×

Rush Limbaugh

For a better experience,
download and use our app!

The Rush Limbaugh Show Main Menu

RUSH: Now, one thing — I want to just get rid of this. I don’t care whether Obama was ever in a pew when Reverend Wright said what he said. I don’t care whether Obama never heard it. Because I don’t believe it. He didn’t have to be there to know what this guy was talking about. He knew him for 20 years, and we’re falling for a smokescreen here. If you get sucked into this notion that, ‘Well, Obama was never in church. He might never heard it,’ you’re being led down the path. The thing is, the New York Times has reported that the Obama campaign ‘disinvited Reverend J. Wright from delivering the public invocation at Obama’s candidacy announcement.’ Now, we all know that Reverend J. Wright was publicly disinvited. But Wright, Reverend J. Wright talking to the New York Times, said, ‘Fifteen minutes before it I got a call from Barack. One of his members had talked him into uninviting me.’ In a phone call with Reverend Wright, Obama ‘cited a Rolling Stone story that was titled, ‘The Radical Roots of Barack Obama,’ and according to Reverend Wright, Obama said to him, ‘Look, you can get kind of rough in the sermons, so we’ve decided that it’s best for you not to be out there in public.”

So he knew! It’s in the New York Times. Reverend Wright, in essence, confirms what Obama is trying to deny. He did it inadvertently. He’s not angry at trying to sabotage Barack, but he clearly has undermined Barack’s whole premise that he never heard it because he quotes Obama as telling him, ‘Look, you’re kind of out there. You’re getting kind of rough in the sermons.’ So, anyway, it’s a smokescreen, and we ought not fall for it. Also, David Axelrod, who is running Obama’s campaign — this is from Byron York at The Corner at National Review — says that ‘A ‘Major’ Reason Wright Didn’t Speak at Obama’s Announcement Was…It Was Too Cold’ out there. Axelrod told reporters that the weather was one of the reasons Rev. Jeremiah Wright did not speak at Obama’s presidential candidacy announcement last year in Springfield, Illinois. When asked on a conference call why Wright did not speak, as had been planned, Axelrod said, ‘Part of what happened was that it was seven degrees in Springfield that day, and we truncated the program, and that was certainly a major part of the motivation there.’ When a reporter followed up, asking, ‘So you’re saying that Rev. Wright did not speak because it was too cold?’ Axelrod broadened his answer. ‘That was part of the decision,’ he said. ‘There was no doubt that there was controversy surrounding him, and we didn’t want to make him a target and a distraction on a day when Sen. Obama was going to announce his candidacy.” Why not? I know Obama’s ‘denounced,’ but that may not enough here. He is losing support now among white male voters. That’s the latest polling data. He’s losing support among white male voters, and whoever wants to win the presidency has got to win a majority of white male voters. Obama was in the recording studio over the weekend.

(playing of Jeremiah Was My Pastor)

RUSH: Barack Obama, portrayed vocally by ‘white comedian’ Paul Shanklin. There is more footage here of Reverend J. Wright. This is a montage here of sermons between 2001 and 2007 at the Trinity United Church of Christ.

WRIGHT: The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. The government lied! The government lied about Pearl Harbor. (cheering) They knew the Japanese were going to attack. Government’s lied. We’ve got a paranoid group of patriots in power that now, in the interests of homeland stupidity (cheers) — I mean homeland security. The government lied about the Tuskegee experiment. They purposely infected African-American men with syphilis! [snip] ‘Fighting for peace,’ is like raping for virginity. [snip] What’s going on in white America, US of KKKA, black men turning on black men. That is fighting the wrong enemy. You both are the primary targets in an oppressive society, that sees both of you as a dangerous threat. [snip] We cannot see how what we are doing is the same thing Al-Qaeda is doing under a different color flag (cheers and applause), and guess what else? If they don’t find them some weapons of mass destruction, they gonna do that like the LAPD and plant some weapons of mass destruction. (wild cheering)

RUSH: Now, that congregation is going nuts during all this, folks. It is just pure hate-liberalism. You can call it racism. It’s got all of the components of liberalism. In fact, Bill Sammon in his book Meet the Next President, divulges one of the philosophies of the Trinity United Church of Christ. Reverend J. Wright ‘advocated a redistribution of wealth that went beyond socialism. The congregation was required to embrace ‘economic parity’ and disavow the pursuit of ‘middleclassness.” This, folks, is the church that was instrumental in bringing Barack Obama to Christ. This was the church advocating radical wealth redistribution, ‘economic parity.’ Everybody has an equal amount of stuff regardless who earns it. All of this rage and anger… Actually, it’s not that foreign. You can find this kind of rage and anger for the last four years on many Democrat blogs, liberal blogs. There is this rage out there, and this congregation was eating this stuff up. I just refuse to believe… You know, Obama can denounce it all he wants. He went on this Friday night damage control tour on TV. He went on all the networks. In fact, let’s listen to a couple of these. CNN’s Anderson Cooper 180. Cooper says, ‘I want to ask you why you’ve been listening to this pastor and been close to him for nearly 20 years.’

OBAMA: I have to confess that those are not statements that I ever heard when I was sitting in (pause) the pews, uh, at this church.

RUSH: Who cares?

OBAMA: Uh, th–this is a church that I have been a member of for 20 years. Uh, this is a well-established, typical historically African-American church on the south side of Chicago with a wonderful set of ministries — and what I have been hearing and had been hearing in church was talk about Jesus, and talk about faith and values. Uh, had I heard those in the church, I would have told Reverend Wright that, uh, you know, that I profoundly disagreed with him, they didn’t reflect my values, and they didn’t reflect my ideals.

RUSH: He’s trying to get away with saying he never heard it and so it wasn’t said. Well, when he calls to tell J. Wright he’s not speaking at his presidential announcement — he says, ‘Look, your sermons are kind of rough. You’re getting rough in your sermons’ — he knew exactly what this guy was. Look, Oprah Winfrey used to be a member of this church, and Oprah Winfrey bagged this church back in the late nineties, because she didn’t like what she was hearing from the Reverend J. Wright. This guy knew (and knows to this day, Obama does) exactly what Wright’s all about. He’s his mentor. He’s going to have to treat this in a smarter and more face-straight-up manner here if he’s going to get past this, folks.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: We are here at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies, reviewing the Barack Obama Friday night damage control tour. Here’s another question and answer with Anderson Cooper 180 on CNN. Cooper said, ‘Senator Obama, did you not know — I mean, a couple days after 9/11 your preacher said, ‘This was America’s chickens coming home to roost,’ the result of what he called American terrorism around the world. I mean, you may not have been there, but you must have heard that he had said these things?’

OBAMA: You know, I confess that I did not hear about this until I started running for president, and then there was a story that was issued in which I strongly objected to these statements and condemned them, and so my belief was that this was something out of the ordinary. Obviously some of these statements indicate that this was happening more frequently, and so I have to strongly condemn the statements that were made. They do not reflect my views or Michelle’s views or probably the views of many people in the church.

RUSH: Ohhh.

OBAMA: On the other hand, Reverend Wright is somebody who is like an uncle or a family member who you may strongly object to what they have to say, but, as he’s about to retire, you know, I have no intention of leaving the church itself.

RUSH: First thing I notice, other than I just don’t believe this, but other than that, the first thing I noticed is that without a TelePromTer this guy does not have the flowing, charismatic cadence of his speeches, where he’s talking about hope and the future and change and so forth. He’s back now to calling the guy crazy uncle. Somebody out there call the Obama camp. I want to solve this, and here’s what you ought to say, Obama. Call David Axelrod, somebody out there I know in the Obama campaign’s gotta be monitoring this show. Here’s how you handle this. You focus on the minister’s hate, because it’s obvious in every sound bite, every bit of footage, this guy hates. He is angry; he is filled with rage; he is anti-America. He hates. And you, Obama, are a uniter, although there’s no evidence of this. Everybody in Obama’s inner circle is mad at everything. His wife’s fit to be tied all the time. This clown, J. Wright, never has what seems to be a reflective sober moment. He just seems to be always just out on the edge about to lose it. And yet we’re told this Obama guy can unite us all and make us forget our horrible past. How in the world can we forget our horrible past when his mentor is living 50 years ago and preaching to his congregation as though this were 50 years ago, and Obama chose this?

You know, you don’t choose your uncle. You don’t choose your parents. You choose your preacher. You choose your church. So somebody, Obama, Axelrod, somebody out there, you gotta say, ‘Yes, Reverend J. Wright, my uncle, my mentor, whatever, yes, he’s filled with hate, and there’s too much of this in this country, and this is why I want to be president, because I want to get rid of and change the things that lead to this kind of discord in this country. I think it’s horrible that so many Americans in my party feel this way. I think it’s dangerous that so many Americans actually blame their country for these things, and I, as your president, want to change this.’ There’s an easy way of dealing with this, but he’s not doing that. When he’s off the script and doesn’t even have a script, he’s on defense here, and he’s saying things that are going to come back to haunt him later on in the general campaign if he succeeds in getting the nomination.

But there’s a larger question here. Whether he was in the audience, whether he was sitting in the pew, I can’t believe it took a year for him to find out that his mentor blamed America for 9/11, chickens coming home to roost. I can’t believe it took him a year to learn that the reverend was out there blaming America for creating the HIV virus to get rid of black people. I think I first heard that on Nightline back when Ted Koppel still ran that show, might have been Mr. Ice T. That was funny to watch, Koppel said, ‘Mr. T.’ This is just a mess that he’s making. Reverend J. Wright, my friends, was Obama’s mentor for 20 years. No presidential candidate can belong to a church with a leadership and membership that adheres to such hate, to such an idea that we deserve 9/11, that we invented the AIDS crisis, or HIV virus, or the government did. Let me do a Geraldine Ferraro. Let’s change the race here. Let’s say he’s a white guy and he’s going to a church, white church where the minister says this kind of stuff. He’s out of the campaign. He is gone. He is fini. No country wants a president who’s a member of a church with this kind of radicalism as its mainstream.

Now, this Reverend J. Wright was Obama’s mentor for 20 years. Are we supposed to believe, are we supposed to assume that Obama was simply immune to the race baiting of Reverend Wright? That’s asking me too much. You hang around somebody 20 years as a mentor, you choose them because something about them resonates with you and you like them, but all of a sudden you can have boundaries and all this hate and racism simply bounces off of you? Why the hell stick with the church, then, if you’re going to ignore all that, if that didn’t matter? Obama, by the way, is purposely campaigning on character, his character. He is a uniter, we need to get past the old visions, politics of the past, blah, blah, blah, blah, without ever providing evidence of that character. We haven’t seen any evidence of the character. We’ve heard flowery speeches of nothing, delivered greatly. We don’t see any evidence of the character. What we see is that this guy is surrounded by people who are constantly enraged, ticked off about everything, mostly their country. Now we see evidence of his character as exemplified by his choice of church, by his choice of reverend, and we’re supposed to await proof of him being in the pews, when the worst of these things were spewed to the pews?

The double standard here is Mitt Romney. Here’s a guy whose religion was trashed as a cult. The Drive-By Media did everything they could, there were some on the Republican side — ahem — no need to mention names now because they’re no longer in the race, but they were out there trying to undermine Romney on the base of religion. Romney went out and gave a great speech in Texas about it. We’re supposed to just look past this because Obama wasn’t in the pews when the Reverend J. Wright was spewing this stuff to the people in the pews. Doesn’t matter. This is evidence of his character because he chose this church, he chose this guy to lead him. What do you think a mentor is? Most importantly, and I know I’ve said this a lot of other ways, but I’m going to say it again and use different terms. Church membership is church ‘member’-ship. It’s a community of like-minded believers. You go to a church, it’s not just you and your reverend. You have a like-minded relationship with all the members that you worship with in that church. If some of those members of that church go wacky on you, you want them expelled, or you’ll change churches. If something happens in that church that you don’t agree with, you’ll get out of there. If the rev starts going nuts on you, if the rev starts getting radical, you will leave the church. Obama didn’t leave the church. The rev has always been radical.

Obama belongs and chose to belong to a community that believes all of this tripe that the Reverend J. Wright spews. He tithed his money in support of this church and its mission. How else, and what else, are we to judge when trying to define Obama’s character? This is stuff of substance far more than these flowery TelePromTered speeches that he gives on hope and the future and change. George W. Bush’s faith, look at him. It puts him in conflict with the unbelievers in our country. In fact, that was the tack back when Romney gave his speech, the Drive-Bys, ‘Well, what about the atheists? He just said he wasn’t going to represent the atheists.’ He was giving a speech about his religion, what is he supposed to do, sit up there and say, ‘You atheists, screw you.’ No, the religion that teaches ‘screw you’ is Obama’s church. Actually, it’s ‘screw us’ ’cause they’re screwing us. Or screw them because they’re screwing us. But there’s a desire by the Drive-Bys to mitigate this, minimalize this so that it doesn’t have the impact precisely because it does reflect on the character of Barack Obama.

Bush, as I was saying, his faith puts him in conflict with unbelievers, but not over issues of faith, but rather in its role in public life. I’m firmly convinced one of the reasons there’s such abject hatred for Bush is because he is very open about his faith, he’s very open that it informs him and guides him, and people hate that. The left hates it. Separation of church and state! Where are those arguments now with the Reverend J. Wright? Obama’s denounced it, of course, but Reverend J. Wright’s faith puts him in conflict with believers, but not over issues of faith, but rather issues of race. This church is separatist and divisive, and it is the church of the man who claims best qualified to unite us?

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Folks, who knows what the future is going to bring? Nobody has the slightest idea. We might all be disappointed as hell one morning in November, but I’ll tell you: right now, these past few weeks, more fun than I’ve had in a long time, and the next couple-three weeks, all the way up to the… Well, I mean the next two or three months are going to be a gas, too. This is just exciting. Here’s more Barack Obama on Anderson Cooper. Cooper finally says, ‘But, I mean, uncles are blood relatives you’re kind of stuck with at family gatherings, even when they say outrageous things. You can’t get rid of them. You can walk out of a church. You can walk up, go to a pastor and say, ‘This is wrong.”

OBAMA: And as I said, Anderson, if I had heard any of these statements, I probably would have walked out, and I probably would have told Reverend Wright that they were wrong. Uh, but they were not statements that I heard when I was in church.

COOPER: So no one in the church ever said to you, ‘Man, last week you missed this sermon. Reverend Wright said this,’ or —

OBAMA: No.

COOPER: I mean, I think I read in your book that you used to listen to tapes of Reverend Wright when you were in Harvard Law School.

OBAMA: I did. I understand.

COOPER: So you had no idea?

OBAMA: I did not.

RUSH: (sigh) Well, you know, this is just tough to believe. He admits listening to tapes of Reverend Wright, but he didn’t know this stuff is going on — and nobody can prove that he knew it because nobody can prove he was there. I hope the Clintons have videotape of Barack in the church, because there’s a controversy. Apparently, there’s a NewsMax story from a year ago that says he was in church on July 22nd of last year, but Obama’s been able to refute that by saying he was at a National Council of La Raza speech at 1:30 in the afternoon in Miami. It’s possible he could have gone to the seven a.m. service I suppose, and gotten down there in a private plane, but seems like he’s got an alibi on that.

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This