RUSH: Here’s Greg in Tampa. Greg, great to have you, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush. Mega dittos. Longtime listener. In listening to AOC and many of the media personalities questioning President Trump’s strike on the General Soleimani, I was reminded of a strike that Obama ordered back in 2011, an American citizen named Anwar al-Awlaki was killed by a drone strike in Yemen. And he wasn’t afforded any of his due-process rights as an American citizen. And I didn’t hear any protests from Democrats. The only person I can actually remember was maybe Rand Paul questioning if you can kill an American citizen abroad without any constitutional rights, I was wondering your opinion or if you remember this –
RUSH: Your call is especially significant here and noteworthy because of your timing. Let me first tell everybody that Greg here is exactly right. Obama loved killing terrorists with drones. He absolutely loved it. Obama personally picked the targets. Obama personally gave the orders. Now, Anwar al-Awlaki was an American citizen who had become a radical Islamist terrorist who had influenced many American military people on U.S. military bases.
The guy was an influencer, and he had perverted, corrupted the minds of many otherwise innocent people, and Obama decided to take the guy out without due process. And he loved doing it. And he demanded, Obama demanded from his intelligence community for the list of people that were subject to this kind of attack, he demanded to pick the names.
There happens to be a new book about this very subject. Actually, it’s not a new book. It was new in 2013. This is a flashback story here from the Huffing and Puffington Post. And it was published November 4th, 2013. This was the year after Obama was reelected for his second term. The headline of this story: “Obama Told Aides He’s ‘Really Good At Killing People,’ New Book ‘Double Down’ Claims.”
Remember, this a flashback story, 2013. “A new book on the 2012 presidential campaign claims that President Barack Obama told aides that he is ‘really good at killing people.’ According to Mark Halperin and John Heilemann –” You remember these two guys?
These are the two guys that were embedded in campaigns, and they got all this juicy information, and rather than report it during the campaign, they saved it all up for a book. Halperin, by the way, was taken out by the #MeToo movement, in case you’ve forgotten. Alleged to have been a serial sexual harasser at work along the lines of Matt Lauer. By the way, Matt Lauer, do you know where Matt Lauer is? Well, Matt Lauer has a new girlfriend.
He bought an island in New Zealand. (interruption) No, no, no. It’s called South Island, and it’s actually in the northern part of New Zealand, and it’s a tiny thing. I think he may be the only resident on the island. I mean, to go to the Kwik Shop you may have to get a ferry to go to some bigger mainland. But no paparazzi. Nothing there. Of course, there were some paparazzi who caught him bicycling with the new babe. But, anyway, Mark Halperin got caught up in the whole #MeToo thing like Matt Lauer did.
It was in this book that Obama made the comment “that he is ‘really good at killing people.’ According to Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, the authors of Double Down: Game Change 2012, Obama made the comment while discussing drone strikes… CNN’s Peter Hamby noted the anecdote in his review of the book for the Washington Post. … The quote comes in the context of both the drone program and the killing of Osama bin Laden by a special forces strike force.
“The passage also specifically references the death of another al Qaeda leader, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed by a CIA drone strike in Yemen,” just as the caller said, “on September 30, 2011. ‘Obama didn’t need to run through this preamble. Everyone knew the litany of his achievements. Foremost on that day, with the fresh news about al-Awlaki, it seemed the president was pondering the drone program that he had expanded so dramatically and with such lethal results, as well as the death of Bin Laden, which was still resonating worldwide months later.'”
Quote: “‘Turns out I’m really good at killing people,’ Obama said quietly, ‘Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.'” quote, unquote, in the Heilemann, Mark Halperin book. So our caller here, Greg here from Tampa, is right on the money, and he’s right… There were some scattered reactions of opposition to this, but not from Nancy Pelosi, not from Chuck Schumer, not from Adam Schiff. Not from any! Not from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — who was still tending bar then, I think. There was no reaction from the typical array of Democrats today claiming, “Trump is endangering Americans!”
This guy was ordering drone strikes, Obama was, for what sounds like the fun of it.