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RUSH: Hillary Clinton said today in Senate testimony, (paraphrasing) ‘I, uh, I just don’t think Dick Cheney is a reliable source on interrogations.’ Oh, as though you are? As though anybody in this administration is? Let me ask something.

The way you need to look at this interrogation stuff, folks, is imagine that one of these people has a member of your family, and they’re threatening to behead them, but you don’t know where they are. We have a prisoner who knows where they are. You want to bet on how much you would be willing to support these very techniques which are said to have worked? It’s even in the New York Times today. The interrogation techniques that Obama has now banned, worked.

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RUSH: Let’s grab some phone calls, since it’s Open Line Friday on Wednesday. We’ll start in Westchester, New York, with Deborah. Thank you for calling. You’re up first today. Great to have you here.

CALLER: Thanks very much. Here’s my question. Barack Obama has to know that as a result of what he’s doing that we’re less safe, that he is crippling further intelligence gathering. He also has to know that an attack on our country during his presidency will utterly finish him, not only him but most likely the Democrat Party for a while. So my question is, does he really believe that there is no war on terror, or the only other option is he’s just willing to play Russian roulette with our country’s safety?

RUSH: I don’t know. It would be tough to speculate as to whether he thinks we’re actually not or actually are in a war on terror, but I can tell you what I think is the primary reason, or explanation, for the answer to all your questions. Let’s go through it. He’s crippling further intelligence gathering. No, in his mind, he’s making us a more moral nation. He is improving our image around the world. He is getting rid of these techniques that created, in his worldview, more terrorists. You said that he has to know that an attack on our country during his presidency will utterly finish him. I don’t know that you can say that. An attack on the country, if it happens again, if you carefully watch what’s being set up here, it’s all being set up to be blamed on the Bush administration. Remember, Barack Obama’s mind-set is that everything that came before him was unjust and immoral, from George Washington all the way to Bush. If we’re hit again, it’s going to be not because we have penalized ourselves and tied our hands ourselves, it’s because the Bush administration so mishandled it with the unfair, immoral interrogation and torture that he drove these people to it.

CALLER: I don’t think the American people will buy that.

RUSH: Well —

CALLER: They will not buy that.

RUSH: Maybe not, but the press —

CALLER: They’ll turn against him. I’m positive.

RUSH: Maybe not, but the press will. You have to understand that his amen chorus, the Drive-By Media, will echo every bit of that.

CALLER: They can spin it all they want, but at some point there’s a tipping point, and if we are attacked and George Bush clearly kept us safe for those eight years, you know, you know —

RUSH: Ah, no, no. See, that paradigm is being erased. That’s what all this going on right now is about. Bush didn’t keep us safe. He risked us even further. He put us in even greater danger. That’s what this is all about, that’s the underlying reason for doing this. Why else prosecute Bush administration officials? Why go out there and investigate them for violating the law and being criminals and so forth? This administration and this bunch of people and the American left here, they are intent not on wiping out militant Islamism. They are intent on wiping out any opposition to them in this country. And you have to look behind the scenes or between the lines at that as their primary objective to explain what appears to be the unexplainable when it comes to both domestic and foreign policy. Gotta run. Thanks, Deborah.

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RUSH: Here’s that audio sound bite, Mrs. Clinton testifying. It was actually not the Senate, it was the House, Foreign Affairs Committee. She was asked a question by Congressman Dana Rohrabacher of California. This is how it went.

ROHRABACHER: Are you in favor releasing the documents that Dick Cheney has been requesting be released?

HILLARY: Well, it won’t surprise you that I don’t consider him a particularly reliable source of information.

ROHRABACHER: Madam Secretary, I asked you a specific question. Dick Cheney has asked for specific documents to be unclassified. We’re not asking for your opinion of Dick Cheney. About those documents. You want to maintain your credibility with us, what is your position on the release of those documents?

HILLARY: Well, Congressman, I believe that we ought to get to the bottom of this entire matter. I think it’s in the best interests of our country, and that is what the president believes.

RUSH: He does not believe getting to the bottom of the matter is at the best interests of the country. Getting to the bottom of the matter would prove every one of you is wrong about conducting the entire war on terror, Mrs. Clinton. Dick Cheney’s not lying about documents, Mrs. Clinton. He has seen them and the documents that he wants released are simply the memos that show the success, above and beyond what’s already shown to be successful with the memos that Obama has released. You gotta love Rohrabacher here. You just gotta love Rohrabacher, because she takes the occasion of his question to start rapping Cheney, and he just hands it right back down her smug throat. ‘Dick Cheney has asked for specific documents. We’re not asking your opinion of Dick Cheney. You want to maintain your credibility with us, what’s your position on the release of the documents?’ People are petty, partisan, mean-spirited, little leftists. Every damn one of them has been Peter Principled. Every damn person in this government’s Peter Principled. You do good at something so somebody promotes you to an area you have no clue what the hell you’re doing. Napolitano, Geithner — you hear what Geithner said today? Geithner testified again today, ‘The US is largely responsible for the world recession.’ More America bashing. More America bashing from this administration.

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RUSH: Even Snerdley! Even Snerdley, who has been, for the most part, paying attention for 20 years, got sucked in by Obama yesterday on this Eric Holder thing. … So I’m in Snerdley’s office during the break, and he says, ‘I really thought it was just unseemly of Obama to dump this on Eric Holder yesterday with the king of Jordan looking on.’

I said, ‘Dump what?’

‘This business of conducting investigations of former Bush administration officials over the torture and the so-called interrogation techniques.’

I said, ‘Snerdley, he didn’t dump anything on Holder.’

You think yesterday was the first time Holder heard anything about this? You think Holder’s minding his own business, having a tuna fish sandwich up there at lunchtime at the Department of Justice and all of a sudden he hears Obama? What this was, folks, is just Obama taking himself out of it. Think Bill Clinton and the Janet Reno invasion of Waco. We got the whole Branch Davidian complex going up in flames after tanks fired all kinds of ammo at the Branch Davidian. Kids are in there, and they go ask Bill Clinton about it. (doing Clinton impression) ‘You gotta talk to the attorney general about that. I had nothing to do with that. I didn’t give that order. You gotta talk to Janet Reno.’

So if Holder does authorize criminal investigations of Bush administration officials, Obama can always say, ‘Hey, I left it up to Holder to do this.’ It’s all about keeping an approval rating 65%, 70%. But to think that Holder didn’t know about it ’til yesterday? But, you know, I’m reminded, we had that great call from Victor in Boca Raton who talked about how the people Stalin was murdering loved him. Solzhenitsyn, in prison, in the gulag, when it was announced Stalin had died, all the prisoners started crying, and Stalin was the guy that put ’em there. Such as it is with cults.

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RUSH: We have some audio sound bites last night from the Fox News Channel. Dick Cheney, the former vice president, was on with Sean Hannity. First sound bite: Hannity says, ‘How dangerous is that to not call it what it is? I mean, there’s still a war on terror. Is it Obama just doesn’t have the courage to say it’s a war on terror? Does it seem like a weakness? Is that telegraphing weakness?’

CHENEY: I think it does. What the Obama people are doing, in effect, is saying, ‘Well, we don’t need those tough policies that we had.’ Now, that says either they didn’t work — which we know is not the case; they did work; they kept us safe for seven years — or that now somehow the threat’s gone away. ‘There’s no longer a threat out there; we don’t have to be as tough and aggressive as the Bush administration was.’ I think that’s a mistake. I just think that’s a misreading of the circumstances we found ourselves in.

RUSH: I respectfully disagree with the vice president, because I was asked about this earlier today. I don’t think Obama’s saying that we don’t have to be as tough and aggressive. I think if we get hit again they’re going to blame Bush and Cheney! Hell, they want to conduct investigations of them for this, even though all the interrogation memos indicate what a rousing success they were in gathering information preventing future attacks. So if we get hit again, this is all set up to blame Bush and Cheney for the ‘torture’ that led to the anger at the US around the world. That’s what’s going on! This is not that Obama doesn’t think that we’re at risk anymore. Why is it so hard for people to understand Obama? Obama is who he is. We’ve got years and years and years of Obama case history, plus we know who liberals are and what they believe — and we know what they think of their own country. Cheney continued with this…

CHENEY: I thought, you know, yesterday this whole exercise on detainees and on releasing the legal memos, you note all of the professionals all said it was dangerous, that this is something we shouldn’t do. Now, I worry about that. I also noticed yesterday, we didn’t have any national security figures out there explaining the new policy or why we were scrubbing these old programs. It was the political spokesmen that were out there. That bothers me. I think that says something about the mind-set that this is being done essentially to appease a certain element of the Democratic Party, or because of campaign commitments that were made in last year’s campaign.

RUSH: They may not have been able to find any security people that agreed with this. But again, here’s the notion put forth that Obama is keeping a campaign promise or appeasing the far left. Obama is the far left! This is Obama. Hannity finally says, ‘When you put all of these things together, what do you conclude? Do you conclude it’s that they’re naive, that maybe they don’t understand the nature of the war on terror?’

CHENEY: Yes, basically. I don’t think as we strip ourselves of important capabilities in terms of our interrogation program for detainees, I don’t think there are members of Al-Qaeda out there round the world this morning saying, ‘Oh, gee whiz, isn’t that great? Barack Obama and his administration are no longer going to ask our guys tough questions when they capture them.’ Now maybe we won’t behead their people when they capture them. That says something about a mind-set that I worry about very much.

RUSH: And I maintain that these guys do not believe that this is going to turn our enemies into nicer people. I don’t think that’s what this is about at all. There might be some naive liberal Democrats that voted for Obama that think this, but people in the administration — and they may hope it, but I don’t think there’s a whole lot of that degree of naivete. Speaking of, let’s do the Obama interrogation parody. We’ve put together a little skit, folks, of what it will be like in the not so distant future with the Obama administration conducting interrogations.

(playing of Obama interrogation spoof)

RUSH: Future interrogations in the Obama administration. Also last night on Hannity, Karl Rove showed up and essentially said that Obama is acting like a Latin-American colonel. Hannity basically said, ‘Look, is it fair to release all these documents that he’s releasing?’

ROVE: Sure. As long as they’ve released the limits to which America will go to extract this information, let’s share the information that was extracted and saved America from further attacks. But, look, let’s step back for a minute. What the Obama administration has done in the last several days is very dangerous. What they’ve essentially said is, ‘If we have policy disagreements with our predecessors, what we’re going to do is we’re going to turn ourselves into the moral equivalent of a Latin-American country run by colonels in mirrored sunglasses, and what we’re going to do is prosecute systematically the previous administration or threaten prosecutions against the previous administration based on policy differences.’ Is that what we’ve come to in this country? Now, that may be fine in some little Latin-American country that’s run by, you know, the latest junta. It may be the way that they do things in Chicago. But that’s not the way we do things here in America.

RUSH: Ah! Ah! Not the way we DID things in America.

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