RUSH: There’s panic out there. ‘Poll shows more Americans think Obama is a Muslim.’ Spreading of falsehoods is to blame. Washington Post leaves out the fact in their story, one in ten Democrats think that Imam Obama is a Muslim, one in ten Democrats. On page two of the Washington Post poll: 61% oppose the Hamasque. Fifty-five percent say okay to build one next to them. But 61% oppose building at Ground Zero. This is the AP: ‘Americans increasingly are convinced — incorrectly — that President Barack Obama is a Muslim, and a growing number are thoroughly confused about his religion. A poll finds that nearly one in five people, or 18 percent, think Obama is Muslim, up from the 11 percent who said so in March 2009. The proportion who correctly say he is a Christian is just 34 percent.’ I mean, they’re beside themselves here at the partisan political operative media. ‘The largest share of people, 43 percent, said they don’t know his religion. That’s an increase from 34 percent in early 2009.’ You want to hear some panic from the State-Controlled Media? Well, here we go. This is The Daily Rundown, MSNBC this morning, cohost Savannah Guthrie talking about the new poll.
GUTHRIE: The more people have gotten to know President Obama since he’s taken office, the more people of all parties have started to believe that he’s Muslim. So, for example, now 34% think he’s Christian, 18% say he is Muslim, 43% do not know, whereas in March of 2009, nearly half the country thought he was Christian, only 11% thought Muslim, and only 34% didn’t know. How do you explain this?
RUSH: How do you explain it? Because more people have gotten to know Obama since he’s taken office, and how are they getting to know Obama? Well, he’s talking a lot, but how are they hearing what he says? It’s television! And sure enough in this Pew poll, six in ten of those, six in ten — the way to say this, 60% of the 18% who think he’s a Muslim. So over half of those who think he’s a Muslim said they got the information from the media, the largest portion, 16% of them saying it was on television. Eleven percent said they learned it from Obama’s behavior and words. So that has gotta be a double whammy for the State-Controlled Media. They don’t know yet. Tom Brokaw, Charlie Rose still don’t know who Obama is, they don’t know what books he’s read. Wait, there’s a kicker coming here. If you just hang in with me, folks, there’s a big kicker coming now. People say they’re learning it on television, or they just learn it from Obama’s behavior and his words. Now, Savannah Guthrie over there at MessNBC was not talking to herself when she said, ‘How do you explain this?’ She was talking to the Pew Research Center Research Associate Director Alan Cooperman who answered her question.
COOPERMAN: This is not just among the people who don’t like the president, it’s not just the critics, it’s not just that there’s nearly one in five who say he’s Muslim. It’s that the percentage who say he’s Christian has also dropped dramatically, and so many people don’t know. You would think after the president’s in office 18 months to two years that the number of people who don’t know would be declining. But the number of don’t-knows has been rising, and it’s now, even among groups who support this president, for example, among Democrats, it’s fewer than half of Democrats who say the president is a Christian.
RUSH: Fewer than half. The more they get to know him. Now, Jeff Zeleny at the New York Times makes an interesting point in the next sound bite. I’m going to preempt it. Zeleny, New York Times, says, well, what does Obama do on Sunday? He plays golf. He doesn’t go to church. He plays golf. Jeff Zeleny points it out in the New York Times. Here, you can hear it. That also happened today on MessNBC, F. Chuck Todd talked to Zeleny about all of this, and F. Chuck said, ‘Religion was a huge part of the campaign at different moments in time. Reverend Wright, of course, is the one moment that a lot of people remember, and I know that Andy Kohut, also of Pew, joked with somebody that the Reverend Wright episode, as negative politics, that was for the president, it did serve as a reminder to the country that Obama was a Christian and attended church on a regular basis.’ No, it didn’t, F. Chuck because Obama said he never heard anything that Wright said. So we’re told that he went to church for 20 years, but he never heard anything that Wright said, which leads people to believe, ‘Well, maybe he really didn’t go there. Maybe he didn’t go to church, or maybe he did and is lying.’ But the bottom line is, the more people get to know about Obama, the more confused they are. So Zeleny makes this point.
ZELENY: I think that is something that will probably be changing over the next, you know, if not several months, certainly over the next two years as the president moves into his reelection. What does he do every Sunday, almost every Sunday? He plays golf. I think you’ll be seeing him go, you know, to black churches, white churches, you-name-it churches to try and remind people that he in fact is Christian.
RUSH: (laughing) He doesn’t go to church, and the Drive-Bys can’t understand why the number of people who think Obama is a Christian is dwindling. He’s starting his sixth vacation, today, or tomorrow, going to Martha’s Vineyard, and we’ll see if Zeleny is right here. We’ll see if Obama goes to church every Sunday, a bunch of different churches. But what difference does it make? Really, folks, what difference does it make? If he were a Muslim, we don’t care. What’s wrong with being a Muslim? Really, I mean, why the controversy here? What’s the big deal? I mean, we’re into outreach, if he’s a Muslim, that’s fine. Right? We went back to the archives of the New York Times, May 12th, 2008, Edward Luttwak. He’s a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. I remember Ed Luttwak. When I lived in Sacramento, worked out there in the mid- to late eighties, Edward Luttwak was brilliant on TV. I remember I went to Washington for a week’s worth of shows. The station there was hell-bent on me interviewing people and I refused to do it, so they sent me to Washington.
I remember trying to get Luttwak on and I’d get his answering machine over at the think tank and he never returned the call, and you shoulda heard these messages. ‘Professor Luttwak, please, please –‘ (laughing) It was amazing. Anyway, he wrote this piece back in the campaign, May 12th, 2008, and the headline of the piece is: ‘President Apostate?’ I want to read to you a couple of paragraphs. ‘This idea often goes hand in hand with the altogether more plausible argument that Mr. Obama’s election would raise America’s esteem in Africa — indeed, he already arouses much enthusiasm in his father’s native Kenya and to a degree elsewhere on the continent,’ where, I might add, the brother still lives in a hut. ‘But it is a mistake to conflate his African identity with his Muslim heritage. Senator Obama is half African by birth and Africans can understandably identify with him. In Islam, however, there is no such thing as a half-Muslim. Like all monotheistic religions, Islam is an exclusive faith.
‘As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood. It makes no difference that, as Senator Obama has written, his father said he renounced his religion. Likewise, under Muslim law based on the Koran his mother’s Christian background is irrelevant. Of course, as most Americans understand it, Senator Obama is not a Muslim. He chose to become a Christian, and indeed has written convincingly to explain how he arrived at his choice and how important his Christian faith is to him. His conversion, however, was a crime in Muslim eyes. … it is the worst of all crimes that a Muslim can commit, worse than murder,’ that is, to quit Islam.
So according to Luttwak, Muslims look at this guy, he’s a Muslim, his father was a Muslim and that’s all it takes. The American people increasingly don’t know. Stop and think about this, now. We’re not talking about a local city councilman. We’re talking about the president of the United States. Almost 20% of the American people think he’s a Muslim. A dwindling number believe he’s not a Christian, which he professes to be. We’re talking about the president of the United States here. And there is obviously here, according to the Pew Center, confusion over the identity of Imam Obama. I find this — (laughing) — I find it Twilight Zone-ish. I mean this is not Clinton’s medical records not being released. This is the president of the United States about whom the American people are increasingly confused. By the way, and can you blame them? They see a man in a state of denial over the state of the economy. He went into Ohio this week, earlier, to talk about jobs and so forth, and they’re not impressed. There’s a story here, one of the Ohio papers, hey, we don’t need any more optics. We don’t need any more photo-ops. We need jobs. We don’t need mosques. We need jobs.
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RUSH: I know you can expect Michelle (My Belle) and the kids to be going in and out of church every day with 20-pound Bibles being lugged around. Obama might even walk into one now and then. Let me ask you a question: If you were Obama, why would you waste time going to church to pray to yourself when you can pray to yourself in the White House? It’s a waste of time to go to church when all you’re doing is praying to yourself. The media is out there trying to make us believe that we’re just a bunch of rubes. We’re so unsophisticated, we just can’t understand. We do not have the ability to understand just how brilliant Obama is. We just are not capable of being within even the aura of Obama.
You know who they ought to poll? Go poll the people that work at NASA and ask them if they think Obama’s a Muslim, ’cause he turned NASA into a Muslim outreach program. The guy holds an Easter Egg Roll and the White House website promoting the Easter Egg Roll does not mention Jesus or Christ. It talks about environmentalism. Obama says he’s a Christian but where’s the evidence? ‘Well, he went to Reverend Wright’s church.’ Yeah, but he says he doesn’t hear anything that’s said in there — and, by the way, Reverend Wright’s church is a weird brand of Christianity. Reverend Wright’s church? Black theology is what comes out of that pulpit, which is, you know, not exactly mainstream Christianity.
The New York Times joins the media chorus, all upset with this. Sheryl Gay Stolberg: ‘In Defining Obama, Misperceptions Stick.’ She says here ‘the White House is struggling with the perception of ‘otherness’ … even his own [Democrat] supporters are confused.’ ‘The findings suggest that, nearly two years into Mr. Obama’s presidency, the White House is struggling with the perception of ‘otherness’ that Candidate Obama sought so hard to overcome — in part because of an aggressive misinformation campaign by critics and in part, some Democratic allies say, because Mr. Obama is doing a poor job of communicating who he is and what he believes.’ He doesn’t think he should have to stoop so low as to explain himself to tell us who he is or what he believes. Gods don’t answer letters.
‘Andrew Kohut, the Pew center’s director.. said the numbers reflected that Mr. Obama had ‘not made religion a part of his public persona’ as much as he did during his presidential campaign — so much so that even his own supporters are confused.’ We’re talking about the president of the United States and a poll that shows even his own supporters are confused about who he is, about his religion. ‘The White House says the public — and the press — are not listening. Since taking office, Mr. Obama has given six speeches either from a church pulpit or addressing religion in public life — including an Easter prayer breakfast where he ‘offered a very personal and candid reflection of what the Resurrection means to him,’ said Joshua DuBois, who runs the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.’
Obama is a member of the Democrat Party, and those of you who are Christians know full well the Democrat Party has you in its crosshairs. The Democrat Party impugns, makes fun of, criticizes, and attacks Christians and Christianity and their faith and their belief. They make fun of them, their comedians and movies and so forth and so on. It’s not outside the realm of comprehension that some people might think that Democrats have it in nor Christians — and if Obama is the lead Democrat, he might also harbor similar opinions.
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RUSH: Let’s go back, September 2008 on This Week with George Stephanopoulos before Christiane Amanpour took it over. Stephanopoulos said to Senator Barack Obama: ‘The McCain campaign has never suggested you have Muslim connections. John McCain said that that’s wrong.’
STEPHANOPOULOS: The McCain campaign has never suggested that you have Muslim connections. McCain said that that’s wrong.
OBAMA: No, uh, well, uh, well, look, the — the, uhhhh. Listen, uhhh, you and I both know that the minute that Governor Palin was, uh — was, uh, forced to talk about her daughter, I immediately said, ‘That’s off-limits. And — and — and — and —
STEPHANOPOULOS: John McCain did the same thing about questioning your faith.
OBAMA: And what — what was the first thing the McCain campaign went out and did? They — they said, uhhh, look, uhhh, his liberal blogs that support Obama (nervous laugh) are out there attacking Governor Palin. I mean, uh, uh, eh, l-let’s not play games. W-w-what I was suggesting, you are absolutely right that John McCain has not, uh, talked about my Muslim faith, and you’re absolutely right that that has not come —
STEPHANOPOULOS: Christian faith.
OBAMA: Uh, M-my Christian faith.
RUSH: Yeah, that’s Obama, Senator Obama September 2008 This Week with George Stephanopoulos. ‘You’re absolutely right that John McCain has not talked about my Muslim faith. You’re absolutely right that he’s not –‘ and Stephanopoulos said, ‘Christian faith, Christian faith.’ Obama said, yeah, yeah, my Christian faith. No, we’re not making a big deal of it, it’s just that people are wondering in the media why Americans are concerned about who the guy is. And they’re saying that they’re learning from television that they think he’s a Muslim. Again I say, what’s wrong with being a Muslim? Why is everybody acting like that is some sort of big problem? Here’s what I heard Obama railing about this morning during a profit center time-out about this jobs bill that he says will not add a dime to the deficit. We need another jobs bill, small business jobs bill, we got two sound bites of what that sounded like.
OBAMA: The last several months I have been urging Congress to pass a jobs bill that will do two big things for small businesses: cut their taxes and make loans more valuable. This legislation is fully paid for and will not add one single dime to our deficit.
RUSH: I have no idea what he’s talking about. What jobs bill is this? All I know is this: When he talks about small business, substitute something for it, $250,000 a year, because that’s small businesses. We’ve been through this. They file their business taxes on their personal return as a subchapter S, double whammy. But for several months I’ve been urging Congress to pass a jobs bill that will do two things? We’re 18, 20 months into this now, we’ve had I don’t know how many jobs bills, we don’t have any jobs. We’re continuing to hemorrhage jobs, and all this guy can do is talk about another jobs bill. Here’s the second sound bite.
OBAMA: This is a bill that makes sense and normally we would expect Democrats and Republicans to join together. Unfortunately, a partisan minority in the Senate so far has refused to allow this jobs bill to come up for a vote. Now, I recognize that there are times when Democrats and Republicans have legitimate differences rooted in different views about what’s best for this country. There are times when good people disagree in good faith. But this is not one of those times.
RUSH: Well, I have no idea what he’s talking about. Some jobs bill. All I know is that if he gets it, it isn’t gonna matter a hill of beans. We’ve already had jobs bill after jobs bill after jobs bill. We’re hemorrhaging jobs.
Jeff in Indianapolis. You’re first today. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Thanks for taking my call, Rush.
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: Appreciate it. Hey, I think the media in this case is really admitting their own failure that they have not vetted this guy, and I know you have that one sound bite from Tom Brokaw from right after the inauguration saying that they really don’t know who this guy is. I mean he’s got two books out, one of them called Dreams from My Father. Does anybody in the media know what the dreams of his father actually are? So it’s almost laughable to me because they are admitting that they failed, that they don’t know who this guy is, they’re panicking that the public has no idea if he’s a Muslim or a Christian.
RUSH: You may be right. You may have a point that the media doesn’t know who he is and that they’re panicking because they can’t convince the American people that he’s not a Muslim. You’re not sure they know. I think they do. You say they didn’t vet the guy, and they may not have. He represents something that they desperately think the country has needed, so maybe you’re right, they haven’t looked into it. And maybe they’re scared to death of what they would find. Regardless, this is unbelievable. We are talking about the president of the United States, who every day becomes a bigger mystery!
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RUSH: I want to suggest something to the Peeeew Research people. Next time you go out and do your poll on how many people think Obama is a Muslim, ask them how many think he’s a Marxist, ’cause I’ll bet you that number is increasing, too — and that number, frankly, would be more interesting to me than how many think he is a Muslim.