RUSH: Speaking of relics, Dan Rather was in Manhattan on Monday night. He was wandering around. I think that he was looking for a National Guard office. I think he’s still following leads on the George W. Bush story. He ended up at a TV network, and they were so excited to see him at the TV network that they put him on the air. It was Friday night. They were ecstatic! Here’s Dan Rather wandering the streets of Manhattan looking for a National Guard office, and he wanders into a TV network/cable news network. They put him on the air, and they asked a couple of questions.
The first question: “Is it a big enough scandal that there’s uncertainty about the future of this presidency and our political volatility as a country?” Does that question make any sense to any of you? I’ll read it again: “Is it a big enough scandal that there’s uncertainty about the future of this presidency and our political volatility as a country?” This is a question wandering aimlessly in search of common sense. Anyway, it must have made sense to Rather, because while looking for a National Guard office and instead stumbling into a TV network, he answered.
RATHER: Your question was are we in a situation in real peril. I would say the Trump presidency is in peril — and because it’s in peril, we are in some danger ourselves, because there’s a lot that needs to be done in the country. But, you know, there’s so much talk about Trump and Comey who’s telling the truth and isn’t telling the truth. I think it’s really important for Americans to understand the big question and how this all started and how it… Really, the direction it should go. The question is: What did the Russians do? Because here you have a situation, the Russians pulled off what I call a psychological Pearl Harbor — a surprise attack that was devastating to the confidence of our whole system of elections and therefore our whole system of government.
RUSH: Do you believe this? They can’t let go of it. Comey admitted that he told Trump three times Trump was not a target. They’ve moved on from the collusion. There isn’t any evidence. Nobody has any. There won’t be any. The Russians didn’t collude with anybody to affect the outcome of the election. They didn’t tamper with vote machines. The Democrats in the media have even let go of that. They have now moved on to obstruction of justice as a means of getting Trump. But here’s Dan Rather saying the Russians tampering with our election is the equivalent of “a psychological Pearl Harbor.”
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RUSH: Okay. So here’s the next question for Dan Rather Friday night. “Okay, you look at recent history, Dan. You see Russia do the same thing to small countries and other countries in their geographic, ideological orbit — you know, former Soviet states, small countries on their borders. But it was a shock and it was a surprise to us because we thought, ‘Hey, we think of ourselves as a country that’s protected by our oceans. But also we think of ourselves as the great power in the world, as the sole surviving superpower in the world, someone who would never be susceptible to the kind of tactics that would work against these smaller countries that Russia has been influencing.'”
RATHER: If they tried it, it wouldn’t work against us. In our hubris — if you want to use that word — we were too confident. We were over confident. “Listen, the Russians ever tried that here; it never would work in America.” Well, it worked, as I say, to devastating, if not catastrophic, and I called it “a psychological Pearl Harbor.”
RUSH: This has gotten so far out of hand. You know, the question here, if I may translate: “Dan, we’re the lone superpower in the world. We’re so big, the Russians would never penetrate here. It could never happen. It happens to all these smaller countries that the Russians bully and so forth but it would never happen to us.” And Rather said, “Yeah, you would think that. You would think that. But no, it was the Pearl Harbor, the psychological Pearl Harbor.”
I don’t know what it is, ignorance or if it’s just stupidity. But the idea that these people don’t have any idea what the intelligence community actually does all day when they’re doing their job? The Russians have been infiltrating all levels of American society for decades. This isn’t anything new. The fact that they are constantly trying to do this? So are the Chinese, and so are the North Koreans and so are the Israelis are constantly trying to spy on us, and vice-versa. It isn’t anything new.
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RUSH: Speaking about foreign countries and their intelligence agencies hacking the United States, do you remember the Office of Personnel Management, OPM? The Office of Personnel Management is basically the agency that handles compensation for federal employees. It’s the human resources division, if you will. It does a lot of things. In fact, it was the OPM that Obama used to cover every federal worker with Obamacare. When Obamacare was originally written, federal workers were not automatically covered by it, and a bunch of them raised hell.
A bunch of federal workers, government workers claimed they couldn’t afford it. They couldn’t afford the premiums. They raised holy hell. So Obama maneuvered them over to the Office of Personnel Management because he had some “funding,” shall we say, opportunities there, and that’s where federal workers ended up being granted their coverage under Obamacare. It’s different from the House and Senate. They have a whole different arrangement. They are exempted in total (snorts) from Obamacare. But, anyway, that’s who the Office of Personnel Management is.
The Chinese successfully hacked 22 million personnel files there during the Obama administration, and it made news, but that was about it. There wasn’t a big kerfuffle over it. There wasn’t any outrage. There wasn’t any allegation that Obama might have colluded with the ChiComs to help them hack 22 million people and their privacy and their personal records. The Chinese easily hacked the Office of Personnel Management. This happens all the time. Now, I don’t know if in the case of your average cable news anchor on analyst, your average journalist out there or your average Democrat, they know.
I don’t know what this. I don’t know if it’s ignorance or stupidity or if they’re acting when they act outraged that the Russians, for the first time ever, managed to find their way into an American election. The Russians are constantly attempting to infiltrate and have succeeded. Why do you think there’s so many leftist college professors in America? Soviet infiltration, communist infiltration. They have succeeded. They’re all over the place. This is not conspiracy talk. It’s not even arguable. It’s…
Thirty years ago, if you talked like this they would accuse you of being a conspiracy kook. But it is one of the most effective infiltration programs any nation has ever run. And they’ve succeeded wildly. Even after the Berlin Wall fell, the Russians didn’t go away. The idea that the Russians successfully hacked an election? I just… It frustrates me to no end because as I say I don’t know if they’re being stupid, genuinely stupid (which is a problem), if they’re ignorant (which is an equal problem), or if they all know this is BS and are just acting it.
But either way, it’s disingenuous, and it’s creating a picture that is totally fake and totally phony.