Even some in the conservative media found it necessary to praise Obama’s speech.  And we know why this happens.  It is because some in the conservative media don’t want to be seen as constantly pestering the guy, so it’s thought that it’ll add to their credibility if they can acknowledge that the president did something well, did something good, presidential, even if it was only a portion of the speech.

But my take on it was entirely different.  I think the first half of his speech yesterday seemed to be high-minded and unifying, but he blows it all to smithereens because I think what the first half of the speech was was a setup for the political hackery that was to come.  It wasn’t as if the speech suddenly and unexpectedly veered off course.  Obama knew that he had to give the impression he was a healer and a unifier before he could pivot to what he really wanted to say.

And I took it, you know, I’m sitting there watching it like everybody else did, and I’m absorbing it, and I felt like it was a political sucker punch.  The second half of the speech is what Obama really wanted to say but couldn’t unless he preceded it with the so-called unifying remarks beforehand.

I was thinking about something while watching the speech yesterday.  Did you know that he mentioned himself 45 times?  I joked to the staff here when this speech began, I said, “Let’s have a tally on how many times he says ‘I.'”  And people counted 45 times Obama said “I.”  By the way, Loretta Lynch in her congressional testimony yesterday said, “I don’t know” 74 times.

And do you remember yesterday on this program, the first thing I told you was I just finished watching Hillary and Bernie Sanders and their so-called joint unification speech where Bernie was endorsing Hillary. And I said, “You know, Bernie’s droning on like he always does and Hillary was standing there like a bobblehead doll, just nodding up and down and applauding and looking — I don’t know — vacant.”  And then when she got up to speech she indulged in the usual screech. It didn’t take long.

Somebody counted the number of times Hillary Clinton nodded.  It’s 406 times.  I knew I wasn’t off the path when I kept noticing this bobblehead doll appearance.  Actually 406 times during the Crazy Bernie endorsement speech.  But here’s the thing I was wondering as I’m watching Obama, and we hear people on the left in the Drive-By Media talking about how Obama tries to unify and bring everybody together.  “What a great effort! Ah, it was just stupendous.”

Then why draw a moral equivalence?  Here he was at a memorial service for five slain Dallas police officers.  Why draw any kind of a more…? Why do you mention Alton Sterling and what went on in Minnesota?  Why? You can mention it, but this effort to draw some kind of moral equivalence as though there is one and we can understand all of it happening?  This inability to look at something and proclaim it wrong… (interruption)

Well, yeah, okay. So he knew he’d get grief from the left.  I don’t think he cares he get grief from the left.  I think the guy’s got his agenda and he’s full-speed marching it down the path.  I’m just… When this year began, I warned everybody. I said, “Folks, this year coming up with the Republicans having given Obama a clear road signaling they’re not gonna oppose anything, not even his policies…” You know, Mitch McConnell and Ryan announced they weren’t gonna oppose Obama.

They didn’t want to appear to be opposing or creating any negatives for the Republican presidential nominee.  So Obama knows he’s got a free road. So why does he care that the left might come at him and say he wasn’t left-wing enough or he wasn’t pro-Black Lives Matter enough? I don’t think there’s any doubt where Obama stands with people on the left.  I want you to stop and think about something.  I want to set it up by acknowledging something that we all know. Obama knows it; everybody knows it.

The entire narrative of Ferguson, Missouri, is a lie.  “Hands up, don’t shoot” is a lie.  The story that a racist cop went hunting and found an innocent Gentle Giant walking down the street — when he should have been on the sidewalk — contemplating excitedly… This is part of the story: He was eagerly anticipating his freshman year at college, was Michael Brown, and this racist cop went hunting, and he found a guy breaking the law, walking in the street!

And he got up in his face and he all bullied him and so forth, and Brown was immediately deferential and put his hands up and said, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” and the cop shot anyway.  That is the story that came out of there, and that story fed entire narrative of Black Lives Matter and whatever they’re trying to do to create controversy and division.  And it fed the New Black Panthers.  It was a lie.  It was a total lie.

Everything about that Ferguson story as repeated by the media and prominent Democrats and civil rights activists was a lie.  What if…? I want you to think about it. What if, in the aftermath of Ferguson, Missouri, Barack Obama, as president of the United States — meaning president of the whole country, meaning president of everybody here — had scheduled a national address from the Oval Office, an address to the people of America and told them the truth about what happened in Ferguson?

After the grand jury investigation was complete, after it was inarguably so — after we learned exactly what happened, that the Gentle Giant had robbed a convenience store, that he was looking for a mechanism to spoke some dope. He had bullied the clerk in the 7-Eleven, the convenience store, whatever. He was walking down the street. He had attempted to overtake the cop in his car. He had defied the requests and the orders of the cop. He had taken action which resulted in the cop shooting.

Everything about that story was not true.

What if Obama had gone on TV and simply told people? For the sake of national unity, for the sake of understanding, for the sake of promoting and acknowledged truth, what if Obama had been on TV and acknowledged what really happened and had told everybody that what they think happened in Ferguson didn’t happen? What do you think the aftermath might have been?  (interruption) Look… (sigh)  Snerdley is telling me in the IFB…

Snerdley’s in New York today because he had to go up early to get ready for our guests. Who’s guest hosting tomorrow? (interruption) Oh, yeah, Mark Belling tomorrow and Buck Sexton, late of the CIA, will be in here on Friday.  Right.  Okay.  So Snerdley is saying, “If he’d done that, then the left wing would have started impeachment proceedings and they would have started threatening and so forth.”  Well, that would have been its own story.  Everybody would have known that Obama was telling the truth. He had the truth on his side.  Just imagine.

This is what we expect of presidents, is the point.  We don’t expect presidents to further and promulgate lies and misinformation for the express purpose of creating and fomenting deadly anger.  Presidents try to quell these situations.  They try to get a handle on ’em and ratchet down the tension. Such an opportunity exists here because the truth was the truth, and the truth was not part of the narrative.  Now, if that had happened — and I can’t predict in the alternative future, but I have to think that the aftermath of that incident the lie would have been short-lived.

And the anger would have subdued. Maybe it would have been redirected toward Obama; I don’t know.  But, remember: It fed Baltimore, it fed Freddie Gray, it fed the situation in New York with the Eric Garner — who also died of a heart attack, not a chokehold.  That’s another lie that was told.  This guy was selling knock-off cigarettes on the street of New York. He’s telling… Because New York City taxes it so high that the guy could make a living selling black market cigarettes, selling black market cigarettes.

For some reason, he came to the attention of the cop. They ended up applying a restraining hold on the guy, but he had a heart attack.  It was not… The chokehold didn’t kill. The cops did not kill the guy.  But that’s not the story.  There are so many lies that have been created and then, if not promoted, they have not been quelled by the White House, which makes me question motive.  Why not?  Of course, I know the answer to this, and you do, too.

You know the answer lies in the president’s agenda and is rapidly becoming the Democrat Party agenda.  I was looking at the Democrat Party platform.  You wouldn’t believe, folks. The Democrat Party has been totally now taken over by the radicals.  I mean, just insane lunatic radicals are now the mainstream of the Democrat Party.  You look at the Democrat Party platform in ’08 and look at it in 2012. They acknowledge the legitimacy of the Second Amendment, these platforms.

Platforms don’t matter much in terms of future governing.  I mean, they’re not binding on presidents if they win the election to implement the platform, whatever.  What the platform basically does is tell you what the base of the party thinks about things, ’cause the base of the party dominates in primaries and they end up on the committee that writes the platform, so the platform gives you an indication where the base of both parties are.  The Democrat Party is…

Not only is it not John F. Kennedy’s Democrat Party. It isn’t Bill Clinton or Hillary Clinton’s Democrat Party.  Hillary Clinton is a… Well, I don’t want to… She’s a radical in and of her own right, but she tempers her radicalness with enough proclamations or statements that make her to be mainstream in enough areas. But there isn’t any mainstream anything in the Democrat Party platform.  And I’m telling you: It’s what happens when there’s no opposition.

When there’s no opposition, when there no guardrails, when there’s nothing to stop people from descending to their extreme worst, that’s exactly what’s gonna happen.  And I’m here to tell you: The extremism in America could be found almost exclusively on the Democrat side, and that extremism has been documented in their platform, and it was speaking in Dallas yesterday. This idea of finding a moral equivalence, and taking the occasion of a memorial service at a funeral for one of the cops to say it?

It was a funeral for one of the cops yesterday. To take the occasion and use it to amplify…? That statement, “It’s easier to get a Glock than to get a computer or gun?”  Come on!  What in the world can that possibly represent, that kind of statement?  There’s nothing unifying about that.  It’s not even true.  And he knows it isn’t true. So that’s nothing but a provocative statement designed to illustrate an actual opinion held by Barack Obama, and he turned that whole thing yesterday into yet another attempt at gun control.

I think it’s the… Yes, ladies and gentlemen, there’s a chapter.  If you haven’t heard this, buckle up.  It’s a chapter of the NAALCP, the National Association for the Advancement of Liberal Colored People.  And somebody in some chapter prominently has now claimed that the death of Micah X. Johnson was nothing more than a modern day lynching.  Yeah.  The guy who assassinated five Dallas police officers and injured 11 or 12 others.

So the police rally, and they use their explosive robot bomb to kill the guy, and now the NAALCP is running around accusing that action of being a lynching.  Innocent people were lynched.  The NAALCP says, “We don’t know if the guy was a shooter!  We don’t know if the guy did it.  We’re just taking their word for it?  We don’t take their word for it!  We don’t trust them; we don’t to believe ’em.  They’re making it up! We don’t have any evidence the guy was the shooter. We don’t have any evidence blew him up with a robot bomb.  It’s a lynching.”

Hey, here’s to unity.

You start talking like that, man, that’s really gonna bring us all together.

We had a caller yesterday, a young African-American from Brooklyn who wanted to know why I referred to any black person talking about their legitimate past as a grievance.  And I gave him an analogy.  A grievance… The purpose of grievance, the way to understand grievance in the modern-day Democrat Party? Grievance politics does not seek a solution, is the difference.  Grievance is a strategy.  Grievance is a method whereby to advance an agenda.  It’s not something being used to seek a resolution.

That’s the quick definition.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  Yeah.  Obama at the memorial said it’s easier to buy a Glock than a book or a computer.  It’s just demonstrably not true.  There’s no background check for a computer.  There’s no background check for a book.  Everybody already has a computer anyway when you count their cell phone.  It’s just patently not true.

It’s one of these things that’s designed to appeal to low-information people, get ’em all revved up emotionally, and therefore it is irresponsible.  Not only that, when you have a phone — I don’t care what kind of phone — it’s easy to buy a book.  It’s easy.  It’s as easy as it is downloading an app.  You can’t download a Glock on your phone.  It’s just ridiculous.  But that’s the kind of thing this president does.  Been saying it for years.  He said it at least three times, that I can remember.

Now, the lynching comment, that came from the Reverend Curtis Gatewood, who is the field marshal for the NAALCP’s North Carolina branch and the former second vice president for the North Carolina NAALCP state conference who made the lynching comment.

Here’s the quote.  He said, “Make no mistake, by taking this black ‘suspect’ and demonizing and using a killer robot to blow him up in this unprecedented and barbaric manner and without a trial in a court of law is the truest and most literal example yet of a ‘high-tech lynching.'”

He went on to call Clarence Thomas “the most vicious Uncle Tom to ever serve.”  Why does Clarence Thomas get dragged into this for?  This guy couldn’t wear Clarence Thomas’ shoes.  This guy couldn’t even stay in the same room with Clarence Thomas.  This guy does not know one-tenth the courage and bravery and intellectual fortitude of Clarence Thomas.

Why drag Clarence Thomas into this?  Why call this a high-tech lynching?  Where are all these efforts to unify?  Somebody tell me how all of this or any of this is designed to unify?  Well, it isn’t.  You can’t convince me.  This isn’t about unifying.  Daily Caller has a story:  “Pew Research Poll:  Race Relations More Negative Today Than Any Other Time This Century.”  Well, that’s only 14 years.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Just a couple more things on Black Lives Matter and all that.  Bob Woodson, I first heard of him even before I started this program.  He is African-American and he was described as a neighborhood activist when I first heard of him. Not in the sense that Obama was a community organizer.

Bob Woodson is a conservative and always has been.  He’s quoted in a column at TheHill.com today written by Salena Zito.  And the headline of this column is: “Even at a Funeral, Dividing the Nation is Apparently Good Politics.”  She doesn’t agree with it, the writer doesn’t.  She thinks it’s abhorrent, but by all intents and purposes, the media analysis worked for Obama to politicize this memorial service and funeral.

But here’s a quote.  “Woodson doesn’t just blame BLM for inflaming racial tensions. ‘Look at what Fox News is doing,’ he said. ‘It is what pisses me off with conservative broadcasters; they will have on Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson –” I’m just quoting what he says here.  I’m quoting what he says.  Don’t anybody go jumping on me here.

“It is what pisses me off with conservative broadcasters; they will have on Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and then Bill O’Reilly and Laura Ingraham become the foil. In short, the face of opposition to BLM is O’Reilly and Ingraham.”  He says nothing against them, but that’s not helpful.  It’s not helping anybody.  They’re broadcasters.

What he’s saying is you need people from the community who can take on Black Lives Matter with credibility.  Meaning, there will be nothing unusual about the fact that Fox anchors, on-air talent, on balance, would oppose.  But there’s another point that he’s making.  Why continually bring in Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton?  What is that doing to help anything?  It’s causing viewers.  You know, bring in these two ancient relics of the civil rights movement, have ’em wax eloquently with a bunch of extreme wackoism.  Then you have your Fox talent react to it.  It’s all a show.

Woodson’s concerned that it’s all a show, it’s not solving anything, it’s not advancing anything.  Besides that, it’s giving credibility to a couple of relics here that have nothing really to offer here in this.

“Bob Woodson has little respect for the Black Lives Matter provocateurs. He finds them morally bankrupt, whose only determination seems to be fifteen minutes of shame rather than concrete resolutions to problems.”  Exactly.  That’s what you have to understand is wrong with the grievance industry.  The grievance industry is owned solely by the Democrat Party.  And the way to recognize it, I want to hearken back to the call that I had yesterday with the African-American from Brooklyn. “What’s wrong with talking about it?  Why do you call it grievance?”

And I gave him an analogy and I told him why, but the point is this.  The grievance industry seeks to create victims, but more important, the grievance industry does not want solutions.  So you say, “Well, then why have the grievance?”  A-ha.  That’s the right question.  Why have a grievance if you don’t want to solve it.  If you have a grievance issue, say it’s slavery and you demand reparations, well, that isn’t gonna happen, but even if it did, it wouldn’t end there. They’d move on to something else, because the whole point of the grievance industry is not solutions; it’s to continue the effort to tear down, to destroy, to transform.

And that’s what Obama is helping facilitate.  And that’s what the American people are not used to seeing, is presidents that facilitate and assist in movements to tear down the fabric, the traditions, the institutions of a great country.  They don’t know what to make of it.  Afraid to say anything about it, a lot of people are, because of the president’s race, and you know how that is, that silences everybody. That paralyzes anybody in the opposition, or a lot of people.

But Woodson is saying that he doesn’t just blame Black Lives Matter for inflaming racial tensions.  He said look at what Fox News is doing.  His point about this is, there’s two things.  A, why give these jokers airtime as though they’re still relevant and credible, when all they are is a couple of hustlers seeking continued fame and revenue.  They’re not interested in solutions, either, is Woodson’s point.  And they’re not.  Sharpton and Jackson would be the first two guys to stop it if it looked like a solution was actually in the offing.  You ever solve the problem, what do you need these guys for?  That’s true of many left-wing causes, by the way.  They don’t want a solution, they don’t want the stoppage.  Too many people living high on the hog. Too many people with a great living with fundraising, siphoning some of the money.

In the meantime, all this stuff is tearing at the fabric of our country, people are profiting from it.  Hence my question:  Who’s benefiting from all this?  A lot of people are, but it isn’t the country anyway you look at it.  Woodson said, “Fox shouldn’t be using Sharpton or Jackson, these other race hucksters.  All they’re doing is continuing the divide.  And I’m forced to conclude that some people on the right have begun forming their own grievance industry in reaction to Black Lives Matter.”  I think what he means by that is that there are people who are continuing to profit by this strain and the controversy either in website clicks, click bait, audience to television and radio, so forth.  I think that’s what he’s talking about.

His real grievance, his real criticism is that he doesn’t see anybody involved actually trying to solve any of this.  And that’s true, starting at the White House on down that’s what’s missing in all this.  There’s no effort to solve any of this.  Whether the grievances are just, whether the complaints are just in some cases or not doesn’t matter.  There’s no effort to really solve this.  All that’s going on is more and more exploitation for personal gain.  The personal gain would be the advancement of a political agenda. It could be increased fundraising from which you siphon some money for your standard of living.

But there’s way too much benefiting happening here, way too much, and there isn’t any solving.  Nothing is oriented toward solving anything.  And that’s what grates on me.  Who among us wants the rest of our lives to be featuring this kind of stuff day in and day out, week in and week out?  What does this do to the nation’s morale?  What does this do to people’s overall attitude in the pursuit of happiness, life, liberty, what does all this do?

When you got this stuff hanging over your head every day, these constant allegations of racism, bigotry, sexism, that are bogus to begin with and then you have no effort to actually solve the problems people are bitching about?  It leads nowhere good, folks.  It leads nowhere positive.  It leads to a tipping point, it leads to a breaking point, it leads to a boiling over somewhere.

You can’t be engaged in all this.  You can’t create all this havoc.  You can’t start randomly shooting people, blowing things up not seeking a solution.  And there isn’t any solving going on.  Worse than that, there doesn’t seem to be any effort at solving anything, especially on the part of the provocateurs.

I’m reminded of Yasser Arafat.  It was obviously before he died, Bill Clinton was still in the White House.  And, you know, every president wants to be able to say they solved the Middle East peace crisis.  Every president wants to be able to say that they brought peace to the Mideast, which means peace between the Palestinians the Israelis, peace between the Islamists and the Jews, peace between the Muslims and the Christians in the Middle East and all that, every president yearns for that.

So Bill Clinton, after numerous summits at Camp David, finally offered Yasser Arafat everything he had been demanding over the years. Some of it outrageous. Some of it literally undoable.  But Clinton offered Arafat everything he wanted, and I think even a couple of bonus things.  What did Arafat do?  He left!  He got out of Camp David faster than you could say, “Get me Marine One.”  He was out of there on the way back to his Fatah headquarters, wherever they were.  He wanted no part of a solution.

He wanted no part of this being resolved in no way, shape, manner, or form.

He was offered everything he wanted.  What does it tell you?  They’re not after what they claim to be after.  You let them have it, you offer it to ’em, and they say no. And the same thing is what happened today.  You offer whoever these radical malcontents are what they want, and it’s not gonna solve anything.  Not gonna… They’re not gonna accept if, under the guise, “You don’t mean it? We don’t trust you! You couldn’t possibly be granting us everything.  No, no, no.  We don’t believe you,” and they would use that to further deepen resentment.

That’s what bothers me.

There’s gotta be an end to this. There’s gotta be a solution to this, after 200-some-odd years.  But look, it’s only getting worse.  And then we have this Pew survey:  “Race Relations More Negative Today Than Any Other Time This Century.” Sixteen years, big whoop! But 7-1/2 of those years include the presidency of the first African-American elected to the job in this country, and it’s gotten worse.  I remember somebody predicting that was gonna happen.  I’m not sure who it was.  Somebody predicted that was gonna happen, like a year before the election somebody predicted it. (interruption)

That’s right.  It was the guy who said, “I hope he fails.”

That’s right. That’s who it was.  Good memory, Snerdley.