We Can’t Be Obsessed with Being Liked

CALLER: Well, we’re not, but those pictures —
RUSH: See, here’s the problem. Steve, I don’t have much time, and you made your point and I appreciate it, but I want to answer this before the hour ends. Bottom line is this. I said the last two or three days — this is Tuesday — the last two days admitting this is not good, that this was a mistake, that this is a problem. But I’m not gonna sit here and just beat it to death. I’m not going to obsess on it. If Bush apologizes once, they’re going to demand that he apologize 25 times. Now, at some point we need perspective added to this, and that’s what I’m trying to do, and I’m trying to bring up another aspect of this I think is interesting. It is to me, and that is the role that women are playing in this and what it says [ear-splitting tone] about our culture. But I’m not going to sit here and spend two weeks wringing my hands over this. It isn’t worth it.
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You know, there has been an apology for this, and it happened over in Iraq. “Abu Ghraib, Iraq: The general brought in to run US military jails in Iraq following the prisoner abuse scandal offered his own and his nation’s apologies for the affair on Wednesday to the people of Iraq. Major General Geoffrey Miller said: ‘I would like to apologize for our nation and for our military for the small number of leaders and soldiers that have committed unauthorized and possibly illegal acts on the detained here at Abu Ghraib. I would like to personally apologize to the people of Iraq for the actions of a small number of leaders and soldiers who have violated our policies.'”
Well, there you have it. We’ve got the apology. It’s not enough. It’s not enough. This is just a start. “Well, this guy is a peon. We can’t count on this guy! This guy can’t speak for Bush. We’re not going to accept an apology till we get one from Bush,” but here’s the general on site has apologized — and there’s almost an apology. Rumsfeld said on Wednesday that “any American…” Here, the audio sound bite. Grab — this is seven and — yeah, let’s do 7 and 8. One of these two will cover it. He’s on Good Morning America. Nope, the Today Show. Sorry, it’s on the Today Show. Yeah. No, wait a second now. Now, I’m getting confused. He was on both of them. Apparently the apology occurred…. Anyway, said Wednesday, “‘Any American felt apologetic for abuses of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers,’ but stopped shortly of offering a direct apology himself.” Wait a second. Where is this one? Well… [talking to staff.] Yeah, I think it might be. [Shuffling papers.] Let me find cut 5. I don’t have cut 5. That’s the problem. I don’t have a cut 5. I’m missing a cut. No, there it is. It is cut 5. It’s cut 5, Good Morning America, and this is what Rumsfeld is quoted as saying.
RUMSFELD: Oh, my goodness. Anyone, any American whose the photographs that we have seen has to feel apologetic to the Iraqi people who were abused and recognize that that is something that is unacceptable and certainly un-American.
RUSH: So there’s the word “apology,” and he of course did not say, “I apologize. We apologize.” He said, “Anybody would have to feel apologetic for what happened and what they saw.” The fact that this reaction has happened, you can’t argue with the reaction that the president has had. You know, the president is taking it very seriously as is the administration. They’re all expressing how upset they are about this, and yet it still isn’t enough. By the way, I’m continuing to answer the call we had just before the end of the hour who says the way I’m discussing this today, the female/prisoner angle…[asking staff]. What did he say I was doing? Yeah, “taking it too lightly.” He said I was “taking it too lightly,” and for two days we’ve dealt with this seriously and I have not condoned it and I have admitted that it’s not typical of what the U.S. does or is known for, but obsessing over this is not productive — and I’ll tell you, something else, folks.

I want to get into this for just a second, and this is going to be very touchy for me, because I know off the bat I’m just going to say right at the top: most of you aren’t going to understand this, and it’s going to make you mad, but I’m to do it anyway because that has never stopped me in almost 16 years. I want to tell you something that’s really irritating me and it’s happening at the administration level. It’s happening throughout every level of strata of our so-cie-ty, and it started after — well, it started long ago, but I mean the intense focus started after 9/11, with, “Why do they hate us? Why do they not understand us?”
Now, if you start asking that question, “Why do they hate us?” then you have to then next go to, “Okay, what can we do to make them like us?” and that is a fatal step, because if we become obsessed with making these people like us, if we become obsessed with showing them that we’re nice, if we get obsessed with this business of, “Why do they not like us?” it’s not going to happen immediately, but it’s going to be another nail in many nails of a coffin that is forever going to bury what has become a distinct American culture.
Because inherent in this business of asking, “Why don’t they like us? What can we do to make them show we like us?” Inherent in that is a lack of self-esteem on our part. If we don’t think being who we are speaks strongly enough for ourselves, and we have to then go out of our way to show people who we really are, we have lost. You cannot do this. You cannot, be it in your personal life or in groups or as nations or what have you, you cannot make it an objective to see to it that everybody likes you — and I know we’re not talking everybody here. We’re talking about the Iraqis. Can’t do it. That is a recipe for disaster, because what will happen in the process is we will cease being who we are, and we’ll try to be what we think they want us to be, and it’ll be phony! — and it won’t work anyway because we can’t continue to be not who we are for the rest of our existence just in order to make people like us.
This is a question that’s borne of New Age-ism. [Sniveling liberal voice] “Why do they hate us? It’s our fault. We must change. We must show people that we’re nice people! We must show people we don’t hate them.” As far as I’m concerned, we haven’t shown them that we hate them. As far as I’m concerned, we are nice people. We don’t have any excuses to make, as the United States of America. Sure, we all make mistakes and we all individually and as nations do things now and then that are not accurate or representative of who we are generally, individually or as a country, but that’s common; it’s normal, and those exceptions do not establish the rule as who we are, and that’s what’s happening here. This business of these photos, what’s happening here is too many people’s reaction is, “That’s the real America. We’ve suppressed it. We’ve hid it from the world, but that’s the real America.” There are people who think that.
Many liberals, the John F. Kerry campaign, that’s what they think. John Kerry came back from Vietnam and said, “Hey this is what we did! We did worse in Vietnam!” John Kerry ought to be investigated because Kerry admitted to all kinds of “war atrocities.” His country is immoral; his country is not going to do this. He was making it all up about all these other soldiers, and if he did all this himself, why did he wait until afterwards to start complaining about it, why didn’t he stop it and complain about it in the process at the time? It troubles me greatly when we start getting all introspective — and there’s nothing wrong with introspection, but when it is based on making other people like us because we think they misunderstand us. It’s one thing if we’re going to just be who we are and say, “Look it, here’s who we are. Take it or leave it,” but if we’re going to change who we are based on what we think they want us to be or what we think we have to be to get them to like us, we’re doomed!
It’s not possible. It simply isn’t possible, and it’s not the way to fight a war anyway. I mean, the whole question, “Why do they hate us?” is absurd. It’s irrelevant. We are fighting a worldwide war against Islamofascism. It is a waste of time to ask ourselves, “Why do they hate us?” Oh, we can learn the answer but it is not going to stop anything unless we say, “Okay, you know what? We’ll stop being what you don’t like,” and we’re not going to do that, and if we do do that we stop being who we are; we stop be the United States of America and even if we did stop being who they are, all that’s going to be seen by them is a sign of weakness and they’re just going to redouble their efforts to come after us. There is no New Age way to deal with this. Ours is a world governed by the aggressive use of force — not words, not treaties, not peace conferences, not introspection, not Tai-Chi or whatever else you want to engage in here to try to figure out how this can be brought to a stop because they just don’t like us. They don’t like us for reasons that you don’t even understand. They don’t like us for reasons that cannot be changed. It is they who have the problem, is the bottom line.

Let me just ask you to think of yourself and another individual in this analogy. You’ve got this idea that you have to make people like you. So what you do is you imagine what this other person — could be a member of the opposite sex, could be, whatever, just friend, romantic partner, whatever — you want this person to like you. So you will do what you think you have to do to make them like you; you are therefore ceasing to be who you are. You are becoming a person that you are not, and you are not going to be able to sustain it, and you’re going to resent it eventually because it’s not going to work anyway. Because the same person is doing the same thing to you, all this stuff goes back and forth. So when you really get down to brass tacks, if you are trying to make somebody else like you, you are missing the point. It’s their problem, not yours. If they don’t like you, screw it! There’s nothing you can do about it, and the biggest mistake you can make is to change who you are to try to make them like you.
If they don’t like you, they have the problem. Now, we’re assuming here you’re not a reprobate and a criminal and all this sort of stuff, all things being equal here. Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not defending rapists and this sort of stuff. I’m just talking about ordinary people, here. Not everybody can get along, not everybody is going to understand everybody, but if people blame themselves for why other people don’t like ’em, they are screwed. If you are not like by a lot of people and you’re blaming yourself for it, you are in deep doo-doo. It’s not your problem that people don’t like you; it’s theirs! Same thing here. It’s not our problem that these Islamofascists don’t like us. It’s not our problem that the Arab terrorists don’t like us; it’s theirs. But we’re not in this to be liked. It’s not what we’re doing here. We’re doing this to protect ourselves. We have been attacked. We are targeted every day. We are sitting ducks every day for these people who don’t like us for whatever reasons that we can’t change.
There’s only one way to deal with this, and it’s not to try to change them. How many times have you tried to change somebody, anyway? It doesn’t work! The only person you can change is yourself, but you can’t change somebody else. Ask the people who have been divorced all these times about changing somebody. It doesn’t work, and it’s not going to work here. We cannot change these people. We could peacefully co-exist with them if they would just stay to themselves and not bother anyone else but that’s not what they’re doing. They hijacked some airplanes of ours and flew them into the World Trade Center killed 3,000 people destroyed the buildings tried to blow up the Pentagon and who knows what else. At this point, I couldn’t care less why they don’t like us. Figuring that out is not going to stop anything because I’m not going to change who I am just to make these people like me so they’ll stop blowing up my country. It isn’t going to happen anyway.
So when I hear people talk about, “Well, these pictures really trouble me because we have to turn a bad image of the United States out there. It’s immoral.” They already think we’re immoral because of Britney Spears! They think we’re immoral because of the movies and records that we play. They think we’re immoral because of the TV shows we watch. They think we’re immoral because we’re not Islamists! There’s nothing we can do about it, short of becoming what they are — and even if we tried that they wouldn’t accept it as genuine. They think it’s a trap. There’s only one thing to do here, folks, and that’s achieve victory over people who have targeted us for loooong, long time, well over 15, 20 years. It’s the only way to deal with this, and that’s why obsessing about a single incident or two of so-called abuse in a prison is nothing more than a giant distraction and could up being something that will really ties our hands and handcuffs us in what the real objective is here, which is the preservation of our way of life and our country.
And that’s why I’m not going to sit here and obsess and join the rest of the media with this and turn this into a campaign issue, try to convince as many people that George Bush is incompetent and needs to be thrown out of office — because that’s all this is. But in the process, what all that does is weaken the resolve of the people of this country because it’s gonna make all the people think, “Oh, God, we are horrible people! Look at what we did!” We didn’t do it! Select few Americans did it. It’s not about all of us. They did it. It doesn’t speak for us — unless we let it. This is real, real frustrating to me, and it’s probably not a view you’re going to get too many other places because the [sniveling liberal voice] natural, normal compassionate thing to do is to try to relate and understand and understand people are hurt. Screw all this! You know, it’s time for a little hard-nosed reality here.

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