RUSH: You know what struck me? Did you watch any of the Sunday shows yesterday, Snerdley? There was a topic, there was a person suspiciously absent from the Sunday shows yesterday. At least as far as I know they didn’t do much on Shirley Sherrod yesterday, did they? Well, they didn’t have her on, but they didn’t even talk about Shirley Sherrod. I mean all week it was intense, why do they want it to go away? (interruption) Really, the race thing’s hurting Obama? But they think playing the race card’s gonna help ’em. But I found it fascinating, after building up the entire week about what a racist Breitbart is, and of course the usual complaint that I, El Rushbo, your guiding light am a racist, here comes the perfect forum to take care of all of this, and not one of them goes there. Not one of them. What happened to this story? What happened to the partisan political operatives? They just dropped the ball on this. After demanding context, they got context. We got the whole speech of Shirley Sherrod.
I think I have it here, Geithner and tax cuts. Yeah, here it is, Maureen Dowd: ‘You’ll Never Believe What This White House Is Missing — The Obama White House is too white.’ Who is it that’s saying all this? Certainly not us. You know, the Democrats, they’re not just race-baiters, they’re race-baiters and switchers. After they baited everybody with race last week, you would expect Shirley Sherrod to show up or at least a story to be expounded upon on the Sunday shows, and it didn’t happen. So what Maureen Dowd wants is more typical black people in the White House. She doesn’t want the Obama type of black people, which is what? What kind of black person is Obama if he’s not the right kind? He’s the magic kind, it’s not working.
‘The Obama White House is too white. It has Barack Obama, raised in the Hawaiian hood and Indonesia, and Valerie Jarrett, who spent her early years in Iran. But unlike Bill Clinton, who never needed help fathoming Southern black culture, Obama lacks advisers who are descended from the central African-American experience, ones who understand ‘the slave thing,’ as a top black Democrat dryly puts it,’ which is just another way of saying Obama is not down for the struggle. Maybe Obama needs to speak with more of a Negro dialect, you know, like Harry Reid once said that he’s capable of doing. Maureen Dowd: ‘The first black president should expand beyond his campaign security blanket, the smug cordon of overprotective white guys surrounding him — a long political tradition underscored by Geraldine Ferraro … Otherwise, this administration will keep tripping over race rather than inspiring on race. The West Wing white guys who pushed to ditch Shirley Sherrod before Glenn Beck could pounce not only didn’t bother to Google, they weren’t familiar enough with civil rights history to recognize the name Sherrod. And they didn’t return the calls and e-mail of prominent blacks who tried to alert them that something was wrong.
‘Charles Sherrod, Shirley’s husband –‘ stand by sound bite 23. I mean, really stand by on sound bite 23. I mean, folks, don’t go anywhere and wait for sound bite 23. ‘Charles Sherrod, the husband of Shirley Sherrod –‘ By the way, does she pronounce it Sherrod? I’ve heard it both ways and I’m — (interruption) okay, we’ll stick with Sherrod. Oh, yes. ‘Charles Sherrod, Shirley’s husband, was a Freedom Rider who, along with the civil rights hero John Lewis, was a key member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee of the ‘60s. As Lewis, the longtime Georgia congressman, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he knew immediately that something was amiss with the distorted video clip of Sherrod talking to the N.A.A.C.P. ‘I’ve known these two individuals — the husband for more than 50 years and the wife for at least 35, 40 — and there’s not a racist hair on their heads or anyplace else on their bodies,’ Lewis said.
‘We may not have a ‘nation of cowards’ on race, as Attorney General Eric Holder contended, but we may have a West Wing of cowards on race. The president appears completely comfortable in his own skin, but it seems he feels that he and Michelle are such a huge change for the nation to absorb that he can be overly cautious about pushing for other societal changes for blacks and gays. At some level, he acts like the election was enough; he shouldn’t have to deal with race further. But he does. His closest advisers — some of the same ones who urged him not to make the race speech after the Rev. Jeremiah Wright issue exploded — are so terrified that Fox and the Tea Party will paint Obama as doing more for blacks that they tiptoe around and do less. ‘Who knew that the first black president would make it even harder on black people?’ asked a top black Democratic official.’ Do you believe this? They actually think Obama’s making it harder on black people.
‘It’s the same impulse that caused Obama campaign workers to refuse to let Muslim women with head scarves sit in camera range during a rally. ‘I don’t think a single black person was consulted before Shirley Sherrod was fired — I mean c’mon. … ‘The president’s getting hurt real bad,’ Clyburn told Maureen Dowd. ‘He needs some black people around him.” He needs some black people around him. The Obama White House is too white. Well, let’s go to the audio sound bites. We’re wondering why this subject just dropped like a hot potato before the highly, quote, unquote, influential Sunday shows. By the way, this organization that Charles Sherrod was part of, ‘key member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee of the ‘60s,’ was taken over at some point by Stokely Carmichael and then by H. Rap Brown, whose members went on to form the old Black Panthers. That was the organization Shirley’s husband was part of.
In October 1961 Charles Sherrod became the first field secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee for southwest Georgia, which eventually was taken over by Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown and became the Black Panthers. Here is Shirley Sherrod’s husband in an unknown place in January. Now, I must offer a disclaimer here for partisan political operatives monitoring the program. We do not know the all-important context. We do not know if Charles Sherrod disavowed racism before or after these remarks. We don’t have the whole speech. We only have one minute and one second of the speech. So we don’t know if this is out of context. After you hear this, I want you to consider the possibility that at some other point in the speech he disavowed racism or sometime after these remarks in the speech he might have disavowed racism. We don’t know. We don’t have the whole speech. But here’s what we do have.
SHERROD: We must stop the white man and his Uncle Tom from stealing our elections. We must not be afraid to vote black. We must not be afraid to turn a black out who votes against our interests. In a few days or weeks the FCC will announce that we won a full power community-owned radio station in Albany, Georgia, a result of years of work. Tears that we shed so many times when the TV and the newspaper comes out the day of an election or day before an election and tell white folk all over wherever we’re running somebody for an office that blacks are gonna take the office over and thousands are coming to the polls. But we had no means of communicating with our people. It’s a blessing that finally we will have a radio station to cover thousands of people.
RUSH: Now, again, we’re trying to ascertain here the context of these remarks because the media is holding Charles Sherrod up as a paragon of virtue. And John Lewis said that there’s not a hair of racism on his head or anywhere else on his body. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard anybody say that. There not a shred of racism any hair on his head, or the rest of the body. What’s Lewis thinking when he says that? You heard it, Charles Sherrod: ‘We must stop the white man and his Uncle Tom from stealing our elections. And the only way we can do this is with black radio stations.’ Meanwhile, this is earlier this year in January, blacks are being elected left and right in this country. He’s very happy he got a black radio station. Again, we don’t know the context. He could have disavowed racism at some point in the speech prior to these comments. He could have disavowed racism at some point in the speech after these comments. All we have is what we played. We must stop the white man and his Uncle Tom from stealing our elections. It might well be that the reason the partisan political operatives did not on their Sunday shows take this Shirley Sherrod story any further is that they didn’t want any of this kind of stuff to eventually hit.