Do you realize the things that Obama and Hillary and all these Democrats have said about George W. Bush the last five years? There has been no tolerance, and there has been no attempt to understand, and there has been no attempt at unity. In all this talk about Obama being the unifying candidate, go find one instance where he’s reached across the aisle as a Senator in a bipartisan way to promote unity. It’s all a smokescreen, and it’s a mask. But wouldn’t it be great, from the candidate talking unity and talking tolerance, if he were as tolerant of George Bush as he is of his minister. By the way, a lot of people, a lot of commentators across the aisle are amazed at how casually and how easily Obama threw his own grandmother under the bus yesterday in his speech in Philadelphia. He had worse things to say about her than he did about Reverend Jeremiah Wright. I don’t know, this raised some questions here about who he is and what his character really is, and like I’ve been saying, he’s two people. The one that we know has been on the scene for, what, a couple years. The earlier Obama, we’re finding more and more about, and we said, ‘Well, which one’s the real one?’ Despite all these talks and points made yesterday about his authenticity, he’s got more problems today than he had yesterday before he gave the speech. For example, people are going back, digging into the archives. April 11th, 2007 on DNCTV. David Gregory interviewed Obama about Imus. David Gregory said, ‘Senator Obama, I want to start by asking you about Don Imus. You’ve condemned his remarks about the women’s basketball team at Rutgers. Let me ask you pointedly, do you think he should be fired?’
OBAMA: I don’t think MSNBC should be carrying the kinds of hateful remarks that Imus uttered the other day. You know, he has a track record of making those kinds of remarks. Look, I’ve got two daughters who are African-American, gorgeous, tall, and I hope at some point are interested enough in sports that they get athletic scholarships.
GREGORY: So he should be off the air, off of MSNBC and off CBS, off the air completely, in your judgment?
OBAMA: Ultimately, you guys are going to have to make that view. He would not be working for me.
RUSH: So Don Imus would not be working for Barack Obama, but the Reverend Jeremiah Wright would be working for Obama, until people found out about Jeremiah Wright, and then Jeremiah Wright got thrown overboard. But why now? See, he’s opened this can of worms, and this stuff is going to keep trickling out. There’s more like this in the Stack of Stuff today and audio sound bites. Gregory then said, ‘Senator Obama, final point on this. You’ve been a guest on the Imus program to promote your books. Will you or would you be a guest on his show in the future?’
OBAMA: No, I would not. I was on there once, actually, after the Democrat National Convention, spoke about my book briefly. That’s been my only experience on the show, and he was fine when I was on that show. But I don’t want to be an enabler or be encouraging in any way of the kind of programming that results in the unbelievably offensive statements that were made.
RUSH: See, the problem he’s got here is that his kids did go and listen to Reverend Wright, and he wasn’t concerned about the impact of Reverend Wright on his kids, but he is taking the occasion here of the Don Imus situation and pandering to an obviously Democrat base and offering street cred her for his blackness, which a lot of people are speculating, by the way, is why he moved to Chicago in the first place, because Chicago has a history of launching black politicos that do well. So it all boils down to the people are now looking at it authenticity of Obama. After this speech, remember the original — I told you this yesterday. The flash reviews, right after it, this was better than Martin Luther King’s, why, they just went beside themselves to praise this thing, and of course the take on this program, totally different from anything you heard anywhere else, because I’m a week ahead on this kind of stuff. I don’t watch this stuff with emotion. I don’t sit here and swoon over the theatrics or any of that. I listen to what is stated without any emotional attachment here, and he’s got problems. The polling data shows that he’s got problems, and they are going to continue.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Let’s go to the audio sound bites. We’ll start on CNN, Anderson Cooper 180. The fill-in host last night was Campbell Brown. She spoke with radio host Roland Martin. They had this exchange.
BROWN: Rush Limbaugh, though, said that Obama is now ‘the candidate of race.’ How politically risky was his speech?
MARTIN: Frankly, I don’t think Rush Limbaugh is really an expert when it comes to the issue of race in America, so we should not be shocked that he would make those kinds of claims. … It amazes me when I hear Christians on the right, and I hear some Christians on the left say, ‘Well, you should disown your pastor, disown your church.’ Those are not words that frankly I as a Christian would use.
RUSH: I didn’t say it. I’m not on that bandwagon. I don’t think that’s what this is about. I think this is about hate, Roland. As I said yesterday, ‘This is about hate,’ and what this is really about — and this is why I’m a week ahead of people. What we heard yesterday, folks — and I summarized it for you very quickly — was that we have all of these problems of division in America because we don’t have nationalized health care. We have all these problems of disunity and division in America because we don’t have national this. We don’t have national that. We don’t have a big enough government, we’re not spending enough money. Obama is a purely liberal socialist, and that is being obscured by all this other stuff involving Reverend Wright. Now, Roland, I’m going to give you a chance to learn something here. Prior to this speech yesterday, Obama had succeeded in making his candidacy not about race.
He was the one, the messiah. By the way, this was the one-year anniversary, I think, March 19th is when the Los Angeles Times published the column by David Ehrenstein, ‘Obama the ‘Magic Negro.” This is the one-year anniversary of that column. I think we need to play it. I think we need to dig it out of the archives because it was the liberals who started all of that. He was the candidate, who first was not black enough, because he wasn’t down for the struggle; then he was too black — and then he transcended it. He was a candidate who had nothing to do with race. That was the beauty of it all! It is the one-year anniversary of ‘Obama the ‘Magic Negro” in the Los Angeles Times. So he had transcended it. He was a black candidate who was getting where he was getting because he wasn’t black. Now all of a sudden, Roland — all, I’m saying is — with that speech yesterday, he has made himself the candidate of race, whereas he hadn’t done that before. Moving on to DNCTV, Norah O’Donnell had this exchange with Republican strategerist Phil Musser.
O’DONNELL: I was listening to what Rush Limbaugh had to say about this today. Take a listen to what he had to say.
RUSH ARCHIVE: Barack makes whites feel good. Jackson and Sharpton did not. But his association with Reverend Wright now threatens this. The association with Reverend Wright has de-masked Obama, and now the speech today has taken him away from this transcendent-on-race position to a candidate of race.
O’DONNELL: Is that true, that it makes him a candidate of race?
MUSSER: But Rush was pointing out that this was a speech of political necessity, too, because the underlying theme is here that the Obama campaign has had this thing nipping at their heels for the last couple days; in the context of a really tough three or four weeks where the Clinton campaign, frankly, has kept them on message defense.
RUSH: Right. That was Phil Musser, who is a Republican strategist. It was. This was not a speech of political courage yesterday. It was a speech of political necessity. Norah O’Donnell and Laura Schwartz, a Democrat strategerist, had this exchange.
O’DONNELL: This country has gotta unite if they want to solve the problems in America. Rather than what Rush Limbaugh said, didn’t it in fact make him the transcended candidate, at least playing with the theme that he’s been trying to run on?
SCHWARTZ: Absolutely, and that’s the key word Norah. He’s ‘transcended’ race in his candidacy and he could have really gone the other way today, but he didn’t. I think he still transcends race as a candidate. He’s not a black candidate. He’s an American candidate running for president.
RUSH: See this is in their dreams. This is what they’re hoping. But, frankly, just with intellectual candor, I don’t know how, Ms. Schwartz — who I like; I like her work on TV — doesn’t get this. ‘The country has to unite if we want to solve the problems…?’ See, that’s bogus too. We do not have to ‘unite’ in order to solve the problem. That’s another little liberal trick, telling us that we conservatives have to compromise and give up on our principles and let them solve problems the way they want to. It’s not the way it works.
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RUSH: We’re going to go to the phones to Huntington Beach, California. Jean, welcome, you’re up first.
CALLER: Yes, sir. As a grandmother I suppose I’ve made it personal for me. I found it objectionable that Obama, in order to make his point, had to diss his white grandmother and compare her with that clown in Chicago. I don’t know. It just seemed to me —
RUSH: Do you understand the technique here? Do you understand what the attempt was? It’s like when Obama compared your pastor and everybody else’s pastor to Reverend Wright, too. Said, ‘I’m sure you’ve all heard your pastor say some outrageous things.’ No, we have not.
CALLER: That’s right.
RUSH: So when he throws a grandmother under the bus, what he’s trying to say is we’re all tinged by race and we are all who we are, and we are who we are because of who we know. We’re who we are because of where we came from. We’re who we are because of our DNA gene pool, and we can’t do anything about it. So Obama was spelling out liberalism there. You’re not an individual, you’re a product of your environment, a product of your genetic code, and you can’t do anything about it, you are who you are, and only people like Obama can unify us. He could have mentioned that the Reverend Jackson, some years ago, said — and this has widely been disseminated now, and Jean, you may not have heard this, but the Reverend Jackson actually said, he’s walking down the street at night, and he hears footsteps behind him, he turns around, and he sees it’s a white person, he feels safer.
CALLER: Yeah. And Obama himself is white, and he was raised, as I understand in an upper middle class environment in Honolulu. So I don’t know how he can — I don’t know, he and his wife, I don’t know — and she is apparently a Princeton graduate — how they can equate their experiences, which to me, haven’t been that bad.
RUSH: The simplest way to understand this is that Obama and his wife are huge liberals, Jean.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: That will inform you in every step of the way when you’re trying to figure out just what is the purpose, what’s the objective? Even in the speech yesterday, it was very clear: we have these problems in America where we’re not unified because too many don’t have health insurance. We have these problems because too many do not have a proper education. We don’t have unity and we have these racial problems because there just isn’t enough government in people’s lives. That’s what he was saying. This thing, you gotta be able to read between the lines. I’ll tell you what, Jean, don’t be upset here, Operation Chaos is working flawlessly. If I were a Democrat, what I would want to be doing right now, just take a long, hot shower.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: George in South Windsor, Connecticut, I’m glad you waited, sir. Welcome to the program.
CALLER: Yeah, Rush, I’m having a hard time figuring out the difference between the Democrats and Pastor Wright. They both say the same things. Pastor Wright said, oh, it’s our fault for 9/11! We’ve killed people all around the world. Our ‘chickens are coming home to roost.’ Democrats have said that. Pastor Wright, he blamed Katrina on the rich white man. You know, white people first. Guess what? The Democrats did that, too. It was all George Bush’s fault, right? A rich white guy. Right through down the stairs, Condoleezza Rice, Thomas, the Democrats did that, too. What’s the difference?
RUSH: Well, I made this point when we first heard Wright’s sermons. When we first played them on this program last week or whenever we got around to it, I made the observation that the reason why there’s not a whole lot of liberal and Democrats disagree with the guy is because they do agree with him. They agree with a lot of what he had to say. People saying what’s wrong with it? We had people calling here, George. They’re saying, ‘What’s so wrong with what he said?’ and I’d say, ‘Well, tell me your favorite thing that he said. What’s your favorite thing he said that you liked? What about his policies here do you like? ‘Well, (muttering).’ They wouldn’t answer and so forth. This is the point. This is why I keep saying that this really, this whole thing is not about race, although Obama’s turned it into race now. But before Obama gave his speech, this is about hate. This is a minister that hates the country and he’s preaching hate to whoever is in his flock, which included Obama and his kids.
Now, as you mentioned, here is Channel 2 Chicago news story from June 5, 2007: ‘Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Tuesday,’ this is not quite a year ago, ‘that the Bush administration has done nothing to defuse a ‘quiet riot’ among blacks that threatens to erupt just as riots in Los Angeles did 15 years ago. The first-term Illinois senator said that with black people from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast still displaced 20 months after Hurricane Katrina, frustration and resentments are building explosively as they did before the 1992 riots. ‘This administration was colorblind in its incompetence,’ Obama said at a conference of black clergy, ‘but the poverty and the hopelessness was there long before the hurricane. ‘All the hurricane did was to pull the curtain back for all the world to see,’ he said.’ So here was Obama predicting riots — and who knows if he was predicting his riots, you know, or trying to stoke them, you know, or warning of a ‘quiet riot’ among blacks.
What happened in New Orleans and what Obama’s wrong about here, is, yeah, the screen was pulled away. The hurricane pulled the curtain back. What we saw was a place that had been run by liberal Democrats for 60 years! We saw quintessential liberalism in New Orleans and throughout a lot of Louisiana. This is what happens when liberals run the show! You end up with a massive state, with a bunch of bureaucracies whose objective is to provide for everybody, which leads to people not having the slightest idea how to take care of themselves — including get the hell out of Dodge when a hurricane’s coming! It leads to a mayor not realizing he’s got a bunch of school buses he can use to get people out. And they try to blame this on George W. Bush! Now, this is a man of ‘unity,’ Barack Obama, talking about all of this. This story goes on to say, ‘Obama, who is bidding to become the first black president, took the stage after a succession of ministers repeatedly brought the crowd to its feet, singing, praying and swaying to music. Repeatedly, with evangelical zeal, [Obama] raised issues that roused the crowd: increasing the minimum wage and teacher pay, funding for public schools and college financial aid for the poor, ending predatory lending and expediting the reconstruction of New Orleans and the Mississippi coast. He introduced his own pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Chicago’s Trinity United as ‘Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian.’
‘He credited Wright with introducing him to Christ, and peppered his speech with Scriptural references, at one point invoking the opening lines of the Lord’s Prayer. Obama noted that during the riots, a bullet pierced the abdomen of a pregnant woman and lodged in the elbow of her fetus. The baby was delivered by caesarian section, the bullet was removed and the child … has only a small scar on her arm to show for it. Using the incident as a metaphor, Obama said society’s problems are worsening because ‘in too many places across the country, we have not even bothered to take the bullet out.’ ‘When we have more black men in prison than in college, then it’s time to take the bullet out,’ he said. … The Rev. Robert Abbott, pastor of the Holy Trinity Baptist Church in Amityville, NY, said Obama connects with black audiences because of the preacher’s style he uses when addressing them. ‘The way he sounds, it’s like he can reach out and encourage people,’ Abbott said.’ So he’s out there… This is, again, June 5th of 2007, a Channel 2 Chicago story on their website, ‘Obama Warns of ‘Quiet Riot’ Among Blacks,’ and indeed blaming the Bush administration for not caring and not doing anything, just right down the party line. This is why people have been asking, ‘What kind of influence did Jeremiah Wright really have on Obama?’ A mentor on an advisory role in the campaign? What kind of influence did he really have? Apparently, it is a lot, enough that Obama is attempting to hide it.