RUSH: Joe in Rockland County in New York, you’re next. I’m glad you waited. Hello.
CALLER: Rush, how you doing?
RUSH: Fine, sir. Thank you.
CALLER: I hope that my whole comment can come in because I know you have the delay system going on there, but there’s just a few things that I would like to state. One is I want to thank you and Sean Hannity for proving to the world that Barack Obama is not a Muslim but that he’s a Christian. That helped us out in a great way. I mean no one could have done it better than you two to explain to the world that he’s a Christian.
RUSH: Now, I gotta ask you, you sound awfully bitter out there, Joe.
CALLER: Bitter?
RUSH: You’re sounding bitter and contentious. I never called him a Muslim.
CALLER: No, I’m saying a lot of right-wing people have went out of their way —
RUSH: I didn’t know it was necessary to prove he was a Christian.
CALLER: Well, a lot of people on the right wing felt that he was a Muslim. However, you know, the laws of attraction say whatever we dwell on or whatever we think about on a regular basis will become bigger, and Barack has become bigger because of the actions of you and of Sean Hannity, and if you look at the situation at hand, you see clearly that he is the man that’s going to end up going to the White House. I know that a lot of the right-wing people may have a problem with that because —
RUSH: He may go to the White House. It probably doesn’t matter who goes to the White House in the end here, but he may well go.
CALLER: Well, you seem like a smart man.
RUSH: I am a smart man. That’s why I’m so depressed.
CALLER: But did you vote for Bush in the first and second?
RUSH: I never discuss what goes on in the ballot box privately.
CALLER: Okay, I’m willing to bet, you talk about the left wing, which obviously means you must have voted for the right wing, and there’s a man that’s in the White House that has taken us to war, 4,000 people are dead in America, 25,000 or more are wounded, seriously wounded because of the war that was unjust.
RUSH: Joe?
CALLER: There were no weapons of mass destruction.
RUSH: Joe, what do you do for a living, can I ask?
CALLER: I’m in the music industry, as well as I’m a motivational speaker, I go to schools on a regular basis speaking to children about changing their lives.
RUSH: You’re a motivational speaker?
CALLER: Absolutely.
RUSH: You go to the schools on a regular basis?
CALLER: Absolutely.
RUSH: Oh, jeez. We’re screwed.
CALLER: What are you doing on a regular basis trying to help the plight of many children of less fortunate denominations?
RUSH: I’m trying to cancel out the negativity done by people like you. You’re out there spouting a propaganda line, the 4,000 death, the 25,000 wounded, taking us to an unjust war and so forth, you’re out there ripping your country.
CALLER: We went there for weapons of mass destruction.
RUSH: We live in the greatest country on the face of the earth, and —
CALLER: We do.
RUSH: — your lectures tear it down. It’s no surprise to me that you vote Obama. Obama doesn’t like the country, either. He’s got a lot of resentment for it and you do, too, and way too many Americans do. You’re the ones that are bitter; you’re the ones that are filled with rage.
CALLER: I think the problem that you have is you’re looking at this black man that may be going into the White House and your daughter and Sean Hannity’s daughter and son are saying, ‘Dad, with all the stuff that you told us, how could this black man be going into the White House?’
RUSH: I’m having trouble here, Joe. I don’t have a daughter, that I know of.
CALLER: Well, you may have one, you never know. You’re spewing so much hate — you know, when they try to say Jeremiah hates, you are actually that in reality.
RUSH: This is what frustrates me. There’s no hate on this program. There’s love, devotion to America, a great appreciation for the exceptionalism of this country, a belief that the people of this country do extraordinary things for the rest of the world as well as the people in this country. There’s no hate here. There’s no prejudice or bigotry on this program. There is simply a great loathing of liberalism; a fear of what liberalism has done to the very fabric of our society and culture and what it will continue to do if it is not stopped. And so the purpose of this program is to try to alert to as many people as possible the danger posed by an ever-expanding liberal government, liberal-dominated culture, but it is not based on hate, it’s based on love. It’s based on the love of this country and the love for this people, a desire for everybody in this country to be the best they can be. We don’t want people to be angry. Not in the United States of America. There’s no reason to be. There’s no reason to be constantly embittered and fed up and enraged, not in the greatest country on earth, not with the greatest prosperity, not with the greatest freedom. I know people say, ‘Well, not for everybody.’ It’s accessible to everybody. It most certainly is. Anybody of any skin color, sex, race, gender, you name it, orientation, it’s accessible to one and all.
The crying shame is that we don’t have enough people who are willing to inspire people to reach for their dreams. Their dreams are put down, their dreams are insulted. It’s no different than me in my early radio days asking advice of people who had failed, people who are bitter about this business. If I had listened to them, I would be one of them, I would be a failure. Too many people in this country listen to people who want to depress them, who want to tell them they have no hope, who want to tell ’em they have no chance unless they give their lives to government. And it is near criminal the destruction of lives, the spirit in so many people that liberalism has inflicted. And you’re participating in that, Joe, if you’re out there lecturing — there’s nothing motivational about what you’re doing unless you’re motivating them to hate the country, unless you’re motivating them to be suspicious. That’s not the kind of motivation we’re interested in here. We’re interested in motivating people to be better than they think they can be, to reach deep down and find things about themselves that are better than they even know.
We want people to like themselves. We want people to like their families. We want people to appreciate the opportunities that this country offers and provides. It’s frustrating as hell to me, Joe, it’s not just the Democrats missing this. No Republicans are talking about it, either. It is very frustrating to listen to a whole presidential campaign and listen to nothing but a bunch of candidates who are trying to relate to people in their misery. ‘Yeah, we know it’s bad out there, but vote for me, and I’ll fix it,’ rather than talking about the greatness of this country, the future greatness, the past greatness, the expanding greatness that’s possible here, all the good things this country does, all the great things this country has done, all the great things this country can do, and you’re out lecturing people on an unjust war and confirming their basest attitudes about this country, which is not helpful to them. So when Obama continues to talk about people who are embittered and angry in this country, he can thank people like you who are contributing to it by telling people they ought to feel that way, and he can thank the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and frankly he can thank himself because it’s exactly what his game plan is.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay, so our caller, what was that guy’s name, Joe, resorts to the usual hate speech, attacks right-wing radio, attacks me by saying I teach my daughter racism, when I don’t have a daughter, and I don’t teach anyone racism here. I fight it. We fight racism on this program. I’m not going to let ’em get away with this, folks. This is exactly what’s going on today, the attempt to spin Obama’s comments into those criticizing Obama as the bigots. Obama is saying what he said. Obama is tapping into this bigotry and racism. That’s why his comments at the San Francisco fundraiser were so sickening, because he believes it! He is spreading it wherever and whenever he can. That is, when he doesn’t think the targets of his smears are listening. Hell’s bells, who’s he with? It’s a fundraiser, for crying out loud. He’s with zillionaires, gazillionaires, billionaires, and millionaires in San Francisco. A bunch of elitists. And everybody knows what they think of people in the heartland, the Midwest, the people that make this country work. He’s trying to get money out of these people. And he’s saying exactly what they think, too.
You see, we have reached the point here, ladies and gentlemen, where patriotism is defined as adopting the attitude and positions of those who smear the country and its values, faith, rule of law, military victory, capitalism. If you criticize those things, you are now patriotic. If you hate those things, you are now a patriot, because your country’s not worth all these great traditions and institutions. This country fights unjust wars. This country oppresses people. This country makes it possible for people to have suffering in Darfur. This country enables genocide in Rwanda. This country does all the evil in the world. This country is destroying the planet with global warming and everything else. So if you hate this country, you are a patriot. That’s the new patriotism. And Obama is tapping into it. If you oppose a candidate, you happen to oppose a candidate because of his positions, and you are white, and he is black, then you are automatically a racist. If that candidate smears millions of people who are different than he is, then he is merely misstating his position, he was clumsy, and he gets a redo.
From David Paul Kuhn today in Politico.com: ‘The furor surrounding Barack Obama’s comments about ‘bitter’ small-town voters and their faith clouds an emerging story line that stood to benefit the eventual Democratic nominee at Republican John McCain’s expense. That narrative was an ironic twist on longstanding partisan stereotypes: a November election that figured to be between a Democrat who is comfortable talking about faith and a Republican who is not. But the Illinois senator’s controversial remarks about ‘bitter’ small-town Pennsylvanians who ‘cling’ to religion and other cultural stances out of economic despair — comments immediately characterized by New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and McCain as condescending — have suddenly reintroduced an unwelcome issue, undermining the progress made by concerted Democratic Party outreach to religious voters and reinvigorating criticism that the effort to woo religious voters is more rhetoric than substance. ‘The danger, frankly, is that Democrats will be perceived as disingenuous,’ said Laura Olson, a Clemson University professor.’ They are. It’s not a perception. It is reality.