RUSH: Let’s go back to the audio sound bites. I want to you to grab sound bite number five. Just a brief departure. Now back to the dominant story of the day.
Last night, CNN, desperate to hold on to this like the missing airliner, Situation Room Wolf Blitzer speaking with St. Louis County NAALCP board member John Gaskin about the situation in Ferguson. By the way, let me paint you a picture. Downtown St. Louis last night, Busch Stadium, the Pittsburgh Pirates are in town to play the St. Louis Cardinals. Busch Stadium is sold out, downtown St. Louis. A stadium filled with people relaxing, enjoying the national pastime. Well, it used to be the national pastime.
A baseball game, sold out. Mere miles north is a powder keg. Busch Stadium, St. Louis, sold out last night as though there was nothing going on outside that stadium. Inside that stadium it was the Cardinals and the Pirates. It was a good old baseball game. Bring me your popcorn, peanuts, and crackerjack or what have you, and there wasn’t a care in the world inside that stadium. You didn’t have to go very many miles north, near Lambert International Spaceport, Ferguson, Missouri, bammo, the contrast is striking.
Anyway, CNN was speaking to the St. Louis County NAALCP board member John Gaskin about Ferguson. Blitzer said, “The Ferguson police chief called the situation in the city ‘a powder keg.’ He’s going to be speaking shortly, having another news conference. What do you want to hear from the police chief in Ferguson?” This was last night.
GASKIN: The first thing we want to hear from the police chief — and the local NA’CP has discussed this this afternoon — is an apology to the family. This is not the first time that this local police department has had an issue with the way that they treat BMW’s, as we say at the NA’CP, black men walking. The Ferguson Police Department has had issues. It’s our hope that the American Congress will use this policy window as an opportunity to address police brutality on a national stage in Congress.
RUSH: Never let a good crisis go to waste. This guy comes out and says it. National legislation to address police treatment of BMWs, Black Men Walking. Have you heard that one before? (interruption) You have? (interruption) Really? You’ve heard…? (interruption) Black Men Walking could be…? (interruption) Look, I was here 10 years ago, and I don’t remember that. (interruption) Okay.
Well, there you have it, Black Men Walking, “national legislation to address police treatment of Black Men Walking.” And here is Emanuel Cleaver, Democrat, Missouri, I think… Yes. Kansas City. He’s also on with Blitzer, who has said, “What should we be bracing for tonight in Ferguson, Mr. Cleaver?”
CLEAVER: When you get the military equipment out of the way, I think it gives the protesters the feeling that we can now protest peacefully and there’s no threat hanging over us. The heavy equipment should probably only go to cities like New York, uh, Chicago, Los Angeles, where there, uh, is always the — the threat of some kind of a terrorist attack. But in middle America, you don’t need, uh, leftover equipment from Iraq. ISIS is using that equipment now.
RUSH: ISIS is using it? Leftover military in the heartland, in the hands of cops, is like ISIS? Wolf Blitzer said, “The St. Louis County Police were in charge. The governor says no more; the highway patrol is coming. What did they do wrong?”
CLEAVER: Some of the officers there I think seem to have the idea that the Constitution is not a document that we have to, uhh, embrace. I mean, you don’t arrest reporters. You don’t take their equipment in the United States. That’s what they do, you know, in Syria. And so I think they, somehow, uh, need to be retrained and desegregated.
RUSH: Wow. Retrained and desegregated. So suddenly Emanuel Cleaver believes the Constitution separates us from what goes on in Syria. How about that?
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: The Cardinals played the Padres last night. I erroneously and with verbal dyslexia said the Pittsburgh Pirates, but the Cardinals played the Padres. Everything else about it was true, it’s just I had the wrong team in town.
Here is Russ in Oakdale, California. I’m glad you waited, sir. Welcome to the program.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush. What an honor.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: Before I get to my point, your story about the Missouri State Police reminded me in the early seventies. My buddy and I were riding in the car with his parents in Northern California — which you know a lot about Northern California.
RUSH: Northern California. Are you all the way up in, “Hum.”
CALLER: Humboldt, up that area.
RUSH: Yeah, Humboldt County?
CALLER: And (unintelligible) was following us, and we pulled over, and he got out and started yelling at my friend’s mom, and we we’re like, “What’s going on?” Until I looked at the bumper. She had a bumper sticker on her car that said, “If you think the police are bad, next time you need help call a hippie.”
RUSH: (chuckling)
CALLER: Anyway, he took offense to that. But the reason I called, I don’t know if you’re aware of what happened a couple of weeks ago in Stockton, California, a few miles south of your home city — adopted home city — of Sacramento.
RUSH: Stockton. What happened at Stockton?
CALLER: They had a 60 minute, over 60 minute running gun battle with three gang members attempted to rob a bank. They took hostages. One of the hostages unfortunately ended up succumbing to gunshot wounds. They kicked two of the hostages out of the car, and they’re still looking for the driver of the person who dropped him off at the bank. So when these people talk about how the police don’t need this, from my understanding they shot the tires out of the armored vehicle, which couldn’t keep up with the rest of the vehicles. Research how many of those police vehicles had bullet holes from the AK-47s, these robbers were using.
RUSH: See, that’s the point. I’m glad — and if I’d heard, I don’t recall these details about Stockton. But I do remember the California bank robbery in the nineties. It’s more than one story where the bad guys had military-grade weapons, and the cops are out there with peashooter pistols, and they’re just totally overpowered. It brought about a debate over, “Are the cops sufficiently armed?”
You had people aying, “Yes, they don’t need any bigger pistols than what they’ve got, I don’t care what the bad guys have ’cause if you give the cops any bigger weapons it’s gonna become a police state,” and so forth. Other people said, “If you don’t let the cops arms themselves in ways where they can stay equal, then you’re not gonna have law enforcement even have a chance.”
It was a really high-pitched debate, but it’s the reason why police departments in certain cities have leftover, unused military-grade equipment. But, of course, here comes the media feeding the notion that the only reason that certain police departments have those kinds of weapons and that kind of equipment is because theory racist and because it’s assume that minorities in these towns are gonna require that level of armament to be kept in control.
It’s bogus, but it doesn’t matter because you can’t make them believe the truth. They have been lied to about so much for so long that they believe it all. I mean, we actually had John Lewis call for martial law in Ferguson! He wanted Obama or somebody to declare martial law, and that’s not the solution to this. The solution to things like this is something that’ll never happen because nobody could get away with saying it.
Nobody could get away with suggesting it.
The reason they can’t get away with suggesting it is that nobody can correctly identify the root problem. The blame, the root problem is: America is racist. The root problem is America is bigoted and racist no matter what steps have been taken. No matter the fact that we’ve elected the first African-American president, no matter that we’ve had years of affirmative action.
No matter what we do as a remedy, America is still racist. We may as well still have Bull Connor and the fire hoses and the dogs and all that — which, again, I remind everybody that was all Democrats doing that. But the point is progress is not permitted to be recorded. So you can’t ever identified the root problem, you can’t ever get down and have the actual remedy addressed or even spoken.
Because it assigns blame where people do not think the blame ought to go. So we have to keep putting up with it in event after event, and it just becomes something that becomes part of the American fabric: Every now and then we’re gonna have race riots, every now and then we’re gonna have this or that, and we’ll just do our best with them when they happen, and we’ll try to get through it and we move on.
We just think it’s part of our heritage that we must have these things and put up with ’em and so forth — and that’s a defeatist attitude, in my humble opinion.