RUSH: I want to review some things that happened while I was gone sound bite-wise. August of 2009, what we have here first up is a conference call between the editorial page’s Kerry Picket at the Washington Times, and the spokesman for the National Endowment for the Arts, Yosi Sergant. And the conversation here is about a conference call in which the NEA tried to recruit artists to push the Obama agenda. And the Washington Times’ Kerry Picket says, ‘I understand there was a conference call on August 10th that the NEA invited producers, artists, marketers, et cetera.’
SERGANT: The NEA didn’t invite. We were a (garbled) called… There was a third party that was the invitation.
SERGANT: Ummm, it didn’t come from us so I don’t — I don’t have it to distribute. You would go to them for that.
PICKET: Uh-huh. So who was the third party?
SERGANT: I believe it was Michael Skolnik, the Corporation for National and Community Service.
PICKET: Michael Skolnik?
SERGANT: No, he’s — he’s the third party. But the corporation set up the conference call and who conducted the conference call.
RUSH: Now, there is separate audio which has just surfaced, and this Michael Skolnik guy who works for Russell Simmons, the hip-hop, the rap guy, Russell Simmons. The Skolnick guy says that the White House and the NEA asked him to set up this call.
SKOLNIK: This is Michael Skolnik. I am based in New York, and I’m a filmmaker for the past ten years, but currently serve as the political director to Russell Simmons. I have been asked by folks at the White House and folks at the NEA about a month ago, a conversation that was had. We had the idea to — I would help bring together the artists, independent artists around the country.
RUSH: Now, what this is all about is the Obama administration using the NEA, a bunch of union people in their community organizing efforts to help propagandize the Obama agenda, all of it. This was all brought up — and this is part and parcel of left wing radicalism, this is part and parcel of the things about the Obama administration that numbers of people have been trying to point out for years, that they’re not who they say they are. This was a propaganda effort today to make this speech at the school. Even though the rhetoric was all conservative, the purpose of this speech today was to set up the health care speech tomorrow night and to blunt any criticism of that speech. ‘Well, he made such a great speech to the kids. He just wants the kids to be so well off and so forth.’ So they talked about this Sunday on the roundtable of ABC’s This Week and here’s what George Will had to say about it.
WILL: Recently there was a conference call arranged by the National Endowment for the Arts with a representative the White House for potential grantees or actual grantees of the federal government getting subsidies. The theme of it was how the arts community could help advance the president’s agenda. And I don’t know how many laws that breaks, but I’m sure there are some.
RUSH: The NEA, the National Endowment for the Arts. So clearly there were laws broken in doing things like this, and all this stuff is taking place behind the scenes, and the interesting thing about it is it’s no different than the White House organizing the union appearances at town halls. The great thing about all that was that people showing up to protest health care at the town halls were just average, ordinary American individuals and going to websites finding out where they had to go, what time things were. They were showing genuine, real passionate opposition to the program. The Obama people — there was a story right before I left that his youthful supporters just aren’t anywhere here. They’re not showing up. Where are they? Where are they out there for the Obama agenda? It’s all having to be organized ’cause there’s no real, genuine passion for the agenda.
There may still be cult-like passion for Obama to help him get things done, but… It’s all a positive sign because it indicates, you know, where the country is. And the country is not anywhere near where Obama sees it and wants it to go.