RUSH: Let me explain with the assistance of my good friends at Stratfor.com what’s going on here with this skirmish between the Russians and the Georgians. The bottom line of this, the Russians can do whatever they want. Ossetia separated from Georgia in 1993 as part of the breakup of the Soviet Union, and they’ve been having little skirmishes with Georgia in all this time, but Ossetia — (interruption) what? What’s so funny Snerdley? What is so funny about this now? No, no, no. The Eastern bloc country Georgia, for those of you who went to the American public school system, not the state of Georgia in the United States, but the country of Georgia, a former Soviet bloc little prisoner, much like Chechnya. Anyway, South Ossetia separated from Georgia in 1993, and they’ve had little skirmishes, the Georgians have been trying to get them back in the old, but it’s been pretty minor. But the fact is the Ossetians don’t stand a chance against the Georgians, but now that the Russians have moved in there, the Georgians don’t stand a chance against the Russians. The Russians can do whatever they want here.
As George Friedman of Stratfor.com makes very clear in his analysis today, the decision the Russians are making here is political. You know, where do they stop? Do they stop in Ossetia, or do they go ahead and roll their tanks all the way into Georgia? You know, Georgia has been a thorn in their side. And of course Putin, he’s out of town, he’s over in China at the Olympics, but Medvedev is back home running the show. The Russians, if they could, would crush everybody. They would crush the Chechnyans and they would crush the Georgians and they can if they want to. The only way the Georgians have any chance is with us, and I don’t think we are going to get involved in this. We’re in Afghanistan right now and Iraq. So the real question here is where will the Russians stop, because they can go wherever they want here. Georgians have no chance against them, just in a straight up and down military conflict. It’s a matter of size. People have been warning us that the old KGB guys that run Russia have just been waiting for a chance to reassert themselves, and this has been building up. Putin has been flying these bear bombers all over the world, as they used to do back in the days of the Gorbachev and Andropov, Brezhnev, Chernyenko, all these guys that were in power for a couple years and died, that’s why Reagan never met with them. So it’s an interesting thing. One of the things that’s happened here is that it has dropped the oil price four bucks. And now people are starting to talk about, hey, the oil bubble, it may have burst here. Let’s go back to May 8th, right here behind this very Golden EIB Microphone and listen to the host that day.
RUSH ARCHIVE: Based on intelligence guided by experience, these are bubbles, and this bubble is going to burst at some point, because markets work. Now, again, I don’t know how cheap oil is going to drop and I don’t know how cheap gasoline is going to drop, but there’s going to be a point where the price, whatever it gets up to, cannot be supported by the market.
RUSH: Don’t know if the day’s been reached, but there are people now starting to talk about the oil bubble having burst, plus the euro is weakening, or it was this morning as a result of this attack with the Russians rolling into Georgia. Now, do you realize, ladies and gentlemen — look at me — do you realize that oil has dropped from $150 bucks a barrel to $116 bucks a barrel since July 15th? And do you know that oil speculators are getting rich? Oh, yes, yes. Ladies and gentlemen, do you think these speculators only get rich when the price goes up? How come Chucky Schumer is not talking about all these speculators driving the price down? How come he’s not talking about all these speculators making gazillions of dollars as the price falls? Some of you are saying, ‘But Rush, but Rush, how can this be? How can the speculators being making money when the price is falling, 30, 40 bucks a barrel?’ Well, there are short sellers in the speculator market, and they’ve been betting that the price of crude will drop, and those that are selling short, betting the price to go down, are making a fortune. Anybody named Chuck-U Schumer will tell you, speculators are driving the prices down. And we have to end this speculation.
Remember when the speculations were driving the price up and everybody was having a cow? We gotta go after the speculators. The Democrats, for once dropped Big Oil as the villain and went after the speculators and there’s Chuck Schumer who wouldn’t know a speculator if he ran into one talking about what we gotta do to punish these guys. And now all of a sudden the price is going down. Speculators are doing just as well, but isn’t it interesting that nobody’s concerned how much money they’re making when the price goes down? And isn’t it interesting that nobody’s even upset that the speculators are driving the price down? Well, something’s driving the price down. That people are speculating on the price of oil-based on all these world events. What goes up must come down, ladies and gentlemen, and it’s happening. So our liberal Congress wants to stop all this speculation that they blame for high oil prices. Now they’re going to have to blame the speculators for driving oil prices down, which is just another illustration of how silly the left is and how hysterical they get and how amplified they are by the Drive-By Media. The lesson here is that the market works, especially when Congress is out of town.