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RUSH: Eric in Wichita, I’m glad you called, sir. You are on Open Line Friday on Thursday.

CALLER: Super mega dittos, Rush.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: Long-time listener. I agree with the majority of everything that you say, Mr. Limbaugh. But I just wanted to say I don’t think that you can quite understand what us as African Americans go through even considering what’s going on with Michael Vick and the prison system and things of that nature, I just don’t think you understand what we go through and how we feel about certain — how the justice system has treated us, how America has treated us. I don’t think you quite understand, because you’re not African American.

RUSH: You know, I’ve been hearing this complaint, this argument for many years, or as many years as I’ve been hosting the program. I’ve reacted to it in a number of different ways. It’s a tricky thing to say I can’t understand it. I know everything there is to know about slavery and I know and I have seen in my younger life blatant racism right in front of my eyes. It’s not a stranger to me. What I also see is that those days don’t exist anymore except in the minds and the imagination of people who for some reason can’t let go of it because it entitles them to be victims or whatever. There are plenty of successful, wowie zowie successful, black people in this country who have abandoned that way of thinking.

CALLER: Well, Rush, I understand and I agree with the majority of everything you say, but there again you can say that you can see it, and many of us have looked past that, yes we’ve looked past it, because we’ve been able to succeed and things of that nature, but —

RUSH: If you don’t give it up, it’s always going to be keeping you in prison.

CALLER: And we have given it up, Rush. What I’m getting at is no matter what we do as blacks or African Americans, no matter what we do, we were still in the sixties stigmatized, and we still, although we’ve given it up, we have grown, we surpassed it, but there is still that sense of racism across this country —

RUSH: Okay, let me stigmatize you, or let me offend you by saying that I am stigmatized, and you probably don’t understand one thing I go through in my life. Now, I’m not stigmatized because of my skin color, except in certain places. I am stigmatized because of what I think. I have members of the —

CALLER: So you know what I mean.

RUSH: Yeah, but —

CALLER: You understand what I’m saying.

RUSH: But wait a minute, now. I have federal officials trying to shut me down and end my career with a thing called the Fairness Doctrine. There are certain areas in the business that I am the most successful person in the world where I cannot work because of what I think. Now, I have not run around and bellyached and whined and moaned about it. I have accepted it as a badge of honor because I do not allow myself to believe that those people are better or more important than I am. Just the exact opposite. And I have found a way to work around it and found my niche here. I know what I’m good at. I’m doing what I was born to do.

CALLER: But Rush, you have in a sense bellyached about it because you continue — when it comes up, you have fought against it and you’ve talked about it. I wouldn’t say you’ve bellyached about it, or griped about it, you have beat the system, and you have —

RUSH: I gotta take a break here. Hang on. I want to finish this with you after the profit center time-out here.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: A moment has to last, and it does, thanks to Rush 24/7, our website. We go back to the phones now. Eric in Wichita, you were saying, sir, before I had to interrupt you to go to the profit center time-out?

CALLER: Well, Rush, I think my last statement was, there are points in even… You said that you are ridiculed, things because of your stance. I too am ridiculed not only because I’m African American. I’m also ridiculed as a black Republican. So I take that with a grain of salt and go in and do my business and act in a way that I’m going to act and appreciate the fact that people don’t like me and that’s their business. I’m going to allow myself to do the best I can with what I can for me and my family. But I just look at you and what you’re saying about Michael Vick, which he is going to cop a plea, and that does admit to guilt, things of that nature, but I think that if it wasn’t for who you are —

RUSH: It’s pretty hard to say he’s being railroaded when he’s going to do that, and it’s pretty hard for you to tell me that I don’t understand the black condition as it relates to people wanting to make a civil rights case out of Michael Vick.

CALLER: I don’t consider it a civil rights case.

RUSH: The NAACP is in on it now, so guess what it is?

CALLER: Well, you know, you and I have the same opinion about the NAACP, so…

RUSH: Well, amen, bro.

CALLER: (chuckles) I just think that in this instance, I wouldn’t say Michael Vick is being railroaded. I just don’t think that he’s worthy of all the punishment that it sounds like they’re trying to give to him, which is a federal offense. I just think it’s out of proportion.

RUSH: Let me tell you something. People don’t know this yet — and Eric, thanks much for the phone call — the state of Virginia is going to make a move on Vick, and if you think the punishment the feds are going to mete out here is anything, if they wanted to go all the way in the state of Virginia, he could get 40 years on state charges here! The feds, the maximum sentence here — if he would go to court, go to trial and lose — would be five to six years, so he’s hoping to get a year to 18 on the fed charges. He was hoping to get the state to get out of it, if he pled guilty to the feds, and the state doesn’t seem like they want to get out of it. You can talk about what people don’t understand, what I don’t understand about the black population and the way they look at that. I’ll tell you what I don’t understand, or can’t understand. I can’t understand what those dogs went through when they were beaten to death, when they were hanged, when they were electrocuted, when they were drowned. The argument here that I don’t understand what poor old Michael Vick is going through because he is black? This is not a racial issue. This is simple human decency. It’s nothing more than that, and there wasn’t any in this operation, and if the people want to start pouring their political agendas into this — and we got it now with the NAACP involved — it just makes ’em look foolish.

Anybody trying to defend this on a civil rights issue, look, I must tell you, I am offended when somebody tells me I don’t understand this because it’s cultural and that I’ve gotta change my view of this kind of cruelty because it’s cultural. I can’t believe that people that make the statement want us all to think that that’s part of their culture. Why would they? Or maybe they don’t. Maybe they’re advancing it as a defense and trying to help Vick. Let me explain one other thing here. I was discussing with Jeff here a moment ago the fact that I’m stigmatized like he thinks he is. We all are. Every one of us gets stigmatized for something, either the way we look or whatever. Forget skin color for a second. I’m not denying that exists. The way we look, the way we dress, the way we sound, everybody forms judgments about everybody — and there are lots of people in corporate circumstances of all races who are going to go no higher than where they are simply because the people above them look at them as odd, or no good, or they’ve reached their maximum potential. Nobody gets everything they want, and certainly not handed to them, and in the real world, when your existence is based on making yourself a victim and trying to get sympathy from everybody, you’re going nowhere!

You’re going to be miserable and you’re going to be unhappy, because even if you got all the sympathy in the world you wanted, what do you have then? You’ve still got nothing ’til you get off your duff and go do something! Everybody has obstacles to overcome. Now, Eric said that he’s heard me bellyache and whine and complain about things. Not within the context of being discriminated against! I’ve found ways to work around it. Everybody has to. It’s life, and it’s a shame to me that there are so many people in this country who are raised with the notion from the beginning they can first understand English, the first days, that they have no chance because the deck is stacked against them because of this or that, and the history that is applied to convince them that that argument’s true is 200-plus-years old, when there are role models that dispel every assertion they’re taught — and they’re taught to hate those people! They’re taught to resent them. It’s a crying shame, in the United States of America, in 2007. Do not misunderstand, my friends. I’m not saying there isn’t racism. I’m saying there is, and there’s sexism, and there is prejudice against the overweight. There’s prejudice against nerds. There’s prejudice against geeks — and believe me, every nerd knows who he is and every geek knows who he is, and they have to work around it, and they are geeks because we say they are, not because they identify themselves that way. They just have to adapt to it.

We can be cruel people. We can be nice, generous, the whole thing, too. In my case, anybody who knew me when I was growing up, knows this. You know, we’re all raised to want to be loved. We’re all raised to want to be liked. It’s not possible but we all want it. Nobody is raised to be hated. (Hitler, maybe.) Nobody wants to be hated when they grow up. People that have known me all my life will say a variety of things about me, positive and negative, but nobody would ever say I was a racist or a sexist or a bigot or a homophobe or any of these clichés that get attached to all of us who are conservative. So I start this radio show in August of 1988, and within six months, all these stories and criticisms are out there. I’m a racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe, mean-spirited, angry. The audience is filled with nothing but angry white men and all this stuff. I wasn’t trained to deal with that. I had no clue how to respond to that. I went through all kinds of (sigh) dilemmas over this, because my reputation was on the line. People that don’t even know me were just trying to destroy it, which was all new to me. I’m 37 years old when this is happening. This is 19 years ago. I won’t tell the whole story. I found a way to deal with it, and it’s the way I deal with it now, but it became obvious to me that because of the way I think and because of the way I speak on this radio show, I had shut myself out.

I have no chance of seeking entertainment business opportunities anywhere else. I had to carve the niche in radio –and I’m not complaining. I’m just saying this is something I had to deal with. You have to deal with whatever in your life, presents you obstacles. We all have to deal with it. We all have to overcome them. People who are not trained to do this, who are trained to remain in this ‘oh, woe is me’ victim status are being disserved, and they are disserving themselves — and it’s just a crying shame to see it happen when it is so unnecessary. There is no excuse for this kind of thinking or existence in this country anymore, and it survives because the leaders of the civil rights movement are financially invested in its survival. It’s how they earn their living. It is how they get and maintain their seats of power. They are not interested in emancipation. They love, for example, when a Don Imus moment happens. They love it! They go into gear. ‘All right!’ They get just as excited as the Drive-Bys get when a hurricane is on the way, and they send out their fundraising letters. It’s a vicious cycle, and all the while the problems that they tell their people that they have that make them victims of this, that and the other thing, are all pointed and labeled and blamed conservatives and Republicans! As I mentioned earlier, remember this quote that the president mentioned in his speech yesterday, a senator said (paraphrased), ‘Who cares about these people in Vietnam? They’re just a bunch of peasant farmers, subsistence farmers. What do they care? Why does it matter if their leader’s a communist dictator, a socialist commissar?’

This is a Democrat. It was J. William Fulbright, and he was William J. Clinton’s mentor — and J. William Fulbright was one of the original segregationists, and if you doubt that, just look at his statement on these poor peasant worthless farmers in Vietnam and Cambodia. Their lives to him were nothing, and this is a liberal Democrat. (whispering) ‘They care more about people than anybody else! We conservatives, we’re racist, mean-spirited. We’re cold-hearted.’ But people like Fulbright and Clinton, and all these other people? Yeah, they have the reputation of big hearts and lots of compassion! They go out of their way to protect these people who are downtrodden from the evils of people like Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and so forth — and it’s just the exact opposite. Yet the reality survives because the Democrats are smart. Jesse Jackson wouldn’t be Jesse Jackson without the Democratic Party, and neither would the Reverend Sharpton. They couldn’t exist without having seats of power at the Democrat Party power table, and this goes for Ralph Neas at the People for the [Un]American Way, and all these other civil rights groups. They deliver on Election Day. They deliver money. They are given status within the Democrat Party. It’s all about elections. It’s all about power and maintaining it. Have you ever wondered why all of these downtrodden, middle-class, miserable, unhappy Americans continually vote Democrat?

Have you ever been amazed by how they continue to complain to the very people they’re voting for, why things aren’t getting better, why they don’t have health insurance, why they don’t have lifetime retirement income, why they don’t have whatever it is they want? They’ve been voting for people for all these years promising that they’re gonna get that done and they’re going to take it away from the Republicans. Rich people are going to give it to them. It never happens, does it? Never happens! Yet they keep voting for them. We got a country half full of unsatisfied, malcontent, miserable, unhappy people precisely because of the people they vote for and because they are led by people who do not try to inspire them, who don’t tell them how good they can be, who don’t tell them what kind of opportunity exists in this country just waiting to be accessed. Occasionally, opportunity will knock on your door. Sometimes you’re minding your own business, and it will knock. You have to be willing to open the door and see what’s there. Some people won’t do that. (grumbling) ‘I don’t trust who’s ever on the other side of the door.’ So all of this is just — to me, as a conservative and as an American — is frustrating as hell to see so much potential being wasted and so much victimhood being sponsored and bought and paid for. This is one of the problems I had with all the illegal immigrants being granted amnesty. The country can’t take this. The country cannot take 12 to 20 more million people, and who knows how many new millions each year, becoming auto-victims, blaming America and certain Americans for their plight, which is exactly what the Democrat Party wanted to do with them.

I’m a little long in this segment, my friends. I must take a time-out. Therefore, the next busy broadcast segment will be shorter than normal. You have been warned.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I said, we all have to overcome obstacles in life, folks, and I’ve got many obstacles here before getaway day.

I’m thinking, by the way, of claiming a new title, and that new title would be ‘America’s Real Civil Rights Leader,’ because, ladies and gentlemen, as evidenced by my monologue in the last half hour of today’s excursion into broadcast excellence, I am the only American in public life offering real solutions to people who encounter all kinds of discrimination for whatever reasons. Unlike liberal complainers in the civil rights movement, I articulate and inspire people to try to find ways around whatever obstacles are in front of them, believe in the power of themselves, and as such, my friends, who better than me to assume the mantle of ‘Real Civil Rights Leader’? It does not take a village. You wait for the village, you’re going to be waiting and waiting and waiting until you are pushing up daisies. Do it yourself. Of course, when you say that, liberal critics will come back and say, ‘Oh, well, yeah, easy for you to say.’ I remember back during the homeless debates, which only really occur when Republicans are in the White House, but this is in the late eighties and early nineties, and Mitch Schneider — may he rest in peace — running around saying there were three million homeless and there weren’t.

We’d talk about it, why are these people, the ones that are capable, why don’t they just get a job? ‘Oh, easy for you to say,’ as though it was committing some kind of insensitivity crime to suggest that they do what every normal person does, and that’s work. Work is valuable in a whole lot of ways. People take their identity from it, sense of their self-worth; it’s where you achieve; it’s where you also learn a lot about other people. It is how you earn a living. Something the Kennedy family wouldn’t know, but it is the way you earn a living. Yet it is constantly ridiculed for some people: ‘Oh, yeah, easy for you to say.’ No, we’re trying to actually solve the problem here, rather than just try to get credit for big hearts by noticing the problem. ‘Oh, look at that person in the gutter. It’s so terrible. We gotta do something. Let’s do a rock concert!’ Yeah! They do the rock concert. The person is probably in the gutter while the concert is on. The concert is over, and the person is still in the gutter. But all those people think they have made a difference, and all the while they ridicule the rest of us for not having compassion or big hearts. It’s just exact opposite, as I said. Therefore, ladies and gentlemen, I, El Rushbo, in addition to being a Nobel Peace Prize nominee and a national treasure, I was even told recently by a caller that I am a prophet, fine and dandy. I am also the ‘Real Civil Rights Leader’ of this country.

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