WEINGARTEN: The worst thing that happened was that midway through — and there was one point in which I was listening both to Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, which is a very, very bad thing to do if you are an unreconstructed liberal like I am, and because what you wind up doing is comparing them, and there’s no comparison. Rush Limbaugh is better. He is funnier, and uh, uh, he’s much more interesting. He’s — he’s mean, but — but he’s mean in a way that you don’t really get involved with. You — you know he’s kind of kidding. And so the worst thing that happened to me was that I found myself grudgingly respecting Rush Limbaugh, which is just a terrible thing to do if you’re a — a liberal. But gradually what happens is, you get into it, and — and I find — I found things to really despise about his eventually. Yes.
RUSH: You know what’s interesting about this? This is Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post Magazine. Jeffrey Lord has a piece today at the American Spectator Online bouncing off a famous quote of Bill Buckley’s in his book, Up From Liberalism, called ‘Liberal Mania,’ and basically the theory is that these liberals all live in their little cocoons and anything that interrupts their worldview… We’ve made this point here on this program before. Anything that interrupts and penetrates their little cocoon and their worldview sends them into conniption fits; they actually become manic and don’t know how to deal with it because they’ve never had to. This is one of the reasons why Geraldine Ferraro is reacting the way she’s reacting. Liberals are never called racists by the Drive-By Media. Clinton, after South Carolina, blew a gasket, because the Drive-By Media gives these people puff-piece treatment — and now the Drive-Bys are turning on Hillary and they’re turning on Bill, and this is causing mania, Liberal Mania. The same thing happened to this Weingarten guy. He’s got this little liberal cocoon worldview that he has lived in for all these years, and he listens to this program, and he almost got sucked in. He almost got sucked in, but, finally, for his own salvation, he found reason to hate me. There’s one more bite here, though, that I want you to hear. Michel Martin said, ‘Well, what did you despise about Limbaugh?’
WEINGARTEN: Well, you know, he’s very much, uh, against Obama, which is — which is fair game, you know, he’s, uh… Limbaugh will attack Obama in areas where he’s vulnerable, and that’s fine, you know, but — but then he discovered he was saying his name kind of interestingly, O-bama, and I decided this was a racial thing, this was like ‘yo mama.’
MARTIN: Yeah. To try to make him the black guy.
WEINGARTEN: Yeah, make him the black guy.
RUSH: See what I mean? (laughing) They are that stupid. The whole point here… Read Jeffrey Lord’s piece today in the American Spectator Online. They hear me pronounce — and I’ve been doing it earlier in the program today, just to goose ’em — ‘O-bama,’ and they haven’t the slightest clue. They think it’s a racial thing? They think that I’m trying to say ‘yo mama.’ Everybody knows Obama’s black! So what? You know, I’ll tell you what, Mr. Weingarten. You need to look at your buddies on the left if you want to find racism in this campaign. There is a virtual civil war going on in the Democrat Party: Jeremiah Wright, Geraldine Ferraro, the Clintons, all this talk about Obama not being black enough and then is he too black and is he not black enough, ‘What about his white half?’ You had the Clintons’ campaign people in New Hampshire talking about not just his drug usage but perhaps he might have been selling drugs, all with racial undertones — and you hear me pronounce ‘O-bama’ that way and think that I am doing it in a racial sense, and it’s that that made him hate me? (interruption) Well, it’s not that I’m mispronouncing it.
Snerdley says, ‘How do you pronounce it in a ‘white’ way?’ I guess the white way you’re supposed to say Obama but sometimes, you know, I will say ‘O-bama’ just as I say the, ‘uh, Reve’rend Jacks’nnn.’ What these people do not understand is broadcasting. They do not understand the various things that skilled professionals do in media to stand out from all the other noise. As such, they are so sensitive and so attuned to the notion that all conservatives are racists that when they hear something like this, they use their cliche and their own prejudice and their own bias to attach a meaning to the way I’m pronouncing it. One of the things that’s always amazed me — and I think we can all agree here that in terms of radio and media, the Rush Limbaugh program is pretty prominent and has enjoyed a lot of success; major, major success. But because the left so despises my political effectiveness — they so hate me because of my political effectiveness — they never stop to think of the professionalism, the talent, the broadcast achievement that is part of this show. It just totally escapes ’em, because I’m so good at the other stuff, too.