RUSH: Now, I’ve mentioned in the past on this program — and I’ve been very serious — in discussing Barack Obama, that I really do think that somebody else is behind this campaign. You can even look at it as you want as an Oz behind the curtain pulling the strings. I don’t mean it that way. Politics is what it is. Every candidate has sponsors and friends and people that encourage the candidate, ‘You gotta run, Barack. You gotta run.’ There’s somebody behind the strings, ’cause the things that he is saying in response to various things McCain says or the president says are so predictable. They’re right out of a particular page in the Democrat Party playbook. For example, McCain has changed his mind. In his mind, the facts about oil drilling and energy independence have changed. So he is now advocating exploration and drilling for oil offshore the US continental shelf. What does Obama do? He comes out and says, ‘This is just another example of the failed policies of the past.’
‘Failed policies of the past’ is a preapproved, focus group-tested little phrase. It’s a cliche. Any Democrat can say it; they all have said it. I don’t know what page in the playbook it’s on, but it’s in there. Obama didn’t think of it. It’s a traditional, knee-jerk Democrat response. What are the policies of the past when it comes to oil exploration? What is it? The policies of the past were discovering oil, building the oil industry, creating an energy source that lead to the geometric exponential growth of the United States and world economies, that increased standards of living, that changed forever the way pleasure and business were conducted. And Obama wants us to believe that all of that is the result of a failed policy of the past, oil discovery, oil exploration, oil discovery and refining? The creation of gasoline, jet fuel, diesel, this is a failure? That’s why I said it’s like they have three-by-five little…
Well, it’s a computer file, but visualize it as a three-by-five-inch index card holder. And in that three-by-five-inch index card holder are approved responses based on all the opponent says. So McCain comes out in favor of oil exploration, so somebody in the Obama office or the Democrat Party goes to a little three-by-five-inch index card box, finds the appropriate response for, ‘We need to drill more oil,’ and out come two cards. One says: ‘We can’t drill our way out of this.’ The other is: ‘This is a continuation of failed policies of the past.’ In the meantime, we’re told that this is the best that the messiah can do. This guy that’s brand-new! There’s never been another like him! Nobody’s smarter. Nobody is more compassionate. There’s nobody with a better feel, a better touch for the circumstances of average people in the country — and all he is is a walking, talking, leftist cliche! And he comes out with these cliches. It’s like his speech. It’s like his speech in church on Sunday urging black fathers to stay home and be fathers.
He’s the first to talk about the importance of fatherhood in the black community or anywhere else? No. Lots of people have done it. A lot of fathers have done it on their own without having to be told by the messiah to do it. But you know what’s really ironic about that is that Obama should have and could have said, ‘By the way, I understand why some of you fathers there have taken leave of your responsibilities, and I intend to change it — and that is the federal government became the provider of your responsibilities. We provided welfare payments and AFDC payments for every child you fathered whether you stayed home or not, and so as far as the mother of your children was concerned, she didn’t need you. She had us. Well, I, Barack Obama, am going to change that.’ So Barack Obama’s out there saying we need to fix this problem, when in truth it’s people like Barack Obama who caused the problem! Then he’s out there getting all kinds of credit for ingenuity and genius and courage for daring to say what he said in church. When, again, it’s on an index card in their index box.
There’s somebody out there that’s putting all these words in his mouth, and further evidence of this: ABC News posted on their website this story that Obama thinks that the way we ought to fight the war on terror is the way we fought the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. In the courts. This is huge, in indicating and illustrating how little Obama knows about the war on terror, about the ’93 attack on the World Trade Center, about how and why certain suspects were prosecuted. A lot of it, Senator, had to do with the fact that they were in New York! The blind sheik and his buds were in New York. They blew up the building and then these idiots did something with their receipt, turning their rental truck back. They were tracked to their mosques. The blind sheik was here. Anyway, this is an interesting example.
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RUSH: Let’s go to last night’s Nightline. Barack Obama, the Democrat presidential nominee, appeared and Jake Tapper interviewed him. Jake Tapper asked him this question: ‘Senator Obama, you applauded the decision that the Supreme Court made last week. The Bush administration says that no matter what people think about their other programs, other policies they’ve initiated, there has not been a terrorist attack in the US since 9/11 and they say the reason that is is because of the domestic programs, many of which you opposed, the NSA surveillance program, Guantanamo Bay, and other programs. How do you know that they’re wrong? It’s not possible that they’re right?’
OBAMA: It is my firm belief that we can track terrorists, we can crack down on threats against the United States, but we can do so within the constraints of our Constitution.
RUSH: Oh, please.
OBAMA: Let’s take the example of Guantanamo. What we know is that in previous terrorist attacks — for example, the first attack against the World Trade Center — we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial. They are currently in US prisons, incapacitated.
RUSH: This is so dangerously ignorant, and I mean this. I’m not trying to be funny. I know I’m a naturally funny guy. I’m not trying to be insulting. This is dangerously ignorant. Let’s go back to 1993. Yeah, we did apprehend a bunch of these guys. The blind sheik, Omar Abdel Rahman, a number of others, they were here. They were right in New York. They gave themselves away. We already had intel that these people were here and were doing things. But we didn’t catch ’em all. Do you know who was involved in this we didn’t get? Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The name ring a bell? Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was part of the first ’93 World Trade Center bombing, was not apprehended, Senator Obama, and guess what he did? He finished the job on 9/11, 2001. And between the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 and the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001, after we’d arrested these guys, Senator, and after we’d incapacitated them, what happened? More terrorist attacks occurred all over the world, against Americans, Khobar Towers, the USS Cole, and might I remind you, Senator, with these guys in captivity, in our prisons, 9/11 still happened, Senator, but since 9/11 we have not had a single attack on the soil of the United States.
What’s different? We’ve not been using the court system, Senator. We have been in the belly of the beast. We took the fight to them. It happens to be Afghanistan and Iraq. And, you know what, Senator? We’re wiping ’em out. The Taliban has been disbanded. They’re trying to re-band but they’re having trouble. In Iraq, Al-Qaeda in Iraq is on the run. Even the AP today, in one of my stacks, has to admit, it has turned around in Iraq, both militarily and politically. I can’t believe it, but it’s there. What’s changed, Senator? He wants to go back and fight the war on terror the way the Clintons did. What’s new about that? Where is the change in that? He wants to fight the war on terror in the court system. Hey, Senator, do you know something? We indicted Osama. We indicted him long before the 9/11 bombings. After the embassy bombings, the US embassy bombings, Bin Laden was indicted along with his top henchman, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Also, 24 others were indicted. Do you know how many of those 24 have been prosecuted, I should say?
Six of them. Exactly six. And of those, the top-ranking Al-Qaeda figure, Mamdouh Mahmud Salim has never been tried for the embassy bombing and that’s because when we gave him all the glorious privileges of the American Constitution, he used his access to free legal help as an opportunity to attempt a kidnapping escape from custody in the course of which he maimed a prison guard by stabbing him in the eye before being subdued. The attack on the USS Cole happened in October of 2000 in Aden Harbor, Yemen. No arrests, Senator, no indictment, until well after the 9/11 attacks. That indictment has been on the books for years. As our many allies have pretended to pursue the Al-Qaeda perpetrators, there’s no prospect of an American prosecution because of the justice system’s painfully obvious limitations. But, look, the major point here is another opening for Senator McCain, a huge opening for Senator McCain to draw a huge distinction.
Here is Barack Obama, the messiah, the candidate of change, the candidate of doing it a different way, the candidate of the future. In prosecuting the war on terror, he wants to go back and replicate the policies of the Clinton administration. When you’re prosecuting the war on terror in your own court system, you are not prosecuting the war on terror. You can indict the world. If you can’t apprehend the people you’ve indicted, you haven’t done diddly-squat. All you’ve done, Senator, is do what your elitist, Northeast corridor buddies love, and that’s this whole little magic phrase called ‘due process.’ Oh, yes, when we’ve engaged in due process as Americans, we love ourselves, we are good people; we are following our Constitution. And while we engage in due process, the people that we are using due process to apprehend are continually blowing other people up around the world. But we great, good Americans, we can fall back on due process, and we’re good people. In the meantime, after 9/11, the second attack on the World Trade Center, despite the first attack had many prosecutions and guilty convictions, didn’t stop 9/11 from happening, did it, Senator? All this stuff that you want to re-institute didn’t stop it from happening. Well, we haven’t had an attack since, Senator. You think it’s ’cause the Bush administration is throwing indictments down all over the world? You think it’s because the Supreme Court’s usurping the commander-in-chief role? You think it’s because your lawyer buddies and your judge buddies are going to get to run the war on terror now in our court system?
Or do you think, Senator, that one of the reasons that we have not been attacked since 9/11 has been because brighter people than you will ever be looked at the past and said, ‘This isn’t working in our court system,’ and we deployed the mighty, the brave, and the courageous United States military to do the job. And guess what, Senator? Despite the fact that you have 20/20 vision for the future, you can’t see the present, and you don’t even want to go see the present in Iraq. I understand he is going to go. The fact of the matter is this brave and courageous US military is what’s prevented an attack on this country since 9/11. They don’t deal in indictments, Senator. They have to put up with members in your party accusing them of rape and murder of women and children, and yet they still do the job and have made it safe for your skinny little rear end to run around and utter all these inane stupidities while people think you’re the messiah. You owe them a debt of thanks, sir, not the court system.
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RUSH: Back to the phones to Bill in Kenmore, Washington. Hi, Bill. It’s great to have you with us.
CALLER: Hey. Hey.
RUSH: Hey.
CALLER: It seems to me what this guy is talking about is police action. Police action only works after the attack.
RUSH: Are you talking about —
CALLER: Obama.
RUSH: — the Obama, the messiah?
CALLER: Yeah, the aerial cerebral Obama.
RUSH: You know, we are being sold a bill of goods on this, and I think a lot of people are buying it because of these soaring speeches that say nothing, that are written for him by David Axelrod. This guy is not, by any stretch, the way he’s being marketed and packaged.
CALLER: See, he’s talking about a police action. Police is only after the crime. It doesn’t do anything about preventing the crime.
RUSH: That’s an excellent point. That’s an excellent point: if you’re going to use the court system, what? You have to wait ’til the criminals hit you.
CALLER: Yeah, only time you call the police for something, they say, ‘Well, have they done anything yet?’ They won’t do anything ’til it’s happened. You can’t prosecute a murder until it’s been done. Right?
RUSH: Well, not necessarily, if the Democrats get total control. I’m not sure what they’ll change in terms of people they don’t want to deal with. I’m being facetious here, but, yes, you’re absolutely right.
CALLER: He’s talking about using the Constitution. Follow the Constitution. Well, that means you can’t do anything ’til the crime happens.
RUSH: That’s what I meant by this. These guys are so taken with this whole notion of ‘due process’ and ‘fairness.’ See, everybody to them, they look for the victim everywhere they can find them, and of course in world geopolitics, everybody outside America is a victim — a victim of us. We’re the world’s only superpower, and we have a giant footprint, and we’re just squashing people like bugs all over the world. We’re wiping ’em out, invading countries, and these people that fight back — these poor little victims who fight back, like Al-Qaeda, who can’t take us being the world’s superpower — we capture ’em, and, ‘Why, we’re really mean to them to find out what they know about the next attack. We need to grant them due process.’ I tell you, the Democrat Party may one day in the past may have been constituted with people about whom you could say they were the backbone of America, but no longer.
If Barack Obama had been around during World War I or World War II and running this country, if the Democrat Party had been constituted then as it is today, with all the various constituent groups, America would not exist today as it does. We’d still be here, but it would be an entirely, entirely different country than it is today. These people are ladled with so much guilt, they think that we deserve some of what’s happening to us, if not more of what happens to us, because we’re just too big and too powerful. So this whole notion of everybody else being a victim — Al-Qaeda is a victim, everybody is a victim, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is actually a victim. We’re making him the way he is. This is what these people think! That’s why they want to go talk ’em. Obama wants to go talk to these people and say, ‘Look, I understand how you feel. We know that you hate us because we’ve had some cowboy presidents here who have invaded your area, and we’ve had our bases and our interests there, and we know you don’t like us because we’re supporting Israel and so forth — and you have a point.
‘I just want you to know that with me in charge, no longer are we going to act as the cowboy of the world, and we’re going to back off here.’ And of course Ahmadinejad and his little nutcase buddies just sit there and chuckle and laugh at this. But this is what they genuinely think. They’re nothing but a bunch of Neville Chamberlains. The whole damn Democrat Party and the leftist movement is a bunch of Neville Chamberlains, and that’s what Obama is here. This recitation of his on comparing Guantanamo Bay to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing is just so ignorant. It is ignorant of history that’s recent. What, 15 years ago was 1993 when the World Trade Center was first hit. Fifteen years, it’s not that bad. He was just getting ready to be a Chicago community organizer. He know what’s going on — or does he? There’s something about this that just doesn’t pass the smell test. This whole campaign does not pass the smell test, and it’s going to show up. It’s going to show up more and more as this whole thing unfolds.
Here’s Troy in New Orleans. Hi, Troy, glad you called, nice to have you with us.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. I’m a first time call, bit nervous, but I was just thinking. We’re giving these terrorists US citizens’ rights, basically, and they got to be rolling around on their backs laughing at us.
RUSH: Well, I don’t know.
CALLER: They do what they want. I’m sorry?
RUSH: Their lawyers certainly are laughing. But this is a huge problem. Not just the substance of the Supreme Court’s decision, Troy, but look at it from a logistics standpoint. What are there, 270 people down in Club Gitmo right now?
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: And nobody knows how this is going to manifest itself. These guys are going to be dumped on the US court system, put where? What guidelines was this judge going to have? This was not in the Supreme Court decision. This was an absolute disaster, not to mention a rape of the US Constitution.
CALLER: What’s going to happen next? Are they going to sue us monetarily for wrongful imprisonment? You know, the government’s going to have to pay them millions of dollars.
RUSH: I don’t know that they’re going to have standing to file civil suits. That’s another thing that remains to be seen. But you are on to something. The tort bar, the plaintiff’s bar of lawyers is going to see to it. They’re going to lobby for that, and the Democrat Party would love nothing better than a whole bunch of show trials: the United States being sued for gazillions by these poor little victims that have been mistreated and tortured and held against their will by the Bush administration. Yes, you’re on to something there, sir. It’s not quite understood where this is all headed because the Supreme Court, of course, didn’t sit there and say, ‘Here’s how you did it.’ They just said, ‘What you’ve been doing, you can’t do. You’re holding these people without due process, habeas corpus and all this.’ I’ll tell you where we’re ultimately going to have fight the left, folks, and that’s in the court system. We had the decision, Supreme Court decision yesterday basically a green light for illegal immigration, regardless the will of the people here, and that was an extralegal decision. That was not their purview to make that ruling in this case. The Constitution doesn’t grant them at the Supreme Court the power to make immigration policy. The Congress makes that, the representatives of the people, elected representatives. The courts are where we’re going to have to beat back liberals. In addition to Congress and the Senate, of course, local legislatures and so forth, but it’s also going to have to include the courts.
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RUSH: I just got a note from one of my favorite reporters, Bill Sammon. Bill Sammon writes for the Washington Examiner, formerly of the Washington Times, occasionally appears as a Fox All-Star on Brit Hume’s roundtable discussion toward the end of his six o’clock show, and he just got off a conference call with Obama foreign policy specialists. By the way, this represents, ladies and gentlemen, yet another illustration of how Obama is not about change. The two foreign policy advisors on the conference call were John Kerry, who served in Vietnam, and Richard Clarke, the national security advisor in the Clinton administration held over by the Bush administration. Here’s the question that was asked of John Kerry and Richard Clarke. ‘The McCain camp said that if Osama Bin Laden were captured and detained at Guantanamo Bay, Obama would want to give him habeas corpus rights. They said that this morning. I’m asking you two gentlemen, would he? In other words, should Osama Bin Laden have the same rights that were granted by the Supreme Court last week to other terrorism suspects?’
John Kerry, who served in Vietnam, took the first stab at this. He said, ‘First of all, the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that they have those rights. This is not Obama. This is the Supreme Court of the United States. If John McCain were president, he would have to give them those rights. This is a phony argument. It’s typical of what the Republican playbook is, which is say anything no matter what the other side has said, just say it and enough people may believe it, unless you folks write the truth and write it boldly and write it clearly.’ A little defensive there, Senator Kerry. And then Richard Clarke chimed in. Richard Clarke said, ‘If Osama Bin Laden were brought back, the Supreme Court ruling holds on the right of habeas corpus, but fifth, terrorists have routinely in the past, prior to this administration, been successfully captured around the world and prosecuted, including in the United States. With the exception of one participant in the World Trade Center attack of ’93, they were all found, they were all brought back to United States, they were all given their rights –‘ that is not true. We haven’t got the people who did the Khobar Towers. We haven’t got the people that did the USS Cole. This is not true, but anyway, this is Richard Clarke saying this, ‘and they’re all locked up in Supermax in Colorado. It can be done and it has been done.’
So, what do we conclude from this? It’s very simple what we conclude. Obama’s foreign policy advisors said today that Bin Laden, if captured, should be allowed to appeal his case to US civilian courts. That’s change? That’s the Clinton administration. We went through this earlier in the program. That did not stop terrorism. That’s a police action. You only deal with these people after they’ve hit you, after they’ve blown up your buildings, after they’ve killed your population. After they’ve blown up your barracks, after they’ve blown up your Navy ships, that’s when you deal with them? That’s going to stop terrorism? We put the blind sheik in prison, we put a bunch of his accomplices in prison after the World Trade Center bombing of 1993, and then terrorism continued to happen and the World Trade Center itself blew up when the airplanes hit it on 9/11. The best and the brightest, the backbone of America, John Kerry, Richard Clarke, change that we can believe in.