So it appears to me, if you look at Reverend Wright, listen to what he says and analyze it from the context or perspective of what’s best for him, which is clearly all he’s interested in, what’s best for him is that if Obama loses, because then it’s easy for him to say, ‘See, the white power structure doesn’t want a black man to rise to the pinnacle of power in the United States of America.’ It would certainly fuel Reverend Wright’s future and continue to help him raise money and keep people whipped up into a frenzy. He’s not helpful. Whatever he thinks he’s doing, it is not helpful to Barack Obama.
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RUSH: Now, you tell me if you think that this is the Reverend Jeremiah Wright trying to help Barack Obama. ‘The Rev. Jeremiah Wright said Monday that he will try to change national policy by ‘coming after’ Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) if he is elected president. The pastor also insisted Obama ‘didn’t denounce’ him and ‘didn’t distance himself’ from Wright’s controversial remarks, but ‘did what politicians do.’ Wright implied Obama still agrees with him by saying: ‘He had to distance himself, because he’s a politician, from what the media was saying I had said, which was [portrayed as] anti-American. I said to Barack Obama last year, ‘If you get elected, November the 5th I’m coming after you, because you’ll be representing a government whose policies grind under people.”’
Is this helpful to Barack Obama? Once again, he has just destroyed the entire reason for Obama’s success, and that is he’s a messiah; he’s a new kind of politician; he’s a politician we haven’t seen before; he’s a politician which has never, ever, trod the land of glory that is the United States of America. Barack Obama is brand-new, nobody ever, ever has been like him, and here comes Reverend Wright, (paraphrasing) ‘Eh, just your average run-of-the-mill politician. He had to say what he said,’ meaning there’s nothing new, nothing unique, nothing distinct about Barack Obama. He’s just a politician. And then Reverend Wright says he gonna go after him, he’s gonna keep on him to change America the way Reverend Wright wants.
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RUSH: John in Libertyville, Illinois. Let me just deal with this rather than talk to him off the air. John, are you there? Hello, John. Welcome to the program.
CALLER: Hi, and thanks for taking my call.
RUSH: Yes, John.
CALLER: I read an editorial in the Chicago Tribune I thought was pretty illuminating that pointed out that Reverend Wright had given up a student deferment and chosen to join the Marines to go serve in Vietnam and later became a Navy corpsman and served at Bethesda Naval Hospital where he treated then president — he was part of the medical team that treated Lyndon Johnson and received commendation letters from the White House. Now, I know that Dick Cheney used five deferments to avoid service in Vietnam, and Bill Clinton had a student deferment, and you yourself had a medical deferment. And I’m just wondering, if Reverend Wright’s comments are fair game, wouldn’t it be more honest to assess the man based on the trajectory of his whole life experience rather than just a couple of statements? I’ve never heard you mention anything about his honorable service to our country.
RUSH: I’ve mentioned it before. We’ve played tapes of Obama talking about him having served in the Marines. Lee Harvey Oswald was in the Marines, too, ahem, in the sharpshooter division. I don’t think that alone has anything to do with it. We examine everybody in the current context as to what they’re saying about the country. These are not snippets. In fact, the more of these sermons you listen to, the worse it gets. These are not just a little couple of comments taken out of context with Reverend Wright. This is one angry, livid, enraged individual, and Obama’s got a serious problem with him now. You may not want to admit it and the Democrats and the superdelegates may not want to admit it publicly, but they’ve got serious problems here. This guy is undermining the Obama candidacy.
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RUSH: Reverend Jeremiah Wright: We’re all victims. Those of us in the black church and those of us who are black; we are all victims. We are intellectual victims, but we are all victims. Even the editor at Salon.com can no longer explain Reverend Wright and wonders if he’s trying to ruin Obama. Joan Walsh is no friend of mine, no friend of this program. She’s a huge feminazi on the left. Joan Walsh, editor of the liberal website Salon.com… Well, let me take it back. She’s not a feminazi. I take that back. She’s just a leftist, period. But this is what she wrote:
‘[T]he whole idea that Wright has been attacked over ‘soundbites,’ and if Americans saw his entire sermons, in context, they’d feel differently, now seems ludicrous. The long clips Moyers played [on PBS] only confirm what was broadcast in the snippets (and the longer excerpts out today are even more troubling). … He used his hour with Moyers to argue that his thoroughgoing critique of American evil is, well, true. And I’m on the left. I know huge chunks of it are true. But Wright casts his critique in such an extreme way that the possibility of redemption, the evidence that America can and has and will change for the better, is never considered. … Watching Wright and Moyers I also couldn’t help thinking: Is Wright trying to ruin Obama? I don’t have an answer’ to that, but I do have a theory. My theory is that one of the worst things that could happen to Jeremiah Wright’s race business is to have Obama in the White House, not because of what Obama would or wouldn’t do.
My theory is that it would be far better for Jeremiah Wright for Obama to lose because that will give him a whole new launch pad for his America-is-racist-and-hates-black-people comment, that America is run by ‘rich white people’ who couldn’t handle the prospect of a black man being president; and Barack was beaten down by the same forces that have kept blacks down since slavery, blah, blah, blah. The bilge and the drivel that he argues. In all seriousness, folks; if the Democrat Party and if Barack Obama had any say-so whatsoever, this guy would be hibernating. He’d be on a permanent vacation until November. Nobody would be able to find him. He certainly wouldn’t be speaking publicly. But he’s out there doing it. Now, last week I thought this was a rehabilitation tour to make Reverend Wright a teddy bear and to show the American people that the man in these sermons — the snippets of sermons that we’ve seen — is not who he really is, but that’s off the boards now. That’s not possible now because he’s only exacerbating the problem that he has with the American people. He is a radical. He is anti-American. He is an extremist. He’s doing nothing to mollify that and he’s not helping Obama in the process. As we always do, when we listen to the latest Jeremiah Wright sound bites, we always start with just one example, a montage of his various sermons from the years 2000 through 2007.
CONGREGATION: (cheers)
WRIGHT: He was riding dirty. [snip] In white America, US of KKKA: black men turning on black men. [snip] I am sick of Negroes who just do not get it. [snip] Not God bless America, God (bleep) America! It’s in the Bible. For killing innocent people, God (bleep) America! [snip] (Screaming) And now we are indignant because of stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards!
CONGREGATION: (cheers)
WRIGHT: America’s chickens are coming home…to roost.
RUSH: There you have the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Now we go this morning to the DC National Press Club. After he spoke, the moderator says, ‘Senator Obama has tried to explain away some of your most contentious comments, has distanced himself from you. It’s clear that many people in his campaign consider you a detriment. In that context, why are you speaking out now?’
WRIGHT: This is not an attack on Jeremiah Wright. It has nothing to do with Senator Obama. This is an attack on the black church launched by people who know nothing about the African-American religious tradition. In our community we have something called ‘playing the dozens.’ If you think I’m going to let you talk about my mama —
AUDIENCE: (laughing and hooting)
WRIGHT: — and her religious tradition and my daddy and his religious tradition and my grandma, you got another think coming.
AUDIENCE: (cheers and applause)
WRIGHT: I was quoting the ambassador from Iraq. That’s number one. But number two, to quote the Bible: ‘Be not deceived; God is not mocked. For what so ever you sow that you also shall…’
MOYERS: Reap!
WRIGHT: Jesus said, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you. Those are biblical principles, not Jeremiah Wright bombastic divisive principles.
RUSH: Yeah. The problem with this analysis is — and it’s very simple — it is a problem we face in this country. We are the good guys in the world. The United States is the solution to problems. I don’t remember who said this, but it’s right on the money. ‘Darfur is the world. The United States and western democracies are the exception.’ Most places in the world have riots, unrest. They are dictatorships with protesting people. They are people that live in squalid circumstances under dictatorial rule. The United States is different. The United States is, as Reagan called it, ‘the shining city on the hill,’ along with most of the other western democracies. What Reverend Wright fails to agree with and what he actively disagrees with, is that we’re the good guys; that we are the solution to the world’s problems. Would it offend any of you if I said, Darfur or Zimbabwe or Congo, any of these countries — take North Korea, I don’t care; I don’t want to make it simply a racial thing. Take any land of squalor. Would it not be better if those countries operated like the United States of America?
Would it not be better if there were more United States of Americas out there in terms of lifestyle, freedom, quality of life for people? Yet to guys like Jeremiah Wright, we’re the problem. We created all this poverty — and he’s not the only one. There are a tremendous amount of American leftists who think the same thing. That’s why all these actors get on their high horse about Darfur. In their minds, it’s ultimately our fault. It’s not the fault of dictators, militant Muslims. It’s like in Ethiopia. The first objective of Ethiopia was to get people food because there was a famine there, and so we have Live Aid and all these Bob Geldof concerts. What Geldof himself even learned was that the only reason there was a famine there — and this was the same thing in Somalia, by the way — was a famine there was that the emperor was denying people food! He wanted ’em to starve to death. Communists kill their populations — or they’ll do anything they can, including kill them to control them. Starve them or whatever, keep them from rebelling.
This, thus, becomes our problem because we somehow have stolen all the world’s resources. We have stolen all the goodness of the world. We’ve made it our own, and then we don’t share it (which is cockamamie BS), and thus we become the enemy. So in Jeremiah Wright’s eyes, we’re not the good guys. And if you live in this country and don’t understand that we are the good guys — that we are the solution to the world’s problems — then you’re going to end up hating this country, and he does. He has a smooth little game here to say, ‘Hey, I wasn’t saying any of that! Jesus said it. I wasn’t saying any of that; the Bible said it. I wasn’t saying any of that; the ambassador from Iraq was saying it.’ Yeah. At the time, the ambassador from Iraq was appointed by Saddam Hussein. So let’s side with that regime over the United States of America, Reverend Wright. But that’s his game plan. ‘We’re all victims.’ Hey, he’s just trying to be loyal to the Scripture. He’s trying to say that the country’s not his god, that Jesus is. Another question: ‘What’s your relationship with [Calypso] Louie Farrakhan? Do you agree with and respect his views?’
WRIGHT: One of our n-n-news channels keeps playing a — a — a news clip from 20 years ago, when Louis said 20 years ago that Zionism, not Judaism, was a gutter religion. He was talking about the same thing United Nations resolutions say, the same thing now that President Carter is being vilified for and Bishop Tutu is being vilified for; and everybody wants to paint me as if I’m anti-Semitic because of what Louis Farrakhan said 20 years ago. When Louis Farrakhan speaks, it’s like E. F. Hutton speaks: all black America listens. Whether they agree with him or not, they listen. Now, I am not going to put down Louis Farrakhan any more than Mandela would put down Fidel Castro. You remember that Ted Koppel show, where Ted wanted Mandela to put down Castro because Castro is our enemy. And he said, ‘You don’t tell me who my enemies are. You don’t tell me who my friends are.’ Louis Farrakhan is not my enemy. He did not put me in chains, he did not put me in slavery, and he didn’t make me this color.
RUSH: Well, uh, neither did anyone else alive today, Reverend Wright — and you’ve never been in chains, Reverend Wright. Um, you’ve never been in slavery, Reverend Wright. Quite the opposite! Your church just got you a $1.6 million house in a white neighborhood. How is that possible if you’ve been all chained up, if you’ve been enslaved? You haven’t been enslaved, and you have not been in chains. God made you black, and you’re telling everybody that the only thing that matters to you is God, and Jesus. Yet God made you this color that caused you to be enslaved and in chains. This is not helpful to Barack Obama — and to praise Jimmy Carter? (laughs) To praise Fidel Castro? He is clearly letting it be known that he sides with people who also do not consider the United States to be the good guys.
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RUSH: I don’t know how many times I have seen this over the course of my life. Some controversial civil rights leader will come up and say we need to have an honest dialogue on race. My whole life that’s all we’ve been doing in this country is having a conversation on race. It never goes away because there are race business proponents who never want it to go away. And now Reverend Wright is out there saying he hopes that his speeches and his support for Obama will spawn a national conversation on race. It’s happening, Reverend Wright, and you have spawned it, and you’ve spawned it in a way detrimental to your own cause and your own candidate. Here’s Wright saying he would come after Obama if he’s president.
WRIGHT: I said to Barack Obama last year, if you get elected November the 5th I’m coming after you because you’ll be representing a government whose policies grind under people, all right? It’s about policy, not the American people. You know that’s biblical. God doesn’t bless everything. God condemns something. God damns some practices. And there is no excuse for the things that the government — not the American people — have done until racism and slavery are confessed and asked for forgiveness. Britain has apologized to Africans. But this country’s leaders have refused to apologize. So until that apology comes, I’m not going to keep stepping on your foot and asking you, ‘Does this hurt? Do you forgive me for stepping on your foot,’ if I’m still stepping on your foot. Understand that? Capeesh?
RUSH: So according to Reverend Wright, we still have slavery, slavery is still going on in this country, discrimination and slavery and the chains are out, and nobody’s apologized, and we’re still enslaving people. Now, this is frankly and patently absurd, but this is what Wright wants his flock to think. This is nothing but hate speech, folks. Race-based hate speech. I love watching the Drive-Bys analyze this. CNN, (paraphrasing) ‘Oh, what a great speech this was,’ and they said his NAACP speech in Michigan, what a great, great speech it was. They are so in the tank for Obama. By the way, as we said when we first heard these speeches, sermons of Reverend Wright, why there was so little condemnation in the Drive-By Media. You’d be amazed how many people agree with this guy about this kind of stuff on the American left. Dislike or hatred for your country does not know racial barriers. It appeals to quite a few people, and he’s simply trying to capitalize on this. By the way, what is this business of an apology? Bill Clinton had to have done it because Bill Clinton ran all over the world and apologized for this country. Did Clinton not apologize for slavery? Didn’t he do that when he became the first black president? He was the first black president. He went over to Africa dressed up in native garb.
This is to me just amazing that this is happening, that it is obviously detrimental to Obama’s campaign, and you have to wonder if Wright doesn’t know this. (interruption) Okay, what’s the question? Mr. Snerdley, the program observer, has a question. All right, what’s the question? Hm-hm. Hm-hm. Hm-hm. Well, okay, the question is this: If an apology, as Reverend Wright called for it in that sound bite, if an apology was forthcoming from the right people, and if that would solve all this, why doesn’t somebody apologize? It’s an excellent question, and you want to know the answer? You know the answer. An apology would be an acknowledgment by people alive today of guilt, and it would allow the civil rights coalitions and the Jeremiah Wrights of the world to say, ‘See, you admit it. You admit you are enslaving us to this day.’ The apology would be taken as an admission by those of us alive today that slavery still happens, that Wright and his cronies are still in chains and so forth, and that would start the reparations ball rolling, officially. ‘Okay, so you apologize for it, fine, we want to be paid for it, we want reparations, we want this. And since you apologized for it, you have got five or ten more generations of making up for it since you now admit it. You’ve been going half-assed at affirmative action, half-assed at all these remedial measures. Now that you admit it, now we’re going all the way, brother. Now we’re going reparations and you are going for the next 50 or hundred years let us have what we want.’
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RUSH: Hey, folks, it’s not just me. A whole bunch of leftists in the Drive-By Media and the Democrat Party are pulling their hair out today. They can’t get over what Jeremiah Wright is doing. He’s being destructive to the Obama campaign, and these guys are in the tank for Obama. You have to understand, the media, I don’t care if it’s the sports media, I don’t care if it’s the Drive-By news media, they’ve all got this guilt. They are ladled with all this white guilt. They agree with Reverend Wright when he talks about slavery and bondage and chains even today. They feel personally responsible for it, and they think their salvation and their feeling good about themselves is opposing discrimination and accepting the premise that slavery-like conditions to this day still exist. So supporting Obama is a way for them — it’s the old ‘Magic Negro’ thing — it’s a way for them to assuage their guilt, to show everybody what good people they are and so forth, and they hate this. Guess what it is that is bringing down Obama? In addition to Operation Chaos, it’s race. It is race. The racial divide in this country is in the Democrat Party, and it is on full display for the American people to see.
The Civil War is still being fought in this country in the Democrat Party. Race is bringing down the candidacy, and harming it greatly, of Obama. What’s fascinating about that is that before all this stuff started hitting the fan, Obama was getting away with being what everybody was calling a post-racial candidate, meaning he was black, but that’s not why he was there. The fact that he was black shows everybody how we have moved on, we have gotten past the hurdle of our sin-laced and slavery-oriented past, and Obama could do it without touting himself as a black. He was just a messiah. His skin color didn’t matter. Well, now, of course, race is all his candidacy has become. That is what it’s about. This is a 180 that nobody foresaw, because liberals, typical as they are, couldn’t care less about the substance of anything. It was all about the image, it was all about the packaging, it was all about how somebody made them feel, and people were swooning and people were fainting at rallies, ‘Obama!’ and everybody was going nuts with this.
Now he’s just a man, not a messiah, he’s just a man, very inexperienced, has no behavior that is at all similar to the campaign he’s running. He’s running on a campaign of unity, running on a campaign of crossing aisles, working together with people, bringing people together. Doesn’t do that, hasn’t done that. He’s a hard-core, fanatical, extremist liberal, and that is what’s becoming known by his associations. By the way, Senator Salazar, I have a question for you, sir. I know that you are uncommitted as a Democrat superdelegate, but would you dare send Barack Obama a letter asking him to reprimand Bill Ayers? Do you realize that Obama has friends who have blown up buildings? Obama, Senator Salazar, actually has friends who have set off bombs and have said they wish they could have done more. Obama has not distanced himself from these people. Barack Obama actually has close-friend relationships with known, admitted domestic terrorists, and yet you send me a letter demanding that I be reprimanded for tongue-in-cheek comments about so-called riots in Denver that have been alluded to by Democrats already, because the Democrats have this history.
It’s liberal Democrats that riot. It’s liberal Democrats that cause civil unrest. It’s liberal Democrats that do this. So I think if you’re going to start sending out letters demanding people be reprimanded, you need to send one to Obama asking him to reprimand and denounce Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn. Anyway, back to the audio sound bites with Reverend Wright, another question, after his speech, ‘Senator Obama has been in your congregation for 20 years and yet you were not invited to his announcement of his candidacy in Illinois, and in the most recent presidential debate in Pennsylvania he said he had denounced you. Are you disappointed Senator Obama has chosen to walk away from you?’
WRIGHT: He did not denounce me. He distanced himself from some of my remarks, like most of you, never having heard the sermon, all right. I was not invited because that was a political event. Let me say again, I’m his pastor. At a political event, who started it off? Senator Dick Durbin. I started it off downstairs with him, his wife, and children in prayer. That’s what pastors do. So I started it off in prayer —
RUSH: Wait, this is at variance with what we have heard. What we have heard was that Wright was invited and was scheduled to appear publicly and say something publicly on the day Obama in Illinois announced his presidential campaign and at the last moment Obama went to him and said, (paraphrasing) ‘You know, your sermons are sometimes a little bit over the top here, I’m going to keep you downstairs.’ So, again, we don’t know who to believe here. We don’t know whether to believe the messiah. We don’t know whether to believe the lying anti-American pastor. Either way, it’s not helpful. Next question: ‘In your sermon, you said the government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. So I ask you, do you honestly believe your statement and those words?’
WRIGHT: Based on the Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything. In fact, in fact, in fact, one of the responses to what Saddam Hussein had in terms of biological warfare was a nonquestion because all we had to do was check the sales record. We sold him those biological weapons that he was using against his own people. So any time a government can put together biological warfare to kill people and then get angry with those people use what we sold them, yes, I believe we are capable.
RUSH: So there you have it. Jeremiah Wright at the National Press Club confirms his belief that the United States created AIDS in order to wipe out black people. Obama did say that he had disowned Reverend Wright, after saying that he couldn’t. Obama’s all over the path on this, he’s all over the ballpark on all of this. Barack Obama says things — for example, with Chris Wallace yesterday, said, capital gains tax, maybe raise it 20%. You said a couple weeks ago you’d raise it to 28 or 30%. Then you said I’m not going to raise taxes on people in the middle class. Then he said he’s going to by virtue of raising the payroll ceiling from $102,000, the payroll tax, FICA, upwards from 102,000 — he’s all over the place, and this is just a fact of inexperience. And, frankly, what we said last week, Obama doesn’t think he ought to be questioned about these things. He thinks he’s above it. Sort of like the Clintons were in ’92-93: Look it, we’re so important you can’t treat us the way you treat normal candidates, we are too important.
That’s the way Obama views himself, and it derives strictly from the way he was raised in the university. This is strictly an academic elitist liberalism that he has, particularly black academic elitism that he has, same thing with Jeremiah Wright. He’s actually clueless as to what it is that makes this country work, who the people are who make it work, and I don’t know that Obama actually looks at the United States and sees us as the good guys because you’re not taught that in university. In the Ivy League, Stanford, you go out in the major, major institutions of higher learning, you are taught America is the enemy; you’re taught America is the bad guy; you’re taught to believe that your country has done rotten, evil things, more than it has done good things. So it’s not surprising to me that Obama also carries into his daily existence that worldview.