RUSH: Another item that I found last night, ladies and gentlemen, that made me eager to arrive today, is this audio sound bite from Charlotte, North Carolina. Calypso Louie on the case, speaking to a rally in support of his Millions More March.
RUSH: So what we have here is the Reverend Farrakhan, Calypso Louie, leader of the Nation of Islam, telling his flock here that he had a very reliable source, that under the levee there was a 25-foot hole which suggested it may have been blown up. It’s an amazing bomb that they had, too, because the bomb knew to send the water only to black neighborhoods. It must have included the neighborhood of William Jefferson, black Democrat, Louisiana, because his affluent neighborhood home was also — well, no, it wasn’t flooded. The bomb knew to stop the water at the third step on the front porch of Democrat William Jefferson’s house on Marengo Street, the fashionable uptown section of his district. Mr. Snerdley informs me these are called smart racist bombs. They’ve been in the US arsenal unknown before today, last night for many, many years, apparently. And so the bomb blew up the levee and sent the water on a path to destroy only black homes. Now, we don’t know why this is the case, but probably, I can guess they wanted to raze and get rid of these black people and these black homes so they could build something for Halliburton or the Carlisle Group or maybe an oil refinery in that area. We’ll keep a sharp eye as the rebuilding of New Orleans takes place to find out just what does go up on these areas of these destroyed homes.
Now, yesterday, if I may get serious about this for a moment, James Taranto from the Best of the Web today, which is the Wall Street Journal’s website — well, it’s their online blog called OpinionJournal.com, took some polling numbers about race in America, and entered into an interesting analysis of them. He says, “What does Hurricane Katrina tell us about race in America?” Well, the new Gallup is informative. Now, there’s a lot of numbers here. Numbers are hard to follow on the radio. I’m just going to give you a couple to illustrate the point. Six in ten — that would be 60% for those of you in Rio Linda — 60% of African-Americans say the fact that most hurricane victims were poor and black was one reason the federal government failed to come to rescue them more quickly. Whites reject the idea nearly nine in ten: 90% say they weren’t factors. Republican efforts this year to reach out to black voters have not been helped. By more than three to one, blacks say Bush doesn’t care about black people. By more than two to one, white people say that he does. What this all means is the vast majority of blacks, 72% — I’m not mentioning a whole bunch of numbers, I’m just going straight to the conclusion here after giving you the first initial set — the vast majority of blacks, 72%, disagree with a solid majority of the overall population. The black population of the country is about 12% now, and the white population is around 80%, so if you do some extrapolation, you’ll see that the vast majority of the black population, 72%, disagree with a solid majority of the overall American population, 60%, on the question of whether Bush cares. A solid majority of blacks, 60%, disagree with an overwhelming majority of the overall population, 78%, on the question of whether the rescue was racist.
But here is where Taranto says that that now falls apart. “The truth about race that Katrina illuminates, then, is that, at least when it comes to matters involving race, black Americans are extreme political outliers. This is why attempts to play the race card are politically futile: They have to appeal not just to blacks, but to a substantial minority of whites. The Gallup poll results makes clear that the current racial appeals are not resonating with whites.” While all these blacks think that this recovery effort was delayed and no energy was behind it because the people are black, nine out of ten white people disagree with this. So playing the race card down the road politically is not working in this case. That’s the ultimate point I wish to bring to you.
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