RUSH: I just told the broadcast engineer I wasn’t gonna do this sound bite now, but now I’m gonna do it.

Last night on the Fox News Channel, The O’Reilly Factor, the guest was Dr. Krauthammer. I only say it that way ’cause Henry Kissinger said it that way to me once. He kept talking to me one time about the great Krauthammer column that he liked and, you know, me I’m a student of voices, so it just stuck with me. I don’t say it to disparage anybody. Just to be flexible and different. Dr. Krauthammer.

Anyway, Dr. Krauthammer was on the Fox News Channel last night, and it was during the story that O’Reilly calls the Personal Story segment, talking with Krauthammer about the United States retreating from the world, and O’Reilly said to Krauthammer, “Many people, including me, think that — Charles, just how bad is it out there?”

KRAUTHAMMER: There’s a big difference between decline as a condition and decline as a choice. What we have with Obama is a president choosing decline. This is very much unlike how many people talk about decline as a condition, a result of something wrong with America. We have a president who doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism, American greatness. And he has chosen for America to retreat from the Middle East, to not lift a finger in places like Ukraine, basically to make us one nation among others. And that is a choice.

RUSH: I know that you all have heard me say this before countless times for many years. I’ve been saying it since the beginning. But I’m happy now to have it out there. I’m happy another person has the courage to call this what it is. I’m gonna tell you, I’m becoming more and more convinced that Obama’s not just satisfied with managing America’s decline. I think Obama’s greasing the skids. I think Obama is trying to hasten America’s decline. How else can you interpret the parade of bad news that we face every day?

If Obama had had his way, we would have gone to war to put ISIS in power in Syria. Have people forgotten that this is the same group — ISIS in Iraq is the same group — that in Syria that we were almost going to throw Bashar Assad overboard for? This was the “red line.” We drew line (Obama did) and dared Assad to cross the red line, and all along — as we suspected from the beginning and said so — it was Al-Qaeda-related groups making themselves look like average, ordinary citizens.

This did not look like standard, ordinary behavior from Bashar Assad. Search your memory banks, folks. If you recall, if Obama had had his way with this red line business, we would have gotten rid of Assad, which would have put ISIS in power in Syria! That’s the kind of mastermind he is when it comes to foreign policy. The sad thing is that Obama probably still regrets not using force to topple Assad and give the country over to the ISIS terrorists.

I don’t want to be misunderstood. It’s not that Obama is pro-terrorist. He’s just got this thing about people in power, that they’re unworthy of it, unjustified — particularly the United States. I love what Krauthammer said here, because it’s exactly what I said starting June 16, 2009, and have been excoriated for it. I’ll give you an example. October 18, 2011. Let’s go back. This is just one of the many times I talked about the country in decline and choosing it, Obama choosing it.

RUSH ARCHIVE: Obama wants to manage a nation in decline. It is what we deserve. We have been an illegitimate superpower for way too long. We became a superpower by stealing resources from around the world with imperialism and a military, and it’s time we found out what the rest of the world has had to live like because of us. And nobody can convince me that that is not Obama’s attitude and mind-set.

RUSH: I said that three years ago, October 18, 2011, into Obama’s second year in the Oval Office. And how many times have we discussed on this program Obama’s distaste for American exceptionalism and anything special about the United States and his retreat from the world, not lifting a finger to help anybody else? We’ve talked about it. So I’m really happy, folks, to have Dr. Krauthammer on Fox make the same point we’ve been making here (and a lot of other people have been, too) for three or four years.

Well, you remember back on January 16, 2009, when I said, “I hope he fails.” It is my contention everybody knew what I meant then and chose to mischaracterize it and distort it into saying I wanted America to fail. It was the exact opposite. I wanted America to succeed and prosper. I wanted Obama to fail at exactly what he’s doing. I want to reiterate: I don’t think Obama is just satisfied with managing America’s decline.

I think he’s trying to grease the skids. What do you call what’s happening at the Southern border.

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RUSH: Remember, ladies and gentlemen, the point here is that Obama is not just managing the decline. Let me tell you why. You know an airplane, the wing design is such that if you achieve the right speed, the airplane wants to fly. That’s what it wants to do. The natural thing for an airplane to do, that’s designed properly, is to fly. Race down the runway, the right speed is attained, and the air pressure is such that you get a differential that causes lift. It wants to fly.

Ditto the United States economy, the greatest economy, the greatest economy because of its free market principles and its devotion to the individual and rugged individualism, entrepreneurism. The American economy wants to grow. The natural order of things, by its design, is to grow. If the United States economy is in decline then it’s a cyclical thing that we go through with maybe a recession here, a small recession there, recovery. There’s a cyclical pattern to these things and in many cases you can peg recessions to policy decisions, sometimes not. If it were simply policy then we could prevent them forever, if we wanted to.

So when the American economy is in decline, the natural thing it wants to do is to recover, because that’s the natural thing the American people want to do. Nobody wants to be in the midst of an economic decline. Therefore, when we are in one and it continues to worsen despite its natural tendency to come out of it, we’re not just witnessing a president managing decline. We have a president who is greasing the skids. He’s not leaving it to chance. The president is implementing policies guaranteed to continue this decline. This is what worried me with his election.

This is why on January 16th I said, “I hope he fails.” It is why I’ve been making this point for at least the past three years, that this is a decline being managed now. I’m ramping it up and calling it purposeful. And I actually always have said, if your memory is even halfway intact you’re fully aware of the bold, fearless statements I have made over the past three years about the intent of the president. It is a purposeful decline, and it’s rooted in the belief held by the president that we have not deserved our superpower status because of the way we acquired it.

I mean, that’s the simple version of it. We were colonialists. We were imperialists. We were thieves. We unfairly used our advantages over people and took what was theirs, appropriated it as ours, became big and then didn’t share. That’s basically it in a nutshell. So if you look at all these things that are happening, the IRS scandal, the VA mess, Benghazi, the border, suing the state of Arizona for simply trying to enforce what was essentially US immigration law. I don’t think there’s any other conclusion any honest, objective person can draw.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, each time I bring this up and I go check the e-mail, I get some people asking questions. Some of them are legitimate from the standpoint of people that may not really know. I wouldn’t call it ignorance, but some of the questions are not just taunting, in other words. Some people are really confused and want an answer.

One of the questions that I just got: “Why do we have to go to Iraq, Rush? Why does it matter? What does it matter in Syria?” Because I talked about Syria. “Why does it matter?” Let me tell you why it matters. It’s never mentioned because this is somehow taboo to mention something like this. For example, maintaining the free flow of oil at market prices is one of the reasons we went into Kuwait to kick Saddam Hussein out of there.

Now, when you say maintaining the free flow of oil at market prices, you might as well be showing Dracula the cross, when liberals hear it. Blood and diamonds and oil and, ew, it’s filthy and it pollutes and it destroys the planet and the Koch brothers are involved. They hate oil and all that. It’s amazing the conspiracies going on right under their nose with their support that they don’t even see, such as the purposeful decline of the United States of America. And yet you talk about maintaining the free flow of oil at market prices and they somehow think some great crime is being committed.

Well, I don’t care what they believe or know, oil is the fuel of freedom. Oil is the fuel of the engine of democracy, if you will. And the free flow of oil at market prices around the world is crucial, mandatory for our country to remain free, an economy to remain viable and growing. It just is. There’s a lot of people afraid to talk like that because it makes them sound like greedy capitalists and they don’t want the criticism and so forth, but it’s just common sense.

But that’s just one example. What is never mentioned in talking about the projection of American power is the impact it has on global trade. The economies of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Europe, those economies were made possible by the US military. The free flow of natural gas. That’s what Putin’s trying to corner the market on with what he’s doing in Ukraine and Crimea. There’s a giant pipeline, natural gas, from Russia to Western Europe. He wants total control of it to be able to blackmail western democracies and the people who live there, be able to charge them exorbitant fees, rates, prices, whatever, unless they do whatever he wants.

The point is our military isn’t just to protect us against bad actors. The military is not to conquer foreign lands and peoples and put them under our domain. The United States military’s purpose is to kill people and break things and maintain freedom and defend and protect the US Constitution. But it also serves as an umbrella of safety for world commerce. This is what a superpower takes on as a responsibility.

You can’t, on the one hand, wring your hands as a politically correct liberal and talk about how we are all part of the global community, we’re all citizens in the world, and then suggest that we become isolationists and get out of the world and leave everybody up to themselves because when we do that, we make ourselves vulnerable. When we retreat from the world and bring our military with us, there are negative economic consequences worldwide. Isolationism will undermine global trade to a point of collapse.

The United States isn’t a bully. It’s a protector of worldwide commerce. The United States is a defender, guarantor, protector of freedom. But that’s not how Barack Obama sees this country, and he never has, and I have been trying to point this out to people. It’s why I’m so glad that Dr. Krauthammer finally just fired both barrels last night so that it’s not something they can just discredit, “Well, you know, that’s just Limbaugh, he hates Obama.” The wider spread this view becomes, the better.

And, yeah, you know, I don’t mind reminding people that I’ve been consistently warning about this, but I’m not happy about it. I wish none of this had happened. None of this is necessary. People have been so paralyzed by the racial factor, so paralyzed by the historical nature, so paralyzed by the media on our side into not being openly/legitimately critical of policies that are disastrous, that they’ve just been allowed to be implemented by fiat, almost.

So the consequences are dire, and their not accidental. Remember the natural tendency for the US economy is to grow, by virtue of its design. The natural order of things is for the US economy to continue growing and for prosperity and abundance to continue. There’s no reason that we max out.

Only defeatists and pessimists and Democrats think, “Well, our share is already too big, and my God, we don’t need anymore! It’s unfair how much we have.” They totally miss the point that as we do well, the rest of the world follows. We are able to provide disaster relief around the world. We’re able to provide food relief, whatever. We’re able to help nations of the world as long as our economy is growing as well.

But if your perception is that this country is flawed and immoral and unjust and undeserving of its stature in the past — and if you believe, as Obama does, that it’s time we got cut down to size, for a whole bunch of reasons — A, equality; B, fairness; C, so that we can find out what the rest of the world has had to go through (that’s part of it, too) — then the sad little fact is that while Obama thinks he’s making the world better by downsizing the US, while Obama thinks he’s making everything more equal and more fair and punishing this unjust country, what he’s doing is allowing the whole world to descend with us.

And that, I don’t think he gets, although he might. It could be, but I think these people really do believe that the more you punish the successful and the more you take away from the country’s success — the more you punish it, you take away from it, and then redistribute — well, that’s fair, that’s equal, and the better off everybody is. But how do you distribute what doesn’t exist? How do you redistribute what doesn’t exist? And that’s where we’re headed.