RUSH: President Obama with a joint press conference this morning with Angela Merkel, she is perhaps unique on the world stage among all the European Union leaders in that she is not spellbound and she’s not rendered a little high school cheerleader when Obama comes to town. A story here from Baden-Baden Germany: ‘Last time Barack Obama came to Germany, he was campaigning for the White House, met Angela Merkel, and was treated like a rock star by hundreds of thousands of people in Berlin. But today there’s an undercurrent, however slight, of resentment against the United States and its role in the global financial meltdown.’ Now, I thought that was all fixed yesterday. I thought the resentment at the United States was fixed because I thought Obama went over there, the G20, I thought he apologized, I thought he gave up, he handed them quite a lot of America.
John Bolton has a piece here that I’m going to quote from as we get into the program today about what the loss of sovereignty looks like. Bolton’s point is, it’s one thing, ladies and gentlemen, to give up your sovereignty in foreign policy, and that’s a big concern, but what really worries John Bolton is the giving up of sovereignty in American domestic policy. He’s written some great stuff about this, and, as I say, I’ll share it with you as the program unfolds today.
‘The German people seem to like Obama. In fact, he may be more popular than Merkel,’ says the AP. ‘But Obama will find a Germany more worried than enthralled. And Merkel — who faces a rough re-election campaign ahead of polls in September — more than willing to hold her own ground. Simon Koschut of the German Council on Foreign Relations, ‘Merkel is not a huge fan of Obama. She is skeptical not only of his policies, but she is skeptical of his whole personality.” That was the backdrop for their joint press conference that took place. I watched a little bit of it, didn’t listen to much of it ’cause I think this is all a giant dog-and-pony show that is going on. But let’s review some of the AP coverage of the events going on in Europe. Now, this first story, this is fascinating. ‘President Barack Obama says al-Qaida is still determined to harm Westerners and the war in Iraq was a distraction from a shared goal with Europe to dismantle the terrorist network. Obama said Friday that the unpopular war in Iraq undermined Europe’s initial support for the US after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He says he wants to repair that relationship because the United States and Europe still have a shared interest in rooting out al-Qaida. Obama says the world cannot expect that because someone named Barack Hussein Obama ‘got elected, that everything is going to be OK.”
Now, what is this? It’s okay to use Hussein in Europe? Just because my middle name is Hussein doesn’t mean the Islamofascists are going to end up loving us? So what does he do? Once again he goes over to European soil and blames the United States and excuses Europe for failing to join us, in not just the war in Iraq, but the war on terror. And, of course, he conveniently forgets to point out, folks, that the French, that the Russkies, and the ChiComs had ties with the other Hussein, that would be Saddam Hussein. Have we forgotten the days of Dominique de Villepin and Jacques Chirac? Have we forgotten the Oil-for-Food program? Have we forgotten the members of parliament, or one of them, anyway, in the UK? And journalists who were bribed by Saddam Hussein? The reason the French wanted no part of the Iraq war had nothing to do with policy or morality or any of that. It had to do with the fact that they had under the table business deals with Saddam Hussein, and that’s why. They didn’t care that Saddam Hussein was mass murdering his own people. They had developed deals, real estate deals, oil deals, they had all kinds of deals, some of them personally, some of them country to country.
They had ties with Saddam Hussein that were economic. The moral component of getting rid of the other Hussein was uninteresting to them. They had no desire. That’s why they opposed us. It wasn’t ’cause they hated Bush; that was just a cover story. But never mind, never mind, President Obama is willing to go over there and continue to spread and enlarge the myth, that the only reason Europe didn’t support us is because everybody hated George W. Bush and hated the Iraq war because they thought the US was immoral, everybody wanted to go to Afghanistan. If that’s true why isn’t everybody joining us in Afghanistan? There’s a story today that Obama says we can’t go it alone in Afghanistan. He’s trying to get NATO to go along. If everybody thought Afghanistan was the prize — and, by the way, how’s Obama’s plan to capture Osama coming? Well, remember, that’s how they defined success in Afghanistan when Bush was running the show. Have you heard a whisper even about capturing Osama Bin Laden? So if Europe really wanted us to go to Afghanistan, if they opposed Iraq ’cause they thought it was unnecessary, then where is all the support for our ramped-up efforts in Afghanistan? Security in the region never entered the equation over there.
So the myth continues. The world hated Bush; the world loves Obama; now the world loves the United States. If the world loves the United States, the G20 loved the United States, it’s ’cause the United States has decided to stop being who we have always been. Barack Obama wants to turn the United States into something similar to a Western European socialist democracy. The next story I found interesting, also from the Associated Press: ‘Welcomed with thunderous cheers, President Barack Obama pledged on Friday to repair damaged relations with Europe, saying the world came together following the 2001 terrorist attacks but then ‘we got sidetracked by Iraq.” We were all kumbaya, we were all happy, we were all hunky-dory, we were one world. And then Bush, Bush, Bush made us hated around the world ’cause he went into Iraq. Obama said, ‘We must be honest with ourselves,’ Obama said. ‘In recent years, we’ve allowed our alliance to drift. … We got sidetracked by Iraq and we have not fully recovered that initial insight that we have a mutual interest in ensuring that organizations like al-Qaida cannot operate. I think it is important for Europe to understand that even though I am president and George Bush is not president, al-Qaida is still a threat.’
I cannot tell you how this makes the blood boil. Feed the hatred of George W. Bush but then don’t change the policy? Ramp up the policy in Afghanistan all the while pledging to repair US relations with Europe? How do you do that? You go over there and you bow down to the king of Saudi Arabia, you go over there, and you say, ‘Yep, we’re to blame, I agree with you. United States is the problem, and we’re going to fix it.’ That’s how you do it. You go to the ChiComs and say, ‘Hey, look we’re going to get rid of our nukes,’ and you go to Medvedev, ‘Hey, we’ll get rid of our nukes, hey, we’re going to totally nuclear disarm,’ and the audiences applaud and the ChiComs and the Russians, ‘Can we be this lucky? Can we be this lucky? The American people elected this dunce? All we gotta do is pretend we’re going along with this?’ These guys have figured out all they have to do is act like they are enthralled with this guy, all they’ve gotta do is do that and the American people will think Obama’s working miracles while he dismantles the United States of America, and these guys sit around and laugh behind closed doors all the while in public, except for Merkel, they make it look like they are just as big rock star fans as many Americans.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Back to the European theater here. From Strasbourg, France: ‘President Obama says impoverished nations are entitled to help, but they also have to help themselves.’ You know, President Obama, that would be very, very nice to hear here. That would be very nice if you would say that about the entitlement class. You know, one in ten Americans… I don’t know how this makes you feel. It does not make me feel good. It does not make me feel, ‘Wow, look at how compassionate we are! What a great country we are,’ and it also doesn’t make me say, ‘Wow, what a rotten country we are. What a sinking rotten, horrible economy.’ One-in-ten Americans today — one in ten! — is on food stamps! Just one entitlement program, food stamps. One in ten! It’s a crying shame out there. It doesn’t say anything great about us. It doesn’t say anything rotten about the economy. What it talks about is lives that have been destroyed, pummeled into submission, people believing there’s no option, no hope. I’m sure you’ve got the cheats and the scams in there at the same time. While Obama’s in France and telling everybody over there, ‘Hey, you ought to help yourselves. The world ought to help, but you need to fix your corruption and you need to help yourselves,’ it would be great if he would say that here but that’s not what he’s saying here. Here’s what he’s saying here…
(playing of Obama spoof song)