RUSH: We move on to Houma, Louisiana. Houma. Mike, welcome to the program. Great you’re here.
CALLER: Yes, sir.
RUSH: Hi!
CALLER: Can you hear me, Rush?
RUSH: Yeah, I hear you just fine. Can you hear me?
RUSH: Good. Appreciate it.
CALLER: Longtime listener, first-time caller.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: Listen, I’m calling to comment on Reverend Wright or Dr. Wright or whatever they’re calling him. And I am a black male, but I’m also an avid churchgoer, a man of faith. The thing that disturbed me most about that last clip you played is that it’s reminiscent of…
RUSH: Yes?
CALLER: A lot of liberals won’t bring this up, that Malcolm X (also Malcolm Little) said the very exact same thing as an open black separatist, before he made his pilgrimage to Mecca, and that caused his breakaway from the Nation of Islam, which inevitably led to his demise. So to have one with that type of radical mentality as an advisor, you know? I just don’t know how people can say that they’re advocating the love of Christ, but openly speaking about hate.
RUSH: Yeah, I know. You know, we’ve had people call here today, they said, ‘Well, you just don’t understand the black church, the context and experience.’ Well, that may be true, but you nailed it. I don’t care. Preaching hate doesn’t do anybody any good, any time. And you’re right. I think there is an attempt here. This guy’s clearly advocating separatism. This guy does not want any in his congregation to like white people, at all. He wants them to walk out of there hating white people. Now, you tell me how that’s productive for anybody, particularly the country. And you tell me how in the world that comes from the Bible or from Christianity or any other religion, for that matter, but this guy is clearly advocating hatred and perhaps separatism. And, you know, Dr. King was all just the opposite. Dr. King was all about integration. You know, Brown v. Board of Education was all about integration. Now it seems that so many of these civil rights leaders, be they pastors or what have you, are interested in separatism again, segregation. Even when integration laws allow the discrimination of the past to be forgotten and the college admissions or other clubs, they get inside and still have advocates and leaders suggesting that they segregate once they integrate.
This is why if you’re a human being — if you have any humanity about you at all, and if you have any appreciation for the greatness of this country — the idea that you would rather have your flock or the people who are under your spell constantly poor, angry, filled with hatred and rage… I don’t see the humanity in that. I just don’t see it basic humanity in what Pastor Wright happens to be preaching. We’ve all got things that made us mad over our life. We’ve all had things that were unfair, every damn one of us. I know, ‘But, Rush, it happened because of the skin color.’ I understand that. Progress is being made and has been made, lots of it. But despite that, everybody has some kind of an obstacle, and lots of them are unfair, and there are lots of people who face all kinds of discrimination on the basis of some other physical characteristic that they might have, not just the color of their skin. But there aren’t whole industries that have been set up to establish — for example, there is no civil rights group for the fat. There is no civil rights group for one-armed amputees living in SoHo in New York City.
‘Yeah, but, Rush, you’re confusing this. None of that was institutional.’
I’m saying the institution was. It’s not. By the way, did I not predict this? We’ve got the first legitimate black man running for president of the United States, and look what’s happening in this party? Look at what’s happening in the Democrat Party. We have a race war! You can call it a civil war or call it an Uncivil War, but we’ve got a race war going on in the Democrat Party while the first legitimate candidate for president as a black man is leading their pack. What does that tell you? I know there are a lot of people who believe that if Obama gets the nomination and then is elected president, that we can forever banish our racist past, our original sin of racism and slavery. ‘Banish it! It will be over. We will have crossed the divide! We shall have reached the mountaintop. We shall have crossed the threshold,’ and I tell you, my friends, it’s only going to get worse. Look at what happened to Geraldine Ferraro. Look at what happens to anybody out there, especially on the Democrat side right now, starts to criticize Obama, they point fingers and say, ‘Racist!’ It’s only going to get worse. Let’s just go down the road. Say this guy gets elected president, State of the Union speech. Republicans do their response. Let’s say they choose a white guy to do the response to Obama’s State of the Union. The next day, Sharpton and Jackson go into gear, the Justice Brothers, and claim the criticism is based in race; rooted in Republican anger that Obama won and that that response just was a telegraph to the rest of the Republicans to get rid of this guy as quickly as we can in the next election. Whether it’s true or not, they will say it. It’s going to be made to order for those in the civil rights race prop-’em-up business.
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See this, ladies and gentlemen, is the point. He is going to unify us. He is going to unify America. He is going to unify all of us. We are going to come together, and we are going to see a new sun, a new future, one of hope and excitement and new challenge that will be met by a collective unity all working toward the same goal of hope and change. And yet everybody around him is just the opposite of him. They’re mad as hell. Where is all of this hope and future and love, where is it in Obama’s closest circle? Which is why I have been suggesting he’s been living two lives. We got the life that we see when he wanted to be president and whatever went on before that, and we know that he’s been hanging around with this minister.
Tega Cay in South Carolina. Derek, I’m glad you waited, sir. Welcome to the program.
CALLER: God bless you, Rush. For the first time ever, I think you’re wrong this time, my man, because when I first heard you, I heard all the rumors, you know, everybody that I — I’ve always been a Republican. I’ve never, ever in my life voted for a Democrat and all my friends used to always call you racist and things like that, and so my response always was, ‘Well, listen to him for a while, and after awhile, the racism is going to rebuild themselves. If you just listen and don’t say anything.’ And so I would say in Barack Obama’s case, I would definitely look at the people that he’s around. You’re not looking at everybody he’s around. He actually went to Columbia University, is that correct?
RUSH: Yeah, he went to Harvard, I think, Columbia, one of those Ivy League schools, yeah, he’s well educated.
CALLER: Exactly. Some of his closest friends have obviously graduated from Columbia as well, and I don’t think that’s a black college last time I checked.
RUSH: No. What is your point?
CALLER: Well, my point is, Rush, when I heard you I listened, I waited and I listened to your entire — I listened to you for at least two years before I came up with a decision, and you’re making a decision based on a couple of excerpts, a couple of messages that you just had clips of like, for example, the clip that you played yesterday, you only played the first part. I actually listened to that whole message, and that actually turned out to be a pretty good gospel message about love and Jesus and how Jesus loved.
RUSH: Yeah, we played that. We played that portion of it today. There’s no love in this guy’s church, there’s no love in his message to those people. He is preaching hate. He’s telling them to hate white people out there, Derek. He’s preaching a separatist message, it’s distressing to me.
CALLER: Oh, okay.
RUSH: In 2008 America? This is distressing. Frankly, you know something, Derek, I am sick of these racial divides. They are not necessary and they’re being promulgated by people who benefit financially from keeping the racial divide going. There’s no reason for as many black African-Americans in this country to think they have no chance because rich white guys are not going to let ’em get anywhere. There’s no excuse for that. Too many examples of all kinds of successful black people in all walks of life from all political parties.
CALLER: You’re absolutely right. You’re absolutely right on both of those points, Rush. I agree, how can we get past this racial divide? You know, ever since you played that, that message out here I’ve heard a lot of people calling in on all the different talk shows just locally, and you can hear the anger, you can hear the anger that a lot of people have because of that, you know, and so how do we move past that, you know, how do we move past the deep anger that’s deeply rooted —
RUSH: The deep anger is generational.
CALLER: — in the congregation.
RUSH: The deep anger is going to have to stop being taught. This is a flawed analogy, and I’m not comparing anybody, but if you look at — go look anywhere in the Middle East where there is a terrorist enclave, how many times have you seen these parents strapping bombs on three-year-olds and sending them onto a bus? And for those little kids that don’t have bombs strapped to them, how do you think they’re being raised? They’re being raised to hate, hate, hate. That’s where terrorists come from. Now, I think that you’ve got a preacher like this, this is not terrorism, and don’t anybody thinks so, but when you constantly tell people from young, impressionable ages, lies about their own country, they might not have been lies 50 years ago, they are lies today. But if you want them to live 50 years ago, if you don’t want them to know the truth of what their own country is all about, when they have their own eyes, by the way, they can see people who are not white immigrate and move to this country and do pretty good, see ’em getting into schools, see ’em graduating, see ’em moving into homes. Guys like Jeremiah Wright’s flock, I don’t know how wealthy his congregation is, it’s on Chicago’s South Side, but there are a number of people, you can put Sharpton and Jackson, the civil rights coalition leaders whose job it is to deny the truth of what this country is, based on a 50-year-old truth that’s no longer a truth.
People have been struggling with this who are far smarter than I am to get past it. But one of the reasons I’m reacting to this with such a focus the past couple days is that the guy who is running for president on the Democrat side who’s leading, his mentor is this guy, his spiritual advisor is this guy. Most people that run for the presidency get a media anal exam, and Obama’s not getting it, and precisely because there is a lot of fear that anybody who gives him the same treatment that any other presidential candidate gets is going to be accused of racism. So everybody’s reacting to this with kid gloves. I think these are things that need to be explained. When you listen to Jeremiah Wright talk about America being the focus of evil in the modern world and that we’re only getting what we deserve, for example, on 9/11, then you listen to Obama, basically when he does delve into foreign policy, say, ‘I’m going to go talk to these people, and I’m going to assure them that they have no problem with us.’ I’m afraid he agrees with this guy. He hasn’t denounced it, not specifically. It’s something, as a voter and as an American citizen, I want to know. It’s curious, the whole Democrat Party hasn’t denounced. In fact, a lot of elected Democrats are saying the same thing the pastor is saying, just not in as incendiary a way, but they’re saying it.
Harry Reid, waving the white flag of surrender in Iraq, trying to sabotage victory, trying to demoralize the troops. The Democrat Party has done everything they can to secure defeat in Iraq. The Democrat party’s done everything they can to talk down the US economy. The Democrat Party is into destruction and damage, and so here comes a guy from the pulpit who says in a theoretical sense or philosophical sense much of what we’ve been hearing from Democrat Party leaders, he just says it in a way that’s a little bit more fiery, and nobody’s denouncing him, and Barack is not denouncing him. Barack is out there saying, ‘I’m going to get us out of Iraq,’ believing that. If we elect a president who thinks that we’re the focus of evil in the modern world, we have a problem. We have a huge problem. And if we’re going to do that, people ought to know what they’re doing before they head in to the polling place.