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RUSH: Remember the other day we played audio sound bites of President Obama’s commencement speech to the cadets at West Point. (interruption) Was that yesterday? It seems like — was that just yesterday? (interruption) Are you kidding me? Man. It does seem like it’s longer than a day ago. Anyway, do you know that only 25% of the cadets stood or applauded or something when he entered the room or when he left? I forget which. It’s a really low number. Either way, it’s a hopeful sign.

But what’s funny, you know, we spent a lot of time playing sound bites and trying to parse and analyze it for you, and I think I did a pretty good job. I think I got a pretty good handle on Obama’s view of this country. I think I’ve got a pretty good understanding of what would be called the Obama Doctrine. You can sum it up in two words, but I would like to get more nuanced than that. The Obama Doctrine basically is that America has been a false superpower, an illegitimate one, not a real one. We acquired our superpower status in less than honest ways, and now the world sees us for who we really are, and we must now demonstrate to the world that we are no longer that cowboy country just running roughshod over everybody, sending our military anywhere we want ’em to go.

Now, I could get even more nuanced and detailed than even that, but the sum total of the Obama Doctrine is that there’s nothing exceptional about this place and what everybody thought was exceptional about it was misguided because this country just has too much baggage to ever be considered exceptional. And we need to apologize and acknowledge that we’re aware of that now to the rest of the world so that we will be seen with more friendly eyes.


We put together a montage. This is hilarious. This is the Drive-Bys struggling to define the Obama Doctrine. Now, do you remember during the 2008 campaign the noted ABC World News anchor Charlie Gibson did an interview with Sarah Palin. He asked her if she could explain the
Bush Doctrine, and the Drive-Bys collectively decided after hearing her answer that she had no idea what the Bush Doctrine was, which was further evidence that Sarah Palin was an absolute idiot and unqualified and had no business being anywhere near Washington, DC, to do anything, particularly be the vice presidential nominee on the Republican ticket. She couldn’t explain, they said, satisfactorily to them the Bush Doctrine.

Okay, well, let’s listen to a montage of them, the Drive-Bys, attempting to define the Obama Doctrine.


JACOB TAPPER: (music) Has the Obama Doctrine finally been defined?

WOLF BLITZER: (music) We’ll dig deeper, uh, on the new Obama Doctrine.

CHARLIE ROSE: If there is an Obama Doctrine, would you define it for me?

MICHELE FLOURNOY: Um… I don’t know that I have a, um, bumper sticker.

JEFF GOLDBERG: …Obama Doctrine, neither too interventionist, nor isolationist, nor military focused nor not military focused.

DON LEMON: What do you make of the so-called Obama Doctrine?

JIM ACOSTA: (b-roll noise) The Obama Doctrine, a new balance between force and caution.

LOU DOBBS: What is the Obama Doctrine? Speak loudly and carry a soft stick.

LISA KENNEDY MONTGOMERY: What the hell is the Obama Doctrine?

PAUL BEGALA: That’s not the Obama Doctrine.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Unconnected ad hoc decisions. And that’s the Obama Doctrine.

NORAH OÂ’DONNELL: What some are calling the Obama Doctrine.

PJ CROWLEY: (web quality) The Obama Doctrine, it’s more like a reaffirmation of something that we’ve seen in the past, the Powell Doctrine.

JOHN BOLTON: People looking for the explanation of the Obama Doctrine, are going to be sorely disappointed.

EJ DIONNE: It’s almost like we want another speech.

RUSH: They can’t define it, it. There’s not a soul out there that can tell you what the Obama Doctrine is. It is absolutely hilarious. These are the same people that told you and me that Sarah Palin was an absolute glittering jewel of colossal ignorance ’cause she couldn’t explain the Bush Doctrine. Can any of you explain the Obama Doctrine?

I can. I’m gonna take another stab at it. It’s real simple. I gotta be careful here in explaining it. The reason why I’m tiptoeing… I mean, I could say this (whew) and leave no doubt, but I’m gonna tiptoe around it. I’m gonna get there. I won’t say it but I’m gonna get there. (interruption) What? What were you gonna…? (interruption) Of course it’s weakness! Yeah, obviously.

Cheney, we’ve got the sound bite coming. He was on Hannity last night and said, “This is the weakest president in my lifetime.” Yeah, no doubt. Why? You gotta keep drilling down. Yeah, okay, he’s the weakest in foreign policy. Is it because he’s unqualified? Yeah. Is it because he thinks America deserves…? (interruption)


He does. He has a chip on his shoulder about this country. It’s how he was raised; it’s how he was educated. Look, when a guy writes in his own book that his first job out of college in a law firm he thinks he’s in enemy territory because he’s at a capitalist organization, it should tell you something.

When a guy tells you he wants single-payer, socialized health care, it should tell you something. When the guy assumes office (and even before assumes office) apologies for America in several foreign policy speeches, it should tell you something — and to me, it said a lot. The Obama Doctrine is resulting from and is based on the fact that he’s got a chip on his shoulder about this country, from the moment it was founded.

In his mind — and you’ve heard me say this before — it was unjust, it was immoral, it codified “the supremacy of whites” and the rich and the elites at the expense of minorities, people of color, and the poor. It was a rigged game from the outset, a system designed to keep the elites elites and the rich rich and everybody else with nothing. It was a country that grew and expanded and became powerful by virtue of its illegitimacy.

It grew and expanded not by virtue of liberating the oppressed around the world, but rather going around the world and stealing the resources from other parts of the world and bringing them home and using them as our own. “So of course we could become a superpower if we were gonna be thieves!” They never use those words, but this is what he believes. This country’s superpower status was never truly, honestly deserved.

We were a superpower, but we didn’t deserve to be, because we never or we frequently… What would he say today? We frequently “abandoned our values,” and we forgot our roots, and we behaved in manners of our enemies. So now this country has to be brought back down to size. Because, you see, to the modern American left, “America the superpower” was not real.

If it was illegitimate, it wasn’t deserved. So it’s not real.

It’s just like they say that the 20 years of economic expansion started during the Reagan years, “That was a quirk of fate. It wasn’t real. The real America is all of the misery and inequality and discrimination that existed before that and has now returned. This is the real America. This is the new normal. This is what it is. America’s glory days of the past were simply not real because they derive from illegitimacy and immorality, and, as such, we didn’t really deserve it.”

So the Obama Doctrine is America needs to be cut down to size.

The Obama Doctrine is America is not anything exceptional.

America is no better, America is no different than anywhere else in the world — and it’s a mistake to think that we’re better people. That’s what he thinks people are saying when they talk about American exceptionalism. I’m convinced I’ve heard him talking about it I don’t know how, 10 or 20 times, and I am convinced he doesn’t have the slightest idea what the term really means.

Like most people he has a knee-jerk reaction to it. He hears American exceptionalism and he thinks, “People are saying, ‘We’re better people,’ and we’re not! See, we had slavery. We were racists and we were bigots and we discriminated. No way we’re better than anybody else! We’ve got a long way to go, in fact, to be better than anybody else. We’ve got a lot to make up for.

“We have to pay a steep price before we can even get back to the discussion of whether or not we’re worthy,” because that’s what it boils down to. “We really aren’t worthy. We didn’t deserve all the greatness that happened here, ’cause it didn’t happen for everybody. It happened during teeming inequality. It happened during gross discrimination.

“It happened when there was just blatant unfairness everywhere. So there’s no way this country could ever be considered exceptional,” and he doesn’t even know what it means. I’ll tell you what it means one more time, at least in my view. The story of humanity on Planet Earth since the beginning of time has been tyranny and bondage. Most people who have lived did not have very much freedom or liberty.


They did not have the right to own property, and they certainly didn’t have a whole lot of economic opportunity. The vast majority of people who have lived on this planet have had really hard lives. They lived under tyranny, authoritarianism, dictatorship, you name it.
There never was a nation before the United States which founded itself and organized itself on the belief that the citizen was the center of the universe.

The free, liberated citizen was the engine. Every other nation on earth that had been formed or every other population (even if it was not a nation with borders, just any population group) was always dominated by brutal, tyrannical, dictatorial leaders who led by intimidation, punishment, brutality. The United States came along and was the exception to all of that.

The United States comes along and is founded under the premise that we are all created by God and we’re all created equal and we are all created yearning for freedom, that that is the natural existence of the human spirit. It had never happened before. The Constitution of this country was written for the first time in human history to limit the power of its leaders, to limit the power of its government. It had never happened before.

Maybe Magna Carta got the start, but in terms of organizing a nation for the purposes of existing as a nation state, never had anything like this happened before. That’s what’s so remarkable and miraculous! That’s the exception. American exceptionalism is about the exception to the rule or the exception to the norm.

Not that we’re better people, not that we have better DNA, not that we’re smarter. We’ve had more freedom. We’ve had more liberty. We’ve had the ability to live our lives according to our desires, not according to the limits placed on us by other human beings. He doesn’t understand that.

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