RUSH: Here’s Peter, Palm Beach County, Florida, great to have you on the program, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Hello Rush.
RUSH: Hello, sir.
CALLER: I’m sorry, I’m a little caught off guard here. Great to speak with you. I’ll get right to the point.
RUSH: I didn’t mean to make you nervous. No, I’ve been in your shoes. You’re sitting out there, you’re waiting, you’re waiting, you’re waiting, and finally somebody says, “You’re up next,” and then this, it happened.
CALLER: And there it is.
RUSH: And you freeze up. You choke.
CALLER: I know, I did. But I’m not the professional; you are.
RUSH: Exactly right.
CALLER: We have, in the past, in America, done bombing in the Middle East, and the media in this country could not wait to put on the six o’clock news, 6:30 news, the collateral damage of people who were injured by that bombing. I have yet, with 28 or more bombing raids done by the Russians in the last couple of days, I have yet to see any footage of any collateral damage done by the Russians. And if this doesn’t crystallize in the American people’s mind how biased our media is, it should.
RUSH: You know, this is an excellent point. Collateral damage, do you know when that began? There was a single incident that triggered this. It’s not that it hadn’t happened before this, but a single event gave this whole concept of collateral damage to US Military Academy or US allies military action, a brand-new focus, purpose in life as far as the media was concerned. It was that picture of a Vietnamese little girl running away from having been napalmed, her village or whatever. It might have been a TIME magazine picture that was spread all over TV, but it can be traced back to the Vietnam War, collateral damage, how mean, how evil, how rotten, and it begat this whole concept of surgical strikes.
CALLER: I agree, Rush, but where is the media’s so-called evenhandedness? Why do we not see, certainly the Russians, there’s been some collateral damage, and so far I have not seen one minute of it on television.
RUSH: Well, look, your point is exactly on the money. There’s no motive for the media to make the Russians look like bad guys.
CALLER: But there is for us.
RUSH: Exactly. Exactly right. You know, I was reading about World War II last night. It’s strange that you called about this. I was reading about Hitler and his plans to defeat Great Britain and how he blew it and how close Germany came to conquering Britain. But because of communications problems back in that era, Hitler did not know how successful an air campaign by the Luftwaffe against the RAF had been. And the strategy for the Germans was to totally take Britain by the air. They were not gonna use ground troops whatsoever, and there was something in the pro…
For the vast majority of the time in this air campaign launched by Hitler’s Luftwaffe and the Germans, military targets were the sole targets: Air force bases, manufacturing factories. Britain was producing 470 Spitfires a month. They were just ramping up industrial like crazy, and Germany was trying to bomb airports and coastal reasons, but they were all military targets. And ostensibly one German bomber went off course and mistakenly dropped bombs on London. And that so infuriated Churchill, that he retaliated with bombing runs on Dresden and other cities in Germany.
And the war took on the complexion of civilian casualties, and eventually it was determined by civilian casualties. World War II was largely — not totally, but in many ways — victory was achieved by virtue of civilian casualties and targets, rather than military targets. Now, there were some people that think that the German bombing of London was not accidental or not inadvertent, but before it happened, it had not happened before. The Germans had strictly bombed military targets. My point is, it begat an entirely different kind of conflict and war where civilians were the targets.
And there was no such thing as collateral damage because every civilian, the hearts of cities happened to be the targets. And that was commonplace in both the Russian front with Germany and the US and the Allies against Germany on the other side of Europe. And here we are today where if there is one casualty in any conflict with either the United States or one of its allies that involves a civilian, why, you would think that we are the absolute dregs, the worst shreds of human debris to walk the planet. Now we have surgical strikes.
And, of course, in the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict, Hezbollah can launch rockets at Israelis in the centers, population centers all day long, and the media doesn’t care a whit about it. Hezbollah can put citizens in its mosques and put citizens in its military headquarters and disguise them as houses, or disguise houses as military headquarters so that Israeli targets happen to hit them, and then here comes the complaint that the Israelis are targeting citizens and here goes the media jumping all over the Israelis for doing it. Just as the caller says: It’s a two-way street.
Well, actually, it’s a one-way street.
The reason they’re not in Syria trying to measure civilian casualties or collateral damage is because there’s no reason to portray Russia as the bad guy. That doesn’t help Obama yet. If it does, if it’s found that it could somehow aid Obama, you’ll see it, Peter. You will see Photoshopped video. You’ll see Photoshopped still shots. Any number of ways. If it becomes advantageous to either Obama or the Democrat Party in terms of the presidential race for that kind of thing to be covered and reported, they’ll do it. It’s an excellent point. Right now, there isn’t any of that — and, of course, there has to be some collateral damage.
I appreciate the call, Peter.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
By the way, Vladimir Putin is out saying that there are erroneous reports of Russian collateral damage. In fact, Putin is saying that he saw the reports before the bombing even started. It’s in Russia Today.