RUSH: Now, let’s go to sound bite 17 and 18. Here is another a little illustration of what might be dark days for Obama. This is The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer last night, and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (the CFR) Walter Russell Mead was the guest, and Jim Lehrer said, ‘The president has now said, ‘I won’t tolerate this anymore. We’ve gotta change things,’ et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now, things have to really change, right? Is that the real test yet to come?’
MEAD: This president does have the kind of almost a Jimmy Carter problem. He’s an intellectual. He’s a very thoughtful guy. He is trying to pull America back from confrontation and to try to lower the tone of — of American rhetoric, to try to take the crisis out of something as a way of reducing the country’s risks and vulnerabilities. Whenever you start doing that, people start to question you: Are you weak? And this president is going to be caught — ah, ah, ah — is going to have a hard time avoiding being trapped in a way between a rock and a hard place, of being so tough that you can’t try the new creative foreign policy that he wants, but on the other hand maybe be seen as weak or indecisive.
RUSH: (intellectual egghead impression) ‘He has the kind of almost Jimmy Carter problem. He’s an intellectual, a very thoughtful guy; trying to pull America back from confrontation, to lower the tone of American rhetoric, to try to take the crisis out of something as a way of reducing the country’s risks.’ This is how intellectuals think: Totally devoid of any reality. Would you ask an intellectual to sit down and analyze lunatics like these Al-Qaeda terrorists and try to figure out how to deal with them? ‘Oh, yeah! I’m Barack Obama and I’m going to deal with them. I’m going to show ’em how smart I am and I’m going to show I hate my country, too. I’ll apologize and show ’em we mean ’em no harm. We don’t want any confrontation.’ All these lunatics are going to do is say (rubbing hands together), ‘All right, all right! He’s greasing the skids for us!’ But he’s got his Jimmy Carter problem out there, according to Walter Russell Mead. And you might look weak or indecisive. If he ‘looks’ weak and indecisive it’s because he is, and there’s no two ways about that. Same show, different guests, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace president Jessica Tuchman Mathews, and James Lehrer says, ‘Do you buy Walter’s Jimmy Carter rock-and-a-hard-place theory?’
MATHEWS: I see a very different man, and, ummm, I think in much… Taking on tough issues is not the same thing as being indecisive. (chuckle) I think we remember President Carter in the context of the Iranian hostage crisis, and it didn’t look quite that way at the time that — that he was going, uhh — that it was — that it was, uh, undertaking. But also, eh, eh, eh, as Walter also said: This has been a much smoother first year than President Carter’s first year.
RUSH: Okay. So that’s another intellectual, Jessica Tuchman Mathews, who disagrees. She says Obama’s first year ‘has been much smoother’ than Carter’s, which is… (laughs) How about that for high praise? But nevertheless you got these two intellectuals. I can do intellectual-speak. I’ve studied these people. I know how to do the affectation. I know the words. I know all this stuff, and one thing I know when you do intellectual-speak is you are not immersed in any kind of reality. You’re doing something else. You’re trying to impress yourself. You’re trying to impress everybody else around you with your so-called smarts and so forth, and your ability to, ‘Analyze things in ways that other people just can’t come up with because, you know (deep breath), they’re just not equipped as we intellectuals are.’ But in the meantime these are the last people you want with you in a foxhole. I mean, they don’t even know where one is.
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RUSH: Barry in Birmingham, Alabama, nice to have you on the EIB Network. Hello, sir.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, welcome to the USSA.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: United Socialist States of America.
RUSH: Not quite yet. We can still stop it.
CALLER: We’ve got our emerging ruling academic elite like Russia and China, but, you know, we’re talking about this intelligent elite, I’d love to see ’em stacked up with Jefferson and Madison, I’d love to see them debate with a real resonance man who can run a farm and handle commercial enterprises and really walk with common sense. These people have never seen the outside of a classroom. And, by the way, who ran the ship into the ground anyway? If Sarah Palin is ineligible because she’s not an intellectual, well, tell me, who ran the ship into the ground? I think it was the intellectuals. I’d love to have a framer, a truck driver, maybe a Sarah Palin, somebody that can kill and skin a moose perhaps.
RUSH: Yeah, this is a long-felt sentiment by conservatives. William F. Buckley Jr. phrased it well way, way, way back when he said he would much prefer to be governed by the first 500 names in the Boston phone book than he would by the elected class of the day. It might have been a different number that he used, might have been more than 500, but nevertheless he did.
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RUSH: So I just got an e-mail out there during the break: ‘Rush, what is an intellectual? What’s so bad about smart people?’ It’s a good question, folks. The modern iteration of intellectual, when I use it, we’re talking about academics, people who have done nothing but spend time in a library or an office or a classroom and have no hands-on, real-world experience doing or producing anything, including meeting a payroll, pure and simple. Overeducated.