RUSH: Senator McCain is out there saying the truth about Barack Obama. One of the things that Senator McCain is saying, and he said this last week, he said it’s apparent to him that Senator Obama would lose a war in order to win an election. And of course, the Drive-Bys and the Democrats are outraged by this, and they’re all coming to Obama’s defense. All McCain did was state the obvious. What is truly outrageous about this is it wasn’t just Obama. The entire Democrat Party was invested in defeat, and they did not mince their words about it. And they have never been held to account. It was only a year ago that Harry Reid said that we had no chance to win, that Harry Reid said, ‘This war is lost,’ and it was all about the surge.
They were waving the Democrat white flag; they were threatening to defund the war. It was only six months ago that they were demanding funding limits on this. Here’s the problem for the media in this: The media endorsed the Democrat position that we’d already lost in Iraq, and thus we need to get out of there as quickly as we can. So hold the Democrats to account? To do that would be to hold the Drive-Bys to account for themselves, which they will never do. You remember watching these shows. How many pundits did they publish or have on the air as guests, including former generals under Clinton insisting that all is lost? I think even Colin Powell was among the people complaining in the wings that we had no chance.
Yet today, the AP, I’ll read this to you again, ‘The United States is now winning the war that two years ago seemed lost.’ Now, why this? Why now? A, it’s inescapable. B, they finally went over there. Why did they go over there? Because they went over there in hot pursuit of the Most Merciful Lord Barack Obama himself with their tongues hanging out dragging along the pavement hoping for some face time with Lord Obama. So now all of a sudden Barry goes to Iraq and they notice that we are winning. McCain comes back, and McCain’s comment about Obama preferring defeat in order to get elected was simply Obama’s obstinance in refusing to suggest that knowing what he knows now, he would support the surge. The surge is what brought us victory! Obama has been in a total state of denial about it, and the press is circling the wagons for him as quickly as they can. It’s exactly what it is.
The question remains: Is any of this gonna matter? You know, I sit here and I’m working feverishly on show prep, and people send me their thoughts on what Obama said here and how he’s flip-flopping from what he said a year ago, two years ago. If you go back and actually put a list together of all these things, they are amazing. This guy has been so all over the ballpark on virtually everything. But I wonder if calling attention to the so-called flip-flops is going to work. I don’t think that’s the way to do this. I think to go about this is to continue to hammer away at his competence and his inexperience. Why does a guy have to go to Berlin and tell the audience he loves his country? Why is that just not assumed? He trashes his country. I’ll never forget this, folks.
This is the one thing about that speech that I’m not going to forgot. I don’t care about flip-flops in the past. I don’t care what he said about the surge then versus now, except in terms of that it shows his inexperience. But to go over there and say to these people that his is an imperfect country and we’ve made a lot of mistakes and we’ve got a lot to pay for, and to be routinely praised for this — especially to a country and a group of people who we have saved in any number of ways — just rubs me raw. It just offends the hell out of me, and this is something I think should be focused on, as well as his inexperience. He had nothing to do with it other than suggesting a loss.
The Drive-Bys are out there saying his plans are the ones endorsed by Maliki. His plan has been endorsed by everybody else and he’s the one that’s bringing victory. I’ll tell you something else. I’m gonna go out on a limb. You know this prayer when he went to the Western Wall and he writes this prayer out and he sticks it in the wall, and then some Jewish student comes along (supposedly) goes digging around in there and finds it and releases it, and everybody is up in arms over the invasion of privacy. I would not be surprised — and we will probably not learn this — that whole thing is a campaign trick, that that note was written to be discovered. That note, that prayer was written to be found. Because I’ll tell you: This party and Obama himself are as cynical as it takes to get where they want to go, and if it is ever learned that this whole thing was part of a plan… Hell, they had campaign signs up there at the Western Wall, a sacred shrine, for crying out loud. If I learn that this whole thing was done as part of a plan — and, by the way, I don’t think the student is known.
Has he announced his name? He’s being secretive about some things. But this is just a little too, you know,with all the sensitivity this campaign has, and you know they have it, about whether or not he’s a Muslim, you know that stuff bugs them. It really bugs ’em. What better way to dispense with that, and in Jeremiah Wright and Farrakhan and all these other associations that he has, finding that little prayer? It could go a long way toward showing all those claims that he’s not really a Christian. By the way, none of that’s been stated on this program. I’m just telling you what the campaign is concerned about. But I believe these people — and McCain is right: They’ll do whatever it takes to win an election. They’re doing it now! They’re standing in the way of progress any which way, matter, or form. And then they’re defining progress in a way that…
This mortgage bailout. Last time I looked, 95 to 96% of Americans were paying their mortgages. So now we’ve got a spending bill and a plan and a system behind it that rivals the New Deal in terms of government involvement in people’s lives. This is going to come back and bite us in any number of ways. This bailout is an absolute mistake. Both parties are making a mistake on this, but the sad reality is that we are here for one reason. We don’t have any leaders, and Obama is not a leader. We don’t have any leaders on our side. We have panderers. We have populists. We have people who are gauging what the American people want, and they’re in a race in both parties to give it to them, rather than to say, ‘We can’t do that. That’s not what we do in this country. We’re not going to bail you out. You made a mistake. We can’t bail out 600 thousand to a million mortgage owners and have it not affect us and our system.’ The American people don’t want to go to war. Fine. We won’t go to war.
The only two things they care about: American people want lower gasoline? Democrats will not help you there. And if you want to get rid of illegal immigration and close the borders? Democrats will not help you there, either. But other than that, members of both parties are running around, total populists: listening to whatever people want and giving it to them. We’re going to have a price to pay for this, and we will pay it, and somewhere down the road there’s going to be another conservative uprising to stop all this because the direction this kind of populism and pandering is going to take the country will break it. And there’s going to be a couple generations down the road that are going to see this coming and they’re not going to pay for it and they’re not going to take it anymore. So the problems that we face today — economically and a government that’s just out of control, too large — the people who have created these problems, the political class, both parties who created these problems are simply passing them on to future generations so that people alive today will not have to deal with the very mess they created.
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RUSH: Okay, let’s start on the phones. We’ll start in Fort Hood, Texas. This is Amy, one of my all-time, top-ten favorite female names. Amy, welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush. It’s wonderful to speak with you today.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I just wanted to make a comment about your point with McCain and his flip-flopping and the tactic with Obama. There’s an article in this week’s National Review by Rich Lowry and Ramesh — I’m going to murder this —
RUSH: That would be Ramesh Ponnuru.
CALLER: Ponnuru. And essentially they were writing that the flip-flop issue is not what’s really going to drive it, because McCain should take a page out of Hillary’s book once she got her act together in the later part of the primary, and to really hit hard on the incompetence and inexperience of Barack Obama.
RUSH: They wrote that, did they?
CALLER: Yes, they did. It’s a very interesting article. It’s very well worth the read.
RUSH: Wow. Well, I’m glad to hear they wrote that. One of the times in my life I’m happiest is when I’m on the same page National Review. And this is a point that I’ve been making for quite a while here, Amy, and the same thing with Clinton. I mean, Clinton lies, didn’t hurt anybody, didn’t hurt Clinton. His voters didn’t care that Clinton was a liar. They liked that he got away with it. Obama’s supporters are gonna like that he gets away with flip-floping. Remember, he’s The Messiah. It’s too macro to start talking about what Obama said in 2003 about the surge, or ‘4, ‘5, ‘6, whatever it was, when people are most concerned about domestic issues. Do you find it interesting, folks, according to Gallup, Obama is up by nine, 49 to 40 over McCain. Rasmussen, he’s up by three. Do you find it interesting that no matter what, Obama cannot crack 50%? He cannot get beyond 50% in the polls so he’s up nine, up three, whatever, this is not a big bump. So he comes back from his summer intern tour, and the first thing he announces today is he’s going to put together this great counsel of economic advisors and start focusing on domestic economic issues. Now, why is that? Because he didn’t get a bump out of this trip, and there are a lot of people concerned about some of the things he said.
You know, the American people, liberals and conservatives — I used to be able to say this — I think liberals would love hearing their country trashed overseas, by Clinton, by Gore, by Obama. I’ll tell you, a lot of independents don’t want to hear it. A lot of independents do not want to hear somebody who’s not even the president, who is not even the formal nominee of his party go over and rip his country apart in front of a bunch of Europeans. The elites in the Democrat apart may fantasize about being Europeans, but the American people don’t. So they did the tour, did the requisite, ‘I gotta go work out,’ instead of seeing the troops, did the requisite bashing of his country to get all the Europeans on his side. He’s come back, is starting to work on economic issues, and the reason is the gasoline price, the oil price, and the unpredictability in it. Yeah, gasoline prices nationally may be under three bucks now, but are they going to stay there? The reason prices are down is because people are not using as much. The airlines are not using as much. People are not driving their automobiles as much, and so the spot market price on oil is coming down in the commodities market, but it’s creeping back up. It’s around 124 today, 125, down from its top of 140. But nobody is sure it’s going to stay there, and nobody is sure it is going to keep coming down.
But one thing people do know is that an effort to increase our own domestic supply would go a long way to alleviating this problem on a permanent basis, and they know that Obama and the Democrats are standing in the way of it. Or they should know. Those are the kind of things to plug. Those are the kind of things to tell the American people, not what Obama said in 2005 versus today or 2006, and his associations. When he goes over to Berlin, trashes his own country, who else thinks this way? Jeremiah Wright. Obama just says it in a little bit of a better way, but Jeremiah Wright thinks the same thing that Obama thinks and Bill Ayers. This is why character and these associations matter. These may be little things to a lot of people, but not to me. The reason Obama’s flip-flopping on all this stuff is because he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, folks. He has no military experience. One hundred forty-three days in the Senate. He’s spouting a line guaranteed to get him the Democrat Party nomination, when he opposes the surge. He can’t afford for the military to be victorious while seeking the Democrat party nomination. He simply can’t afford it.
Here is David in Trenton, Canada, great to have you, sir, from north of the border, welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Rush, it’s a pleasure —
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: — an absolute pleasure. The AP story you were mentioning, it makes a lot of sense that they release that story now, because it basically supports the Obama plan for withdrawal. In other words, we’re winning the war so, hey, Obama’s plan is right. I can see why they would do that now, it fits their agenda.
RUSH: Yes, good point, to report what somebody said two years ago couldn’t happen, the Iraq war is now being won. But, you know, this is the Associated Press, and I frankly was surprised to see the story except within the text of Obama has just been there. So we can say the war has been won ’cause the Democrats are now on the right side of it, with Obama having gone and appeared to be a statesman. And you could have a point. This may be a way for the Drive-Bys and Obama to facilitate, ‘Okay, we’ve won, let’s get out.’ But here’s the dirty little secret. I have warned you people about this, I’ve warned you Democrats, forget all this talk about 16 months, forget all this talk about a timeline of getting people out of there, Obama let it slip over the weekend. He let it slip that all this is going to be decided by circumstances on the ground, and we don’t know what those circumstances are going to be. So there’s no way of knowing right now when we’re going to get out of there, there are too many things that are unknown, and there’s still a presidential election to happen, and if Obama wins it, I can just see him saying sometime next February, ‘The Bush administration didn’t square with us, didn’t tell us everything they knew, didn’t tell us exactly what was at stake here in Iraq.’ I can just see all this coming.