Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
It is not a good day for the left out there, folks.
The drive-by media and several elements of the pop culture left.
Not happy out there today.
The movie Selma took it on the chin in the Oscar nominations and they're livid.
How dare this happen?
So close to Martin Luther King's birthday.
Oprah got snubbed.
Totally snubbed.
Roger Ebert got snubbed.
Roger Ebert is a god to several young, aspiring would-be leftists, and particularly drive-bys.
And I'll tell you something, folks.
I don't know, you probably haven't seen reference to this.
Maybe you have, as much as there is to access today, but I have found today three different pieces.
Maybe actually two.
One of them may be from serious leftist establishment foreign policy types who have turned on Obama like you can't believe.
One of them is Leslie Gelb.
Does the name Leslie Gelb ring a bell to you, Mr. Snerdley?
He's a lifelong New Yorker, New Jersey, and you should recognize his name.
He's a longtime reporter for New York Times.
And now he's the director of boring for the Council on Foreign Relations.
If it weren't for his varicose veins, this guy'd be a totally colorless guy.
But he is a ranking member of the leftist intellectual establishment foreign policy apparatus.
And he is not happy.
He wants Obama to broom everybody.
It's all about not going to Paris.
It's all about not going.
It's all about not sending anybody to Paris.
They're just beside themselves over that.
Roger Simon, who is not a leftist, written a serious piece here at PJ Media that was published a couple of days ago, three days ago, my birthday, is the White House a sleeper cell.
And I saw the head of the way just, and this is about the snub of Paris.
By the way, unemployment numbers have just skyrocketed way up.
I just saw this too.
There has to be a better way.
There has to be.
U.S. jobless claims rise to four-month high.
Initial claims state unemployment benefits rose by 19,000 to a seasonally adjusted 316,000 for the week ended January 10th, according to the Labor Department.
Expert economists polled by Reuters had forecast claims falling to 291,000.
And it comes on the heels of all this great economic news Obama treated us to last week, or maybe it was earlier this week, I can't recall.
When he was out there, I think it was last week.
He was after his something, went out to some university and started just singing the praises of the economy and the recovery.
The IRS is totally overwhelmed because of Obamacare and their new instructions.
And the IRS is saying only half of the citizens who call the IRS for any kind of assistance, clarification, whatever, only half of them are going to be served.
The IRS says they are overwhelmed with all of the new requirements that they have to follow under Obamacare.
Now, this kind of chaos, do not assume that this is troubling for Obama.
This is right.
This is exactly what's been ordered.
The Pope, folks, the Pope is doubling down trip.
Now, one thing about this, one thing I've learned about the Pope, Pope Francis, he goes out there and says stuff and the drive-bys report it.
Oftentimes, I'd say about 50% of the time, he doesn't say what they report him saying.
And the Vatican or somebody has to jump and say, no, no.
That is not what Il Papa said.
It happens almost regularly.
Pope will say something, and people react to drive-by is reported as making him look like the next incarnation of communism now occupying the Vatican.
Happily, they do this happily.
And there's three stories of this.
Pope wades into climate change debates, says mostly man's fault.
Pope Anchar Ebdu, there are limits to free expression, and we should not make fun of faith.
This is ostensibly from Il Papa.
One cannot make fun of faith.
This is NBC News out of Manila in the Philippines.
It's, let's see.
Yeah, we're loaded here today.
I've got all kinds of things.
And Obama pushing for mandatory paid leave.
Can I give you a quote that I uttered on this program from way back on my television show, April 19th, 1994?
Clinton was in the White House and they had proposed mandatory 12 weeks unpaid leave to handle emergencies, the birth of a child, take a dog or a cat to the vet, whatever it was, 12 weeks.
Mandatory.
This is what they pushed for back in 1994.
They called it the Family Leave Act.
You may have heard of it.
And what I said from the archive of the television show, Family Leave Act, if you have a company of 50 employees or more, it gives everybody 12 weeks unpaid leave a year to handle emergencies or births of children.
And I said, folks, as it always is the case with the left, this is not the solving of a problem.
This is not the solution.
This is not the end of a problem.
This is the beginning.
They've just created a new problem by design and on purpose.
What is the nature of the problem?
12 weeks of unpaid leave.
How many of you could afford to take three months of unpaid leave, particularly now when we hear over and over again that over half of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck?
How many of you, and this is back in 1994 when we supposedly had a roaring economy, how many of you could afford to 12 weeks off with no pay?
Very, very few.
And so it was easy to conclude, this is step one.
They're going to realize this down the road.
They already have realized it.
And they're going to come back with, it's got to be paid leave.
The leave is no good if people are going to go broke.
Well, we're being nice and giving them leave.
And lo and behold, Obama, it's finally taking some time, but here we go.
Obama going to launch a new push today to require paid leave for U.S. workers.
It's going to be a memo.
It's not an act of Congress.
It's not a law.
Obama's going to sign a memo to ensure federal employees get at least six weeks of paid sick leave after giving birth.
Thereby furthering the notion that pregnancy is an illness.
Paid sick leave after giving birth.
This, according to Valerie Jarrett, the president-in-waiting, president will also call on Congress to approve legislation cementing the mandate into federal law.
Valerie Jarrett, president-in-waiting, wrote in a blog post on LinkedIn, We can't say we stand for family values when so many women in this country have to jeopardize their financial security just to take a few weeks off of work before giving birth.
We can't say we're for middle-class stability when a man has to sacrifice his economic security to take care of his ailing mother.
Exactly.
1994.
Now, a lot of people might have been able to come up with this prediction, but I did it, and here it is.
It's taken a little while, but here that exactly comes who can afford six weeks off without pay?
Who can afford 12 weeks off?
We've got to, this has to be paid leave.
Never mind when I have the money for this.
And this is the federal workforce for now.
But if Obama succeeds in mandating it, i.e., forcing it on the private sector, I don't have to tell you, small business people, you're going to be paying two people at the same time while one of them isn't doing the job.
You're going to be paying two people.
One of them is not producing anything, not even there.
You need the job done, or you wouldn't have somebody doing it.
And you're not going to be allowed to eliminate the job.
They're going to make sure you don't get around the regulation that way.
Now, the federal workforce, they don't care about the money.
They just print it.
To heck with deficits and the national debt and all that.
But once you get into the free market economy, there are not just loads of piles of cash sitting around and small businesses not being used.
that could be allocated in ways Obama mandates.
Well, yeah, I mean, what's going to happen, what always does, the market always reacts, and there's this dynamism to it.
So you implement this mandatory paid leave.
What employers are going to do quietly, they'll never say so unless one of them screws up.
They're just not going to hire anybody they think might be getting pregnant anytime soon.
And that would be the newly married.
That would be somebody with one, maybe two kids.
I guarantee you they're going to do this.
It's going to be very quiet, and they'll never say it, so they can't be accused of discrimination.
And they're going to be doing background checks.
And if some guy comes in and wants a job and he's got a history of hanging around the house, pretending to be househusband, I guarantee you a lot of people are not going to be hired just on the assumption that they're not going to be working anyway.
They're going to be demanding six weeks' paid leave because they're going to be getting pregnant, need to take the dog to the vet, whatever.
It covers everything.
It covers whatever you would normally need to do during the workday that you can't do because you are a slave, having to show up and work for this mean-spirited boss that doesn't even appreciate what you do and doesn't pay you enough and doesn't provide you health care and is probably a Republican.
That's why we have to do this anyway, because Republican businessmen don't care about people.
The government has to come in and make sure that Americans are treated fairly.
Obama's also rejoining the global warming battle again, even though it's over.
In a real sense, there isn't any man-made global warming, and I don't need to go through this all again, but Obama's coming back at it, and I'll tell you how.
He is now focusing on methane.
Now, most people associate methane with the expelling of gas by livestock.
In other words, cow farts.
The leftist environmentalist wackos have actually suggested eliminating beef because that would mean we'd have fewer cattle and that would mean there would be less gas, which is methane, expelled by animals.
Obama is joining this, but not because of that.
The real reason he's going after methane is to attack fracking.
Methane is a key ingredient in horizontal drilling or fracking.
And if they can regulate or mandate all kinds of uses and proscriptions against uses of methane, then they can do indelible damage against the fracking industry.
And that is why Obama is focused on it.
George Will has a piece today.
I'm just setting the table here.
And it's a good piece.
I'm not sitting out here to criticize it.
I just have a question.
The Keystone Pipeline's Many Miracles is the title of George Will's piece.
And let me just read you a few excerpts, which will set up the question that I have about this.
Not since the multiplication of the loaves and fishes near the Sea of Galilee has there been creativity as miraculous as that of the Keystone XL Pipeline.
The Keystone XL Pipeline's not yet been built, but already is perhaps the most constructive infrastructure project since the interstate highway system.
The Keystone XL pipeline has accomplished an astonishing trifecta.
Now, this is where my question begins.
George Will asserts the next three things as overwhelming and astonishing aspects of the Keystone XL pipeline.
One, it has made mincemeat of President Obama's pose of thoughtfulness.
Number two, the Keystone XL pipeline, the debate about it and the refusal by Obama to approve it, all that has demonstrated that Obama lacks even a rudimentary understanding of the most basic economic realities.
And a third observation that George Will makes about the Keystone Pipeline and the miracles, the lessons that the whole process has taught.
Keystone XL Pipeline has dramatized environmentalism's descent into infantilism, meaning they've turned into a bunch of kids, just a bunch of infants, infantiles.
Obama entered the presidency trailing clouds of intellectual self-regard.
His carefully cultivated persona was of a uniquely thoughtful, judicious, deliberative, evidence-driven man, comfortable with complexity.
The protracted considerations of Keystone supposedly displayed these virtues, but now, however, it is clear that Obama's mind has always been as closed as an unshocked oyster.
Now, I can, my question is, to who is all this obvious?
Anybody in Hollywood's looking at Obama this way?
As a faux intellectual, as an exposed pretend intellectual?
This is, again, it's not a criticism, and I'm going to have to take a break here pretty soon.
In the old days, this would be true.
Obama would be exposed as a fraud.
And by the old days, I just mean 20 years ago, 20, 30 years, he would be exposed as a total fraud.
He's not an intellectual.
He's not a complex guy.
He's a total ideologue.
And George Will said the Keystone XL pipeline is just one of many things that's illustrated what Obama is not.
It's made mincemeat of his pose, his act that he's a thoughtful guy.
It's demonstrated he lacks even a rudimentary understanding of the most basic economic realities.
Okay, but to who outside of George Will?
I mean, these are the kind of things we need everybody to conclude and realize, but I don't think they do.
You do.
I do.
I don't know if you associate Obama's fraudulent pose with Keystone.
I think most of you associate his ideology with it.
It would be great.
It would be great if more and more people thought of Obama the way George Will says.
If more and more people were actually now aware of and exposed to Obama's fraud and pose.
But I don't know who is.
I have to take a break.
Snurdley's looking at me with a puzzled look on his face, which tells me I still haven't closed the loop on what I'm trying to say.
I guess one of the problems I'm having is I never fell for the Barack Obama version 1.0 that George Will cites here.
The sentence reads, Obama entered the presidency trailing clouds of intellectual self-regards.
It's a narcissist intellectual self-regard.
Come on, Berlin speech and all this.
Anyway, speaking before Greek columns, his carefully cultivated persona was of a uniquely thoughtful, judicious, deliberative, evidence-driven man, comfortable with complexity.
It wasn't any of that.
And maybe Will means that, maybe carefully cultivated, meaning, but I think it's all been an act.
The left is a sucker for people who can speak as intellectuals speak.
You can be the dumbest idiot walking the earth.
And if you can sound like you know what you're talking about, they'll praise you.
It is the most amazing thing.
George W. Bush ran rings around Obama in grades at school, but because of the way he speaks, they call him an idiot and think of him as an idiot.
But anyway, that misses the point.
George Will says that Obama's handling Keystone illustrates what an intellectual fraud he's been.
And I want to who I wish everybody would realize it, but I don't know who is.
That's the point.
Now, it could be, it could be that it is beginning to sink in as it relates to Obama not going to Paris.
Yes, as I said at the top of the program, there is some real fear for U.S. national security among leftists who consider themselves experts in it.
And they're blaming Obama.
There is some real anger at Obama and his entire inner circle.
And they are worried to death or mad that Obama's decision not to go to Paris illustrates how incompetent and how undeserving of this power and how out of place with it they are.
And leading that charge is Leslie Gelb, who is the ranking boring leftist establishment foreign policy expert in the world.
There really is.
I was not joking.
There's real anger out there on the left today about a bunch of people who think that Oprah Winfrey's movie Selma really got snubbed.
It was nominated for best movie.
I think it was best picture.
But none of the actors in it were nominated.
None of the directors.
None of the writers.
Oprah got shut out.
I think it got two nominations, but they're running around out there today.
What do you mean?
This is a big, why this is Hollywood's all-white this year.
Hollywood's all-white.
It's not fair.
It's not fair.
So they believe that the movie Selma should have won already simply because of what the subject matter is, what it was about, and the importance of it happening now coming out near Martin Luther King's birthday.
And they're fit to be tied.
So I've got that coming up, but I want to get back to this business of.
I tell you, folks, out there in the highest ranks of the leftist foreign policy circuit, I think I've concluded today there's some real fear.
Now, you and I have had this fear for a long time, but the leftists, this crowd that bought into this so-called intellectual superiority, this cultivated sophistication of Barack Obama, I mean, it's really coming back on him now.
And all it took was this little incident in Paris where he didn't go, and they have flipped.
Now, up first, Roger Simon, Roger Simon, PJ Media.
He's not a leftist, but I'm going to start with him.
Is the White House a sleeper cell?
I saw that and I said, my God, they really going to say, are they going to suggest this?
Does this website have a death wish?
So, of course, I read it, curiosity.
I'm still trying to figure out.
This is how Mr. Simon begins.
I'm still trying to figure out why Barack Obama or any high-level U.S. government official other than Eric Holder, who was in Paris, but evidently had better things to do, did not join the nearly 4 million people who marched throughout France protesting the terror killings at Charle Abdu and the hyper-cacher market, or cachet.
White House Press Secretary Josh Ernest has admitted the mistake and apologized, perhaps a little wishy-washily, but we'll give him a pass.
He's apologized, informing us that unfortunately, there just wasn't enough time to arrange presidential security for the trip.
And that's very interesting.
Somehow, there was time for security for 40 or so other world leaders, including Angela Merkel, arguably the most highly regarded politician on the planet at the moment and the de facto president of the EU.
The UK's David Cameron was there.
Spain's Mariano Rajoy was there.
Even Benjamin Netanyahu Israel, who's probably a bigger target than Obama these days, and was not even welcomed by France's President Hollande.
Nevertheless, he showed up.
Of course, the American president is supposedly more important, but correct me if I'm wrong.
Obama was not originally so gung-ho on American exceptionalism, equating it with British exceptionalism and Greek exceptionalism.
All countries, after all, feel they're exceptional.
The American president is more important.
His point here is: in this world, still today, no matter Obama's efforts to transform this country and to cut it down to size, the fact remains that America is still more important.
Obvious reasons.
Not that we're better, not that we're just more important because of the ability we have to project power and to defend people, which we've always done.
But you see, Obama doesn't believe in that.
Obama doesn't believe in American exceptionalism.
When he was asked about.
Well, yeah, I know what it is, but I'm sure the Brits feel it.
They're pretty exceptional too.
And the Greeks, I'm sure the Greeks think, well, they may be more exceptional, is what they start.
But what that means is there's nothing special about us.
There never has been anything special about us.
In fact, we've never deserved all the accolades we've gotten.
Look at our hat pass.
Look at our history.
We don't deserve any of the stuff.
And Obama's acting on us.
He doesn't show up.
And I think probably a number of reasons why he didn't show up, and there's not enough time for security is the last of them.
He just didn't want to go.
He didn't want to be part of 40 guys.
He wouldn't get lost in that crowd.
He's above that.
He photo ops.
It's Obama in one photo and everybody else in the other photo.
Well, he's changed his mind on several times, Obama, so who's to say?
And there was a game on.
I'm a sports fan, too.
Tennis more than football.
So I understand Obama might not want to leave the TV set to go to Paris because there were football games on.
You'd have trouble prying me away from the Australian Open when it starts next week.
But still, in the event of one of the biggest and ugliest terror events in recent years, if I were president, I'd TIFO everything and get my ass over there.
Just yesterday, I theorized the real reason Obama didn't go is he just couldn't put the words Islamic and terrorism together in one sentence, even if it hit him in the face.
He doesn't want to hang around with people who look at Islam that way.
Anyway, Mr. Simon continues to write and speculate about why Obama ultimately didn't go.
And then he gets to this.
Is there a sleeper cell in the White House?
It would certainly explain Obama's not going to France, which was a decision that hurt the USA.
It was a decision that hurt the effort against Islamic terror and hurt the president's already tarnished reputation in the bargain.
There are so many other things that the existence of a White House sleeper cell would explain that I couldn't even begin to count them.
And as you know, a cell doesn't have to be violent to be active.
There are many ways to do damage as a sleeper cell.
But who would be a member of this cell?
Is it one or all of them?
Well, that I'm sorry to say I cannot tell you.
I do not have the proper clearance.
But you're free to guess who in the White House is part of a sleeper cell.
He cites Alger Hiss, who was a member of Sleeper Cell.
Alger Hiss was a communist spy in the U.S. government.
So he's raising the question about Obama because nobody can understand why Obama didn't go.
And no offered explanation has come anywhere near sufficing.
Jim Patterson at thehill.com.
Congress must lead on security as Obama is irrelevant.
This is thehill.com.
You remember when I called Clinton irrelevant back in 1994?
Shortly after the Republicans took over the House, a massive victory contract with America, I was joking on the radio and in TV about Clinton being irrelevant.
He actually went on television at a press conference and denied that he was irrelevant.
I'm still relevant.
I don't care what anybody says.
I'm still president.
I'm still relevant.
People run around saying I'm irrelevant.
They don't understand what's going on.
He actually did.
He actually responded to it.
Well, now it's not me calling a Democrat president irrelevant.
It is thehill.com, which is part of the state-run media.
The utter failure, Jim Patterson is the writer's name, the utter failure of the regime can be measured in so many ways.
From the number of beheaded American journalists to embarrassing heads of state by spying on Angela Merkel's personal mobile phone to callously calling Benjamin Netanyahu a war hero, chicken, excrement, and a coward.
Secretary of State John Kerry, longtime member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, suggests that Israel is an apartheid state.
By supporting Hamas and its ally, the Palestinian Authority, Obama and Kerry have threatened the lives of Jews around the world in the name of human rights for terrorists.
He doesn't realize Gaza is occupied by terrorist Hamas, intent on killing Israeli children until they destroy the Jewish state.
Kerry thinks tweeting will stop the Russian war on the Ukraine.
Let's face it, folks, America is without a foreign policy at a dangerous time.
And here are a couple pull quotes from Mr. Patterson again in thehill.com.
Other Americans, including me, including this writer, symbolically voted for an African-American president in hopes he could lead our country nationally and internationally and that he could put to rest lingering racial issues.
Racial tensions are greater today than they were in the 60s.
The world's on the brink of disaster.
The Obama administration is asleep.
The president doesn't want to wake up until his term is over so he can proclaim his great single accomplishment, being the nation's first African-American president.
But his record is void of any substantive accomplishments.
Another poll quote.
Congress must realize Obama is no longer relevant.
He's wasted his opportunity to lead.
He's lost the confidence of the American people and world leaders.
It's Congress that now must lead.
Congress must act immediately to secure our country from further cyber attacks, further threats to Americans and assets at home and abroad.
But real security will not be restored until Obama loses his security badge to enter the White House, and that day cannot come too soon.
Who's Jim Patterson, you're asking?
Jim Patterson, a former Washington diplomat.
He is a San Francisco-based writer and speaker.
He's not the mystery author.
That's James Patterson.
This is Jim Patterson.
What an indictment.
You haven't had this kind of pointed criticism from conservatives about Obama.
They're afraid to say these things about Obama.
This is astounding.
And here this guy admits he's one of the millions that voted for Obama for pure symbolic reasons.
Yeah, I wanted to say good things about me by saying I voted for a black guy, first black guy.
Look what it would say about America.
And this guy was uniquely qualified to make us safer again.
Restore foreign policy has been an outright disaster.
Racial tensions greater today than in the 60s.
The world's on the brink of disaster.
And real security will not be restored until Obama loses his security badge to enter the White House.
And then Leslie Gelb is next.
And he's really worried.
I mean, these people are scared to death, and they are afraid of militant Islamism.
They are scared to death, folks.
People on the left, all of them who thought they were electing the smartest guy in the world six years ago.
One more little reference here.
Jim Patterson, San Francisco diplomat, former diplomat.
He said, our country is leaderless on security.
Due to Obama's total inaction, the U.S. is at great risk of a crippling cyber doomsday, a day when there will be no internet.
Yeah, the president gets tough on nuclear-enabled North Korea for hacking a worthless Hollywood movie, but he does nothing to prevent such attacks on the national security of our nation and military and diplomatic and industrial assets abroad.
This guy's really down on Obama.
And by the way, he voted for him for all of the right reasons.
He was smarter than anybody else, especially Bush.
Well spoken, so sophisticated, so articulate, so black.
Wow, first African-American president.
Oh, and he was going to rebuild foreign policy.
He's going to make America strong again.
I know it's easy to say.
But what is this?
I didn't fall for any of it.
At no time was I dazzled.
At no time did I buy into any of Obama being real.
And that's because I understand liberalism and how it operates and how it sells itself.
It's just a shame that it's taking all of this time for the supposed smartest people in the room to figure all this out.
They may be figuring it out too late because now there's nothing stopping Obama these next two years.
Now, Leslie Gelb, Leslie Gelb is the former, he's a foreign policy writer at the New York Times, and somehow he ended up over at the Council on Foreign Relations and Foreign Policy Magazine or whatever.
And he is the, I mean, he is at top of the walk at the CFR and like places.
He is considered the top of the pyramid when it comes to American foreign policy.
Not as part of government.
He's never been part of government.
He's always been outside of it, influencing it, writing about it.
And he had a piece published in the Daily Beast recently.
This is Obama's last foreign policy chance.
He says, before I continue, I have to tell you that I have never made such extreme and far-reaching proposals in all my years in this business.
I have never proposed such a drastic overhaul of the U.S. foreign policy establishment.
But if you think hard about how Mr. Obama and his team handled this weekend in Paris, I think you will see that I am not enjoying a foreign policy neurological breakdown.
It was an absolute no-brainer for either Obama or Biden personally to show the American flag on the streets of Paris.
Anyway, cutting to the chase, Leslie Gelb goes on to criticize Obama and to highlight his incompetence and to suggest that everybody in his inner circle is incompetent.
Valerie Jarrett to know what she's doing.
I mean, this is stunning, folks.
And the people in left-wing drive-by circles who read this stuff, I guarantee you, are huddling in the corners and talking about it amongst themselves.
You'll never see this in the New York Times.
You'll never see this discussed on Fox News or anywhere else.
It's being closely held.
Here's why America's failure to be represented at the Paris unity march was so profoundly disturbing.
It wasn't just because Obama or Biden's absence was a gaffe.
More than this, it demonstrated beyond argument that the Obama team lacks the basic instincts and judgment necessary to conduct U.S. national security policy in the next two years.
It is simply too dangerous to let Obama continue.
With his current team and his way of making decisions, America, its allies and friends could be heading into one of the most dangerous periods since the height of the Cold War.
And then he writes, before I continue, I have to tell you that I've never made such extreme and far-reaching proposals.
And he goes, his proposals are for Obama to get rid of everybody.
Fire Valerie Jarrett.
But not just that.
He wants them replaced with Republicans.
Now, you may not even know who Leslie Gelb is, but just trust me, in this egghead group, this guy's God.
And to have this kind of dissent and publicly write about it at the Daily Beast, you know, Tita Brown's own place.
I don't know who runs it now.
Barry Diller runs.
I don't know who runs it.
But it's a publicly accessed website, obviously.
Now, the Republicans, he wants Obama to hire.
And he knows it's not going to happen.
He's illustrating.
Let me make a point here.
He wants the most moderate Republicans you could ever, Thomas Pickering, milquetoast kind of guys, but at least he's confident they know what they're doing.
It really boils down to this uprising in the deepest pits of the left-wing national security foreign policy apparatus that folks are scared to death.
That Obama is clueless and has no idea what he's doing.
Sorry, I didn't intend all that to take that much time, but it did because to me, strikingly profound.
I wanted to make sure you got it.
We'll move on to the things and start getting into your phone calls.