RUSH: Here’s Mike in Wakefield, Massachusetts. Nice to have you on the program.
CALLER: Pleasure to talk to you, Rush.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: How you doing today?
RUSH: Good, sir.
CALLER: I just wanted to answer your question you had in the monologue in the first hour. That AP story.
RUSH: Yeah, let me find, before you give me your answer to it, let me give the exact — here it is. ‘Blacks in US imprisoned at five times the rate of whites,’ and my question was, ‘This tells us what, exactly?’
CALLER: This is going to lead to equal opportunity arrests and affirmative imprisonment.
RUSH: So you think there will be a push to arrest more whites?
CALLER: Could be. Never know with libs.
RUSH: You know, I’m all for that, if they deserve it.
CALLER: Oh, I am, too. Absolutely. But, you know how these libs work, they just want everybody to be equal.
RUSH: I’ll tell you, the reason I asked the question that way is because they can’t fool me. This is a cyclical story. This story comes out once or twice a year. It usually happens around some sort of event. This time it comes out all by itself. But usually it comes out after some event has happened, and you’ll get the obligatory responses to this from the Reverend Jackson. The point they’re trying to make here is that the legal justice system is biased against blacks and that the reason there are five times as many blacks as whites in jail is because that many blacks have been discriminated against and don’t deserve to be there. It is because the legal justice system wants them in jail to get them out of the way. That’s the message behind it, of this story and of that headline and so forth. It’s been this way for years. It’s a cyclical story. It comes out now and again, and it’s all meant to foment continual racial discord among the American people, pure and simple.
Now, I should make this stipulation; I will correct the Drive-Bys here because once again, they have misled. It’s like that story that we had yesterday that this guy that worked in the vice president’s office got sentenced to ten years for stealing documents and transferring them to a Philippine resistance group. The headline said, ‘Cheney aide sentenced to ten years.’ The guy was in the White House in 1999. He was in the vice president’s office from 1999 to 2002. Cheney did not become vice president ’til 2001. So he was already there. He was there when Gore and Clinton were in the White House. But the headline said, ‘Cheney aide sentenced to ten years.’ Part of the ongoing action line to make this administration look corrupt and incompetent and so forth. There may be five times as many blacks — well, there actually aren’t. This is the point. There are not five times as many blacks in jail. It’s proportional based on the population differences. The percentage of the black male population that’s in jail is five times the percentage that the white population, male population, general population, maybe, too, is in jail. So it’s a significant point. (interruption) Well, what is it? What is the other way that we should — hmm — hm-hm, hm-hm. (Laughing.) The black population five times — no. No, no, no. (Laughing.) Well, you may have a point.
On a proportional basis, if five times as many blacks, percentage of their population are in jail as whites are, then you could say that the remaining black population is safer than the remaining white population. You’re talking about black-on-black crime. You’re just talking about pure criminals. Okay, well, yeah, but for your point to be accurate, you’d have to restrict that to black on black crime. You’d have to restrict it to that otherwise the point wouldn’t hold up. But I see what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to stir it up. You’re trying to get a Media Matters for America headline for me. I haven’t made one lately. But I recognized where you were going and I put the qualifier, not that it will matter to them.