RUSH: Myron in Detroit. Myron, I’m glad you called, sir. Great to have you here.
CALLER: Yeah, how you doing there, Rush?
RUSH: Fine, sir.
CALLER: Yeah. I hate to go against you, but I think you’re all wrong about the Barack Obama pastor. And what I’m saying is, because I’ve been in the church for twenty-some years, and you don’t take one thing out of a church sermon and say that’s what it’s all about. You don’t do that in church. You gotta play the thing totally out so you can get all the messages instead of one statement of it. I think that’s totally wrong for doing something like that.
RUSH: I understand, look, I’m taken out of context a lot, Myron, on television. But even when I’m taken out of context, you don’t find me saying stuff like this. This isn’t even about race, Myron, I tried to make that point earlier today. This man’s just steaming with rage and hatred. He’s got serious, serious anger management issues. This guy is enraged. He is mad, he’s stuck in a time warp, and it’s okay, except he’s got all these 4,500 people there that are standing up and cheering all this nonsense. It’s not good. It’s not good for them; it’s not good for him; it certainly hasn’t been good for Obama.
CALLER: But the thing dealing with the church, you go there for yourself, you can accept what he say or not, it’s not making the reverend a god, he’s not no god. He’s just trying to give a sermon to let you know something. By taking a segment out of, it, we don’t know what he truly said. I was sitting here listening to you the last two days, we don’t know what he’s trying to get —
RUSH: We do know what he said.
CALLER: How can you know what he said when you just took a segment out? He might have said something after that to rebut what he just said.
RUSH: Because it’s on DVDs. You can buy DVDs from the guy’s church. He’s selling the stuff. Fox News didn’t do a deep inside investigation to come up with secret videotapes. This guy sells this stuff.
CALLER: Hm-hm. Then I would say you shouldn’t just play a segment for your listeners to listen to instead of playing the whole thing. That is totally wrong to play a segment of it.
RUSH: All right. All right. Look, I understand. You’re trying to protect the guy. You’re trying to join Obama and trying to protect the guy. But, you know, this is what it is. You can do what you can to try to smooth this over. Here’s the thing. Here, grab audio sound bite 22. Obama, in his speech today, actually refers to the Reverend Wright as a conservative.
OBAMA: Ironically, this quintessentially American and, yes, conservative notion of self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright’s sermons.
RUSH: How do you know? You weren’t there.
OBAMA: What my former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change. The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society —
RUSH: Hatred.
OBAMA: — it’s that he spoke as if our society was static, as if no progress had been made.
RUSH: He doesn’t want any.
OBAMA: As if this country, a country that has made it possible for one of its own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black.
RUSH: Yeah, well, he doesn’t want it to change, Barack. It’s static because he wants it to be static for whatever reasons, I’m not even going to impute reasons. Some might say he raises a lot of money this way, gets paid a lot, sells a lot of DVDs, who knows, but we can’t assume he’s stupid. He may be uninformed or ignorant, but he can’t be stupid here. He’s not speaking about racism, he’s speaking about hatred. For those of you who think — Myron and the rest of you who think we’re taking the Reverend Wright out of context, then why didn’t Barack say that today? Barack tried it Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, by the way. Friday night on his TV tour, Barack tried to say, (paraphrasing) ‘Well, you can take anybody, 20 years of their work and take snippets out.’ Didn’t fly. So Barack had to do the speech today, and in doing the speech today, Barack, he didn’t complain about segments. He condemned the remarks that had been played, Myron. So actually, you called the wrong guy. You need to call Obama and say you disagree with the way he’s handling it.
Richard in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, you’re next on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Rush, I really appreciate your taking the call, and I agree with everything that you had told Billy instead of wallowing in self-pity or any of the other things that you said to him. We’re totally understandable and right on line with what you say most of the time.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: However, I do have a different take on Barack’s speech today. I actually found it inspirational. I didn’t think that he tried to justify racism in America. I thought that he tried to elevate our thoughts on what we thought about racism. I thought that he tried to make a case that it was understandable, both the way the middle class white man felt, and the black individual felt as to things that had happened to them, that it was understandable, not just (unintelligible). He in no way tried to condone what the reverend said. I think that if half of what he says, he believes, I find it an inspiration, and I’m a die-hard conservative. I found it refreshing. I found it insightful. I also don’t agree with his solutions on hardly anything. I think he’s identified the problem. I think his solutions are all backward.
RUSH: All right. So let me guess. What you really liked about it was that you finally heard a powerful black man say he understands why white people are upset about all this at the same time?
CALLER: No, actually that isn’t what I heard. I heard something else, too. I’ve heard a lot of powerful black men say things about that. I’ve heard Ken Hamblin, I’ve heard Joe Madison, I’ve heard James Golden, all with different points of view, but I’ll tell you, they’re powerful people, and they have a lot of people that listen to them, maybe not on the same side of the spectrum. I also thought that he wasn’t trying to point out you and Reagan. I actually thought he was trying to take issue with some other talk show hosts and some other presidents.
RUSH: No, no, no.
CALLER: Wait a minute, let me finish, please. Bill Clinton stood before the American people and remembered those churches burning when he was a child and tried to make a race issue out of something that never even happened. How good was that for America? Al Sharpton’s made a career out of race baiting, Jesse Jackson’s made a career out of race baiting, and those are black leaders.
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: And they’re nothing but trash. And you know something? Somebody put it to them the right way, J.C. Hayward said they’re nothing but poverty pimps that dwell on people’s misery. This man is not trying to play the race card that way. He’s trying to inspire people to get together. Now, maybe he’s full of it, but, boy, what he said, one thing that rings true over anything else I have heard in a long, long time is, let’s get rid of the status quo. And you more than any individual in this country have been preaching that for the ten years that I’ve been listening to you.
RUSH: Yeah, but Obama says we all want to move in the same direction, and I don’t want to go in Obama’s direction. I don’t want nationalized health care; I don’t want to lose in Iraq; I don’t want any of his liberal agenda. I don’t hate corporate America. I don’t hate entrepreneurism. I don’t want higher taxes. I don’t want anything of what he wants. I think you’re being trapped here. I think what we’re getting from Obama is the same thing Shelby Steele said in his piece today in the Wall Street Journal. We’re just looking at a different tactic. The objective here, Richard, is a presidential campaign. The objective is not solving the race issues in this country. The objective is to get Barack Obama elected president. That’s the context in which the speech took place. It took place in Philadelphia, where the next big presidential primary is. This was about his presidential campaign. This is about him being elected president. Every candidate uses tactics. He’s got a different tactic on race. He’s even written about it in his book, how to make white people like you, don’t make any sudden moves. So this is simply a tactic to make somebody think, ‘Oh, it’s a different guy. He wants to bring us together.’ Well, I don’t know that I want to come together with liberals on their terms. You know, and that’s what I have been, quote, unquote, preaching all of these years. But, look, I appreciate the phone call, I really do.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay, we’ve taken enough calls here, folks. I think that I can safely say that the Obama speech is proof that the Rorschach tests live. This speech, this Obama speech could be whatever you want it to be. This is Obama’s candidacy. It’s as he has said: He’s a blank slate. You can make him whatever you want him to be; you can make this speech whatever you want it to be. Now, I heard the whole speech. Somebody correct me if I’m wrong on this. I have not had time to read the text of the speech, but I don’t think that Obama spoke to why he removed Reverend Wright from that advisory role in his campaign. (interruption) Okay, he didn’t bring that up. All right, then. Here’s another question. This is not emotion for me, folks. I’m not swooning. I don’t get caught up in the flowery. I don’t get caught up working together in the unity, because I know that’s not what’s on tap here. Barack Obama no more wants unity with us politically than we want it with him. Fall for it. I beg you. Here’s the point. Here’s the question. If he profoundly disagrees, as he said today, with Reverend Wright — and his grandmother!
By the way, Wolf Blitzer, I’m told, even thought it was a low blow for Obama to trash his grandmother as a racist. Well, I didn’t hear Wolf say it. I’m just told that. It doesn’t matter. Here’s the question. If you profoundly disagree with the Reverend Wright, why give him an advisory role in your campaign? How many people do you have…? Well, look, I have nobody on my staff with whom I profoundly disagree. Zilch, zero, nada. We have devil’s advocates, but that’s just to spur intellectual thought. I don’t have people who actually disagree with me profoundly ‘advising me’ or whatever. By the way, we don’t discriminate against liberals, don’t misunderstand. They don’t even apply, is the point. But, forget me. Why would you do this? Somebody you profoundly disagree with?