Obama Abandons African Village

RUSH: Now, get this. This is on CNN, the chickification of the news. Ashley Fantz: ‘Obama as Witch Doctor: Racist or Satirical?’ Apparently a tea party rally protester had a sign with Obama depicted as a witch doctor. Here, I’ll show you on the Dittocam. Let me zoom in there. That’s it, it’s as close as I can get. But that’s the poster at one of the tea parties with Obama sitting there as a witch doctor. Now, CNN’s terribly upset about this because this is, of course, a racist country. ‘Posters portraying President Obama as a witch doctor may be racist, organizers of Tea Party protests say, but they reflect anger about where he is leading the country. The posters, showing Obama wearing a feather headdress and a bone through his nose, have been popping up in e-mails, on websites and at Tea Party protests for weeks.’ (laughing) Limbaugh laughs at witch doctor image.

‘The image has stoked debate and cast attention on the rallies, which have drawn people Tea Party organizers describe as on the fringe and not representative of the overall movement. … The witch doctor imagery is blatantly racist, critics contend.’ And then later on in this story, there is this line. Get this, now. ‘There’s another wrinkle to the witch doctor controversy. Obama was mocked by some critics as the ‘Magical Negro’ during the campaign because he was perceived to be a solve-all to nation’s problems.’ By some? ‘Obama was mocked by some critics as the Magical Negro” — can we name the critic? His name is David Ehrenstein and he writes for the Los Angeles Times. He wrote the column that called Obama the ‘Magic Negro.’ And, by the way, I’ve looked at this image. I can see it closer than you, this is not Obama. The media thinks it’s Obama, this poster that’s got Obama dressed up as a witch doctor. This is his brother. This is taken outside the hut, I think, in Kenya. It’s not even President Obama. They’re just all upset here over Obama’s a witch doctor.

Try this headline, folks: ‘US and Cuba Meet on Resuming Direct Mail Service.’ Another step in Obama’s efforts to improve relations, ‘US and Cuban officials met on Thursday to discuss the possibility of resuming long-suspended direct mail service in a first round of talks that Cuba described as ‘broad and useful.” Why don’t we just offer them the post office?

All right, back to the phones. Mona in Salem, Ohio. It’s Open Line Friday. Great to have you here. Hello.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. How are you today?

RUSH: Fine and dandy. Thank you.

CALLER: I want you to help build Rushville in Kenya, Africa.

RUSH: You want — (laughing.)

CALLER: All your listeners, I mean I’ll come out of retirement and go to work. We need to take up — to show we’re not racist, I’d be willing to forgo a can of dog food for this week and put in a dollar. And if we’d all do it, we’ll raise the money.

RUSH: The monitors of this show are going nuts. Do you realize we’re driving them insane today? They don’t know what to focus on. (laughing) All right, let me explain what she’s talking about. Earlier this week we had this story out there, ladies and gentlemen, that Obama family members in the village where his dad grew up, still live there, they’ve been expecting boatloads of money since Obama was elected to the Senate in 2004, and he’s given them nothing. A delegation went to Washington, he met with them, and he gave them advice on how to hit up US Agency for International Development for money. But he said he’s not going to give them any. His brother lives in a hut in this place. His step-grandmother is the first to get water and electricity run to her hut. She has a multi-hut compound, it said in the story. And the town, the village elders, they want to build an Obama Family Museum outside the village. And that’s part of what they want the money for. So I got to thinking about this. I mean how much can it possibly cost to upgrade? The story said water is delivered to the village on the backs of donkeys, folks. They don’t even have running water in Obama’s family village. And so Mona hear is saying, ‘Rush, you gotta do this,’ because I thought about maybe calling it the Rush Limbaugh Obama Family Museum because if you donate and build a wing of something they put your name on it.

CALLER: Absolutely.

RUSH: We’re kind of jumping the gun here. I have intermediaries looking into this. But it’s gotta be done very carefully.

CALLER: Well, I’d be willing to make a donation, as meager as it is. And I’m sure all of your listeners would.

RUSH: Snerdley says, ‘How much you going to throw in?’

CALLER: Me?

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: How much is a can of dog food a week?

RUSH: Throw in a dollar, Snerdley says he’ll match it. So we got two bucks right there.

CALLER: Okay.

RUSH: Eighteen more and Obama’s brother will be able to move out of the hut, he lives on something like a buck sixty-nine a year, he says. His brother’s name George, that’s who I think is dressed up as the witch doctor in the picture. But if I did open this up to donations from this audience, do you realize what we could turn this village into? We could probably come close to building something on a par with the World Trade Center. I mean not that big, but something that would be that stark a contrast to what’s there now. Do you realize what this audience could do for Obama’s family home? We’ve got a precedent for this. There’s a track record. Look what I have done for Rio Linda, California. Before I discovered the place, property values out there were just nothing. Now it’s a big deal to say you’re from Rio Linda. It’s not a big deal to be from it, but it’s a big deal to say you are.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: You know, talking about Obama’s village — the Obama family village which Obama is ignoring — they’re begging the guy for money. Rather than help the family, Obama is trying to train them to get money from a government somehow. He sends them to a State Department agency: US AID, Agency for International Development. He’s organizing them, teaching them how to organize over there. So I dug back. There’s a story in the UK Evening Standard from July of 2008: ‘Barack Obama’s Broken Promise to African Village.’ I remember we had this story. ‘It is an extraordinary sight to walk into a basic two-room house under a mango tree in rural east Africa and discover what is essentially a shrine to Barack Obama.

‘The small brick house with no running water, a tin roof and roving chickens, goats and cows is owned by Sarah Obama, Barack’s 86-year-old step-grandmother. Inside, the walls are decorated with a 2008 Obama election sticker, an old “Barack Obama for Senate’ poster on which he has written ‘Mama Sarah Habai (how are you?)’, a 2005 calendar that says ‘The Kenyan Wonder Boy in the US’, and more than a dozen family photos. But this bucolic scene in his father’s village of Kogelo near the Equator in western Kenya conceals a troubling reality that, until now, has never been spoken about. Barack Obama, the Evening Standard can reveal, after we went to the village earlier this month, has failed to honour the pledges of assistance that he made to a school named in his honour when he visited here amid great fanfare two years ago.’

He reneged on his promise to help them build a school in his honor. Now, the great-grandmother here, the step-grandmother, Sarah? That’s the one who just had the water line and the electricity line run to her house, her compound, the thatch-hut compound. Not making any of this up. There are pictures. We have three or four pictures. I just sent ’em up to Koko and he’s going to put ’em on the website, photos of the Obama school. Now, there aren’t actually any photos of the school building itself. It may not actually exist since he reneged on it. What we have here are pictures of signs. ‘Senator Obama Kogelo School’ with an arrow pointing in the direction you have to go to find it. This is hilarious.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, I have an update, I kid you not, from if the same UK Evening Standard story about the school that Obama reneged on, promised to build and reneged on the school. Here is a passage from the Evening Standard story, this is last year, 2008. ‘On those two voyages of personal discovery to Kogelo, he learned that his grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, who lived to 105 according to his gravestone (1870-1975), had been a respected elder and witch doctor.’ Hang on, folks. Blow my nose here. I know it’s rude but there’s no way to do this without doing it. Again, I read to you. (interruption) No, I used a Kleenex. I did not blow my nose on my sleeve. Well, no, I’m not following the stupid Nanny State rules set forth by Kathleen Sebelius. Yeah, that’s only if you sneeze anyway. Of course, what’s the difference? Yeah, blow your nose on your sleeve, what’s the sleeve for, dude? New phrase from the Obama administration. What’s the sleeve for, dude? Use it.

‘On those two voyages of personal discovery to Kogelo, he learned that his grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, who lived to 105 according to his gravestone (1870-1975), had been a respected elder and witch doctor.’ That’s the UK Evening Standard. Now we go to page 214 of Obama’s book, Dreams from My Father, and he says here that his grandfather was not a witch doctor; he was an herbalist. ‘He was always curious about other people’s business, which is how he learned to be an herbalist. You should know that an herbalist is different from a shaman — what the white man calls a witch doctor. A shaman casts spells and speaks to the spirit world. The herbalist knows various plants that will cure certain illnesses and wounds and how to pack a special mud so that a cut will heal. As a boy your grandfather sat in the hut of the herbalist in his village watching and listening carefully while other boys played, and in this way he gained knowledge.’ This is page 214, Dreams from My Father. So he wasn’t a witch doctor, I wanted to make sure we got that out there.

His grandfather was an herbalist. Huge difference, folks. Major, major distinction. Well, the kinds of herbs here are not explained in the brief excerpt I have from Obama’s book, Dreams from My Father, page 214. It’s just that he was always curious about other people’s business. He was nosy, which is how he learned to be an herbalist. In fact, Obama writes of his grandfather, ‘Even from the time he was a boy, my grandfather Onyango was strange. It is said of him that he had ants up his anus because he could not sit still.’ He was an herbalist with ants up his anus.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Seems to me the answer to the answer to our health care problems is right there in Obama’s book on page 214: Just import herbalists and witch doctors and herbs. Is marijuana an herb or is it a plant? (interruption) It’s a street name for it? It’s the street name for it. It’s an herb it’s not really an herb but they call it an herb. Well, interesting. (interruption) Yeah, ‘the’ herb, they call it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, cool. Well (sigh), ants up his anus I guess. They gotta be somewhere. Everybody has to be somewhere, even ants. (laughing) I’m just sitting here thinking today, folks, of the gold mine that we have given to the left today, to the Media Matters sites, to all these stupid, tightwad, little tight-butt editorial boards at newspapers all over the country and these cable networks. This show today has been a gold mine. They are so overwhelmed. They don’t know what to use today. They don’t know what to take out of context today. (laughing) They probably have a week’s worth of stuff.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: The broadcast engineer, Mr. Maimone, has, during the break, accused President Obama of plagiarism. That would be of the godfather of soul, James Brown, writing on page 214 of his book Dreams from My Father, writing of his herbalist grandfather, he said he had ants in his anus. It was said he had ants in his anus because he was so jittery all the time. And the broadcast engineer thinks the plagiarism comes from… (playing of James Brown tune) I think that’s enough evidence here. We will see, ladies and gentlemen, further evidence of this.