RUSH ARCHIVE: Now, if this Virginia Tech shooter had an ideology, what do you think it was? This guy had to be a liberal. You start railing against the rich, and all these other things? This guy is a liberal. He was turned into a liberal somewhere along the line. So it’s a liberal that committed this act. Now, the Drive-Bys will read on the website that I’m attacking liberalism by comparing this guy to them. That’s exactly what they do every day, ladies and gentlemen! I’m just pointing out a fact. I am making no extrapolation. I’m just pointing it out. I can tell you from the history of this program, starting way back in the early nineties, when there was any kind of an incident, crime or what have you, that attracted national attention, in the early days of this program, the Drive-By Media went out and they tried to connect the perpetrator to this program. They did everything they could. In fact, it went so far as Bill Clinton blaming me for influencing Timothy McVeigh to blow up the Murrah Building. These are the people sponsoring lies and distortion for the purposes of dividing this country and creating hatred. There are just double standards all over the place, folks. I’m telling you, I’m fed up with listening to who it is that’s supposedly coarsening the culture when I watch it on television every day, and I read it on obscure websites every day. These are the people that write books about how to assassinate George W. Bush!
RUSH: Sure enough — sure enough, folks — the Drive-By Media, national and local, across the fruited plain, are running with the story: ‘Limbaugh Calls Cho a Liberal.’
INSIDE EDITION ANNOUNCER: Political pundit Rush Limbaugh is under fire for this remark, claiming Cho’s envy of wealthy students means he was a liberal.
LIZ CHO: Rush Limbaugh, stirring up controversy about the Virginia Tech massacre. Limbaugh said it had to be a liberal who committed such an act.
JIM DOLAN: Rush Limbaugh appeared to blame liberals for the shooting, claiming that the assailant just must have been one.
TAINA HERNANDEZ: There is controversy this morning over comments talk show host Rush Limbaugh made about the Virginia Tech shooter.
RUSH: No, there wasn’t!
SCOTT WAHLE: Limbaugh was pondering what the shooter’s ideology must have been and said that he, quote, ‘had to be a liberal.’
MIKE WALTER: After Don Imus, I’d think, what radio commentators would want to do that?
ANDREA ROANE: Not this one.
MIKE WALTER: Rush Limbaugh now has created a lot of controversy.
JOY BEHAR: Rush Limbaugh just said [sic–days ago] this guy who killed all those kids at Virginia Tech was a liberal.
RUSH: Is this not the greatest thing? They fell for it hook, line and sinker. This illustrates exactly what I was talking about last Thursday about the way all this stuff happens. The point is, there was no ‘controversy.’ There was no controversy on this program. There was no eruption on this program Thursday or Friday. Not until yesterday when the Drive-Bys heard about it three or four days after the fact, and then they dreamed it up! The only controversy is with them because they think I called ’em out. (Laughing.) You people at Media Matters, you’re going to have to learn not to be baited when I’m baiting you, because you end up illustrating and proving exactly what I’m saying — and, by the way, speaking of this, there’s one more thing. Last week — and I did this on purpose. We hadn’t played it in a while, but last week we played ‘Barack the Magic Negro,’ with Paul Shanklin impersonating Al Sharpton through the bullhorn, and guess what? In the past three days various elements of our PR apparatus have received calls from individuals all over the country expressing their disappointment and their shock and their outrage.
We’ve been playing this song for a month, maybe longer! But last week we played it, and of course these people heard it for the first time. It’s all over YouTube. It’s all over a number of places and we’re getting phone calls from ‘solid citizens’ who are very concerned that in ‘the Post-Imus Era,’ these kinds of comments are going on, and we tell them, ‘You know what? This is a great example. You don’t listen to Rush’s show. You hear about what happens on Rush’s show from a bunch of biased individuals, and then you have this cow, and you go bonkers.’ So we explain to them, ‘You understand…? It’s right in the lyrics of the song: the LA Times called him a ‘magic negro.’ It was a black columnist complaining about the fact that Barack had no substance.’ Prior to that, Al Sharpton, the New York Post reported, is a little jealous that Barack was being called the first clean and articulate black presidential candidate when Sharpton ‘bathes every day.’ Joe Biden said this. So there was a little jealousy out there, and a little contretemps going on between Sharpton and Obama. So we put the song together to illustrate it, but if you don’t listen to this program or you don’t understand the context and if you don’t understand that we have railed against this kind of discrimination and so forth…
The LA Times has had two or three columns already on, ‘Is Barack Obama Black Enough?’ It’s not happening here. It’s happening out there. We simply chronicle it, laugh at it and make fun of it, and then people hear it out of context and they go bonkers, and we send them the LA Times piece. What it all means, folks, is that there are these little nerdlings out there that are monitoring their radios in ‘the Post-Imus Era,’ and they’re looking for any, any shred of evidence that could make me the next to get his butt kicked off of major American airwaves. But it isn’t going to happen because everything here has a political point, and bounces off something somebody else said — especially our parodies and so forth, but it’s illustrative of what I mentioned to you when we first started talking about this, and that is that the people that are raising all this hell don’t listen. They get it second- and third-hand, out of context, and they’re out there as an army trying to create this stink. But it won’t work. It’s just funny to chronicle it all, particularly the supposed controversy over my calling the guy at Virginia Tech a liberal. What controversy? Everybody that listens to this show agrees with me, so how can you possibly have controversy there?
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