RUSH: This is Elizabeth in Toledo, Ohio. Hi, Elizabeth. Thank you for calling.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, I think you’re number one. You’ve been my idol for years.
RUSH: Why, thank you. That’s very sweet. Thank you very much.
CALLER: That’s really true. I love the fact that you’re out there kicking for us. I think that the Obama and the minister are more bonded than just religion. I tend to think that he’s more of a father image, because Obama didn’t have a father. He had a white mother and he had a white grandmother, who he threw under the bus yesterday, but I think if you look at the relationship, you might find that this minister is more of a father figure to him as to what a black man should be, in which case he believes the minister hook, line, and sinker.
RUSH: Well, I don’t want to make that automatic conclusion. I know a lot of people whose fathers were really off the deep end and whacked. They loved their fathers, but they didn’t believe everything they said.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: I’ve known a lot of guys whose fathers embarrassed them about some things. I mean, privately they were proud of them, but we all have friends I think like this, as Obama would say. We all have fathers who embarrass us. But I think the mentor bit, I think it suffices.
CALLER: Yeah, I think that’s why he’s not disengaging from him.
RUSH: Exactly. Well, there’s an interesting piece here, Elizabeth, in the Investor’s Business Daily today. It’s an editorial, and it’s about Obama’s speech. The title is: ”Obama Merely Changes the Subject’ — Rather than break ties with his demagogic, anti-American pastor, Barack Obama used a speech on race to excuse his behavior and sweep the controversy under the rug. Passing the buck is not very presidential. Speaking in Philadelphia, steps away from where the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were enacted, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president delivered an address that used the words ‘race’ or ‘races’ 11 times, ‘racial’ or ‘racially’ 15 times, and ‘racism’ or ‘racist’ six times. But Obama’s recent troubles, which this much-hyped speech was supposed to put past him, are not about race relations.’ Amen! Amen! Exactly. These guys at IBD are excellent, by the way.
‘They’re about one churchman who happens to be black, whose views from the pulpit are repugnant and from whom Obama doesn’t seem to have the guts to distance himself. Reacting to being linked with a bigoted conspiracy theorist by lecturing the nation on race is like disgraced ex-New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer responding to his getting caught patronizing an international prostitution ring by giving a speech on the female physique. The supposed divide between black and white is not the issue here; Obama’s longtime association with Jeremiah Wright is.’ Exactly. This is about hate. ‘Obama’s pastor of 20 years is nothing more than ‘imperfect,’ as Obama sees it. And so, ‘I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.’ He won’t quit this church where hate is spewed, and he doesn’t explain why over all the years he has never tried to straighten Wright out. The rest of Obama’s speech was spent explaining and rationalizing hate such as Wright’s rather than denouncing it. Wright’s words ‘reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through,’ the result of which has been ‘a cycle of violence, blight and neglect’ still haunting America. The solutions? Expanded government for one, of course.’ See, these guys at IBD are good, they get it, because every problem we have in this country, according to Obama yesterday, can be fixed by bigger government.
‘But while Obama concedes that ‘the erosion of black families’ is ‘a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened,’ he fails to understand what ‘Wealth and Poverty’ author George Gilder knew back in 1981: ‘What actually happened since 1964 was a vast expansion of the welfare rolls that halted in its tracks an ongoing improvement in the lives of the poor, particularly blacks, and left behind a wreckage of broken lives and families worse than the aftermath of slavery.’ … The early reaction to Obama’s speech amounted to more media fawning on the order of that which was spoofed in a recent ‘Saturday Night Live’ sketch.’ So these guys got it. Can we go back and play sound bites one and two? You may not have been with us in the first hour of the program when it began, and since we’re talking about whether or not Wright will distance himself or Obama will distance himself from Wright, let’s go back to April 11th, 2007, less than a year ago. MSNBC, David Gregory says to Senator Obama, ‘I want to begin by asking you about Don Imus. You’ve condemned his remarks about the women’s basketball team at Rutgers. So let me ask you pointedly, do you think Imus should be fired?’
OBAMA: I don’t think MSNBC should be carrying the kinds of hateful remarks that Imus uttered the other day, and 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 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: ‘He would not be working for me,’ but Jeremiah Wright would be working for him and was working for him at the time. And, by the way, it wasn’t CBS or NBC that got rid of Imus, it was the Reverend Al Sharpton who got rid of Imus, who cowed NBC and CBS into that. So Gregory says, ‘Okay, final point here. You’ve been a guest on Imus’ show 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 Democratic 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: Okay, but he will enable and he will promote the statements ’til he gets caught, of course, of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, which are filled with hate, which is why he’s got a problem here, folks. It’s irrelevant now, but this speech and focusing on race, which he did, has highlighted for people all the hypocrisy now that this brilliant orator, this messianic candidate now brings to the campaign. And this, by the way, is one of the reasons that Mrs. Clinton hung around, even though she has no chance to take over the delegates. She hung around because of Operation Chaos. She also hung around to see if Obama would step in it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Folks, did you happen to hear Barack Obama in the second sound bite on the Imus show? He was asked, ‘Would you ever appear on that show?’ ‘Well, I didn’t hear him say that kind of stuff when I was on.’ Oh, really? You didn’t hear Imus say that kind of stuff when you were on? So, according to your first interpretation of Reverend Wright, Imus never said anything bad; because you, Obama, said you never heard Reverend Wright say any of this stuff on the tapes, and it was all just out-of-context stuff. We found out you lied about that, and you tried lying about it on your Friday night TV tour. It didn’t work so you had to do the big race speech yesterday, in which you finally came clean, Wright did say those things both when you were there and when you weren’t there! If Obama is ever elected president, if this hadn’t come up, if this hadn’t played out, you know what his excuse for anything would have been? He coulda had, say, a secretary of state or any cabinet member do an Eliot Spitzer, and Obama would say, ‘Well, I had no idea. That didn’t happen. I never saw that happen. It didn’t happen in my administration, and you can’t say it did. I didn’t see it, and I didn’t hear about that.’ It’s sort of like Bill Clinton and the Waco invasion. You know, Janet Reno launches the Waco invasion. Lots of kids die. They go ask Clinton about it. (doing Clinton impression) ‘I… Ha-ha! I had nothing to do about that. You gotta talk to the attorney general about that.’ He passed the buck back to her. ‘I didn’t know about that.’ (laughter) It’s all liberalism, folks! It’s just standard, right out of the playbook.