RUSH: I am your guiding light in times of trouble, confusion, murkiness, tumult, despair, depression, and PTSD for Ilhan Omar. Did you hear that? Ilhan Omar said Trump is giving her PTSD. What an insult. She’s sitting in relative comfort in a congressional office talking about PTSD while we have active and former military people literally suffering from it, and she’s out saying (sobbing), “Oh, I have PTSD. The president is making me so nervous!”
Do you remember…? I want to take back New Year’s Eve. I don’t know how many people were paying attention during the break. On New Year’s Eve, everybody’s planning what to do or what not to do. On New Year’s Eve, there was… We put together a montage of media people claiming that the attack that turns out to be launched by Iran on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, in Iraq, was gonna be “Trump’s Benghazi.”
Do you remember that? Well, if you don’t remember it, I want you to listen to the montage we put together. It was just a week ago. Trump was gonna do nothing about the attack on the embassy. He was gonna have his very own Benghazi. Now, before I play the montage, I thought there was nothing to Benghazi. Didn’t Hillary Clinton say, “What difference does it make?” Didn’t everybody in the Democrat Party and the Drive-By Media say to all of us making a big deal about Benghazi, “Come on!
“Nothing happened. You can’t blame Obama. You can’t blame Hillary for that,” while we were trying to demonstrate that Benghazi happened because there was no concern in Washington for what was going on in Benghazi, in Libya. Our ambassador was killed. There was a planned terror attack, and earlier that day the United States embassy in Cairo had sent out an apology for something that hadn’t happened yet. Obama… It was another one of his apologies.
They’re apologizing for some video that some nameless guy had made that they were claiming was responsible for all the unrest at the time in the Middle East. Remember this? So we’re apologizing for a video that nobody had ever seen. That video was then used as an excuse to justify what happened at Benghazi. But in the aftermath, they told us, “You guys are upset about nothing. There’s nothing to see in Benghazi. Now all of a sudden, the Drive-Bys on New Year’s Eve were saying after our embassy in Iraq was hit, “This is gonna be Trump’s Benghazi!”
Isn’t that a tantamount admission that Benghazi was indeed a bad thing, a misstep, an absence of leadership? Isn’t it an admission that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were justly criticized for their lack of action? If you’re going to run around and say, “This is gonna be Trump’s Benghazi,” what you’re saying is, “Trump’s not gonna do anything.
“He’s not gonna avenge this. He’s not gonna make anybody pay for what they did,” and then he did, and now they’re saying, “There was no reason to do this.” These people are psychotic. They’re pathological. Here is the first, the montage that we put together. NBC, CNN, the NATO Supreme Allied Commander, all kinds of bureaucrat experts talking about how the attack on the embassy in Iraq was gonna be Trump’s Benghazi.
KATY TUR: There’s a lot of people out there who are looking at this and they’re thinking this has echoes of Benghazi…
ABBY PHILLIP: …the Benghazi attack, which Republicans really pilloried the Obama administration for for many years…
AARON DAVID MILLER: …the echoes here of 1979 in Tehran and even Benghazi.
JAMES STAVRIDIS: … all the way back to Tehran and the Iranian hostage crisis. Benghazi.
DAVID ROHDE: …Benghazi…
SAMANTHA VINOGRAD: …Benghazi…
BRETT BRUEN: …especially after Benghazi.
GEOFF BENNETT: …the deadly 2012 raid on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi.
RUSH: Right. So they were comparing the hit on the Iraqi embassy — our embassy in Baghdad — to Benghazi. But again, I have to ask, why? If Benghazi was no big deal, if we were wrong to rip into Obama and Hillary for it, then what could possibly be bad about this? So then Trump retaliated. He took out Soleimani. He made it clear that he was gonna continue to take out anybody that had anything to do with killing Americans in Iran. Now all of a sudden after the attack on the embassy in Baghdad was Benghazi, now suddenly there’s no evidence of an imminent threat. There was no reason for Trump to take any action.
GERRY CONNOLLY: There was not a scintilla of evidence presented to justify the so-called imminent threat.
LEON PANETTA: There’s no clear evidence of an imminent threat.
GLORIA BORGER: You can’t have two stories! You can’t say that something was imminent when it was not.
CHRIS MURPHY: There was no evidence of an, uhhh, imminent and specific threat.
MICHELLE GOLDBERG: …transparently lying about an imminent threat.
RON WYDEN: This administration has not made the case that there was an imminent threat.
CORY BOOKER: They did not, ehhh, show us that they were dealing with an imminent threat. I saw no evidence of that whatsoever.
RUSH: So the Saudi oil field is hit and shut down, and then our embassy in Baghdad is hit, and they start talking about — oh, they’re so excited, so excited — “It’s gonna be Trump’s Benghazi! Yeah, payback!” Just like this is gonna be payback for Clinton’s impeachment, this was gonna be payback for Benghazi. Trump was going to get the same treatment. Then, of course, Trump wipes out the people that were responsible for taking the action, kills them, sends Iran into a tailspin.
All of a sudden, there was no reason to do it. There wasn’t any imminent threat. No imminent threat after the oil field was hit, no imminent threat after the embassy was hit. “Yeah, there was no reason to take out the terrorist. There was no reason to take out this guy. There was no imminent threat. This wasn’t justified!” Yet just a week prior, it was all gonna be Trump’s Benghazi. They thought Trump wouldn’t do anything.
You know why?
Because they listened to Trump say (paraphrased), “We gotta get out of these hotbeds. We gotta get our military home. We got no vested interests over there. We’re wasting time, we’re wasting money, we’re wasting people.” So they think Trump isn’t gonna do anything. They still don’t understand. Donald Trump is gonna defend America and Americans whenever they are attacked. It isn’t complicated, and he’s not gonna get bogged down in a bunch of process-related negotiations to do it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Rich, Lincoln, Nebraska. You’re next. It’s great to have you, sir. Hi.
CALLER: Hey, Rush. Thanks for taking my call.
RUSH: You bet, sir.
CALLER: I wanted to get back to something you brought up earlier about the, quote, unquote, Trump’s Benghazi. The mainstream media or the liberals that immediately right after the attack on the embassy said this was Trump’s Benghazi or is going to be his Benghazi. And I think they were really excited because had it gone like they were hoping, this would have normalized what Hillary and Obama did, their failure that they had in Benghazi. So if Trump had done nothing, this would have made their failure legitimate. Also, had we lost people, had there been casualties, it would have made it even better for Hillary and Obama. So that’s what I think —
RUSH: Well, you know, I mentioned this earlier in the program. I had a bunch of audio sound bites with the Democrats caterwauling about it. We had a montage. In fact, let me find it. Your points about it are relevant, but there’s one more to make, but here is the montage.
KATY TUR: There’s a lot of people out there who are looking at this and they’re thinking this has echoes of Benghazi…
ABBY PHILLIP: …the Benghazi attack, which Republicans really pilloried the Obama administration for for many years…
AARON DAVID MILLER: …the echoes here of 1979 in Tehran and even Benghazi.
JAMES STAVRIDIS: … all the way back to Tehran and the Iranian hostage crisis. Benghazi.
DAVID ROHDE: …Benghazi…
SAMANTHA VINOGRAD: …Benghazi…
BRETT BRUEN: …especially after Benghazi.
GEOFF BENNETT: …the deadly 2012 raid on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi.
RUSH: Right. Now, the point to me, are they not admitting that Benghazi was a Waterloo for Obama and Hillary? Hillary told us (paraphrasing), “What’s the big deal? What difference it make anymore whether the ambassador got killed there? What’s the point?” she said. Obama never talked, Benghazi Benshmazi. Now all of a sudden here these people come and say this could be Trump’s Benghazi. So Benghazi must be a bad thing.
If they’re wanting it to be Trump’s Benghazi, they must want and realize that Benghazi was not a good thing for Hillary and Obama. That’s the real take-away. After these people have been telling us, “Benghazi doesn’t matter a hill of beans. You’re trying to make mountain out of molehill.” Remember all the Benghazi hearings that never amounted to anything. The Democrats said, “There’s nothing to see here. Who can stop this stuff?”
They tried to tell us it was caused by a guy named Nakoula Nakoula, who had made a video which irritated the entire Middle East and that caused a terrorist riot. None of that was true. But I think if they’re running around hoping that this was Trump’s Benghazi, what needed to happen for this to be Trump’s Benghazi? Trump had to ignore it. Trump had to not do anything. He had to not retaliate when the Iranians hit our embassy in Baghdad. And that would have equaled Benghazi.
So they just tantamount admitted to us that Benghazi was a bad thing, and they’re hoping that Trump got the same — Trump kind of blew that all to smithereens by killing the guy who did the hit on our embassy, which President Obama didn’t do. Our ambassador died at Benghazi. And, remember, Kenneth Timmerman in a book in 2014 identified Soleimani as the architect of Benghazi. The Iranians were behind the attack on our embassy and ambassador in Benghazi.
So I think even though hypocrisy doesn’t stick to these people, this media montage clearly indicates that they know that Benghazi was an absolute disaster perpetrated by a bunch of Democrats in the Obama administration who didn’t give a damn to do anything about it and were hoping that the same kind of thing would happen to Trump so that they could rip him for it. But once again Trump screwed up them.