RUSH: Reverend Sharpton’s National Action Network convention. Last Friday, this is Mrs. Clinton.
HILLARY: The abuses that have gone on in the last six years, I don’t think we know the half of it yet. (laughter) You know, when I walk into the Oval Office in January 2009, I’m afraid I’m gonna lift up the rug (screaming) and I’m gonna see so much stuff under there. (applause) You know — you know, what is it about us always having to clean up after people?
RUSH: Oh, hardy-har-har-har. You’re the last person, Mrs. Clinton, that ought to be talking about what anybody would find on the Oval Office rug. Of all the things to say, not only do we not want to know what we’d find… If anybody knows what’s on the Oval Office rug, it would be Mrs. Clinton, on it or under it. But here she is using this black dialect again. By the way, this demeaning reference to the fact that they’re janitors or custodial workers or cleaning people? She sits there and says, ‘You know, what is it about us always having to clean up after people?’ When’s the last time you cleaned up after anything but your husband and those sordid messes of his? — and we’re not talking about dirt, soil, that kind of thing. This is just so demeaning. It’s pandering. It’s no different than when Don Imus called Gwen Ifill of the New York Times the cleaning lady getting the White House assignment. (interruption) What, Mr. Snerdley? What? (interruption) What do you mean, ‘Not if you believe it’? (interruption) Well, do you really…? Snerdley says that that’s her view, that America looks at black people as cleaning people. I think she’s telling us her view, not America’s view. Is that what you mean? Okay, it’s her view. All right, then the liberals are sharing with us their perception, their vision of what black America is all about: downtrodden maids, be custodians, janitors, chauffeurs, this kind of thing is how they see them, and that’s how they want them to see themselves as constantly downtrodden, and of course it gets this big standing O and so forth. Let’s go back. Let us listen to her back in March at the First Baptist Church down in Selma, Alabama.
HILLARY: Let us say with one voice the words of James Cleveland’s great freedom hymn, ‘I don’t feel no ways tired. I come too far from where I started from. Nobody told me that the road would be easy. I don’t believe he brought me this far to leave me.’
RUSH: Anybody else does this and they’re going to be tarred and feathered as pandering, speaking in a demeaning tone — and it is. It’s degrading and demeaning to the people in her audience, but maybe it’s not. I don’t know. I didn’t see a snapshot of the audience. Now, Obama, followed this, and he had to go out there and prove that he can speak this way, too. But the question that always surrounds Obama, even when he goes out and tries to imitate Mrs. Clinton’s dialect, is: Is he down for the struggle?
OBAMA: There’s something humming down here. Oh, that’s som’body’s BlackBerry. That’s Sharpton’s BlackBerry. Is that Hillary calling?
RUSH: Now, keep in mind this is the day where BlackBerry service had blacked out. Friday was a bad day for BlackBerry, Thursday and Friday. I never lost mine. Well, I lost mine on Saturday a bit. I lost receivability. But nevertheless there’s the black dialect for the Urban National Network and so forth. Let’s go back to March 5th again. This is Selma, Alabama, and this is Obama talking about having been in Selma ‘befo’.’
OBAMA: This is the site of my conception. I am the fruits of your labor. I am the offspring of the move-ment. So when people ask me whether I’ve been to Selma befo’, I tell ’em I’m coming home.
RUSH: Okay, so he’s trying to illustrate here that he is down for the struggle. This next bite, this is at the National Urban Network, Obama says that he shouldn’t get black votes just because he’s black.
OBAMA: I should not get the support of the African-American community simply because I’m African-American. I don’t believe in that. That is not what America is about.
RUSH: Well, you’d better change your attitude, because Hillary certainly thinks that. That’s exactly what Hillary thinks. I guess they’ve patched it up, folks. I guess Sharpton and Obama patched it up since Obama showed up at Sharpton’s big whoop.
(Playing of ‘Barack the Magic Negro [That’s What the LA Times Called Him]” Parody Song)
RUSH: Before we go to the break, I have a quick question.
(Continued playing of song.)
RUSH: You think Hillary Clinton could use one square of toilet paper?
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here’s the audio sound bite from last Saturday, of Barack Obama at Sharpton’s convention.
OBAMA: These issues that the Urban Action Network talks about.
AUDIENCE: National! National Action Network!
OBAMA: National.
RUSH: He mispronounced it, and the whole crowd shouts out the correction.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, before we leave the subject of Sharpton and Obama and Hillary and the National Action Network convention, on Saturday the Washington Post published an editorial called, ‘The State of Black America — The Urban League has some ideas worth pursuing.’ Now, let me preface this and set it up by reminding everybody what we have said, what I have said on this program from time immemorial.
As conservatives, what do we want? We want the best for every American. We want every American to have the freedom of opportunity to pursue their passion with as few obstacles and obstructions placed in their way. We believe in the potential and the possibility of the individual, as conservatives. We think that most people have far more potential and have far more ability than they even know — and the sad reason for that is that they are not raised this way, or they are not instructed this way. They are not told of their potential. They’re not made to feel special. They’re not made to feel as though they can rise above the normal rigors of life. They are instead told — not just minorities, not just African-Americans here but a whole bunch of people — are beaten down by their parents, beaten down by peers. With the constant barrage of daily doom and gloom apocalyptic news stories, it is no wonder that people in this country in large measure feel apocalyptic and feel tumultuous and in chaos. We believe, unlike liberals who look at the average citizen with contempt, they look at the average citizen, they see no potential, no possibility. They must see them that way otherwise there would be no need for liberals to help these incompetent boobs go through the rigors of life as relatively unscathed and undamaged as possible.
They look at average Americans and see hopelessness. They look at average Americans with a condescension and an arrogance that in the eyes of the liberals says, ‘Only I, am smart enough to overcome all this, but these poor people, because of racism, sexism, bigotry, homophobia, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, have no clue, no prayer, and it’s all because of the majority, the power base in this country that keeps their foot on their necks and so forth.’ We believe, as conservatives, that every individual having the freedom that exists in this country has the potential to be great, has the potential to at least be what they want, has the ability to realize and further their ambition via the application of excellence and effort. We believe that people must be informed and motivated and inspired because we also know that most people don’t have within them what it takes to get everything they’ve got out of themselves. It’s true for most people. That’s why you think back to your favorite teachers, when you get older and mature, are the ones that worked you to the bone and got more out of you than you thought you had.
It may not have been your favorites. You may not have had any fun in the class but that’s who you end up remembering, as well as the teachers you played pranks on in my case. The American left has no such rosy view of individuals in this country, nor do they of the country itself. So I just want to get that on the table. That’s the pretext for giving you the details of this story in the Washington Post on Saturday. ”Black America is at a tipping point,’ said National Urban League President Marc H. Morial in releasing the organization’s annual ‘State of Black America’ report on Tuesday. ‘We can celebrate a great deal of success, but we have a number of struggles to address.’ Successes include Fortune 100 chief executives, a candidate for president with widespread financial and popular support, and an increasing presence in the middle class. But the struggles, particularly for black men, require a sense of urgency not only from government but also from African Americans themselves.’
Well, let me just pause right there. There are plenty of middle class and upper class black Americans, and what happens to them? If they happen to not be liberal, they are excoriated. They are held up for ridicule. They’re called ‘Uncle Toms’ or they’ve gotten there by being ‘too white’ or whatever. They are criticized. There are all kinds of great role models in black America, in the middle class, the upper middle class and above, and they’re seldom held up that way. They’re not even cited.
‘According to this report from the National Urban League, ”African American men are more than twice as likely to be unemployed as white males and make only 75 percent as much a year. They’re nearly seven times more likely to be incarcerated,’ that’s in jail, for those of you in Rio Linda, ‘and their average jail sentences are 10 months longer than those of white men [for the same offenses]. In addition, young black males between the ages of 15 and 34 years are nine times more likely to die of homicide than their white counterparts and nearly seven times as likely to suffer from AIDS.” Well, likely to die from homicide. One of the whole subjects of the Reverend Sharpton’s convention over the weekend was what to do about gang lyrics in ‘popular’ music, in rap songs and so forth. I don’t know how that ended up, by the way. It probably got swept under the rug that Mrs. Clinton is going to have to clean up after she’s elected president. ‘Topping [Mr. Morial’s] agenda is universal childhood education through public and private schools, starting at age 3.’
Need you hear any more of this? ‘Universal childhood education through public and private schools, starting at age 3.’ I hate to tell Mr. Morial, but we’ve got it. We have universal childhood education, maybe not in private schools because it’s the civil rights leadership that opposes vouchers. But everybody’s required to go to school from the first grade on, a lot of people in kindergarten and pre-K. We already got this, and it’s not working, and that’s why we need job training centers for people that graduated and are unable to read their diplomas. We have Head Start. We have Head Head Start. We have school breakfast. We have school snack. We have school lunch. Even in the summertime, we get all that when the school’s out! What in the world is he talking about? — which leads to the point. ‘Head Start has proven track record.’ No, it doesn’t. Head Start is rife with sucking up more money without showing results. It’s been in place for at least… How long has Head Start been out there? Two decades? Maybe more? The point is, every solution he proposes has already been implemented. This is the sad thing. This breaks my heart. Everything he proposes has been in place for years. You can boil the solutions of Mr. Morial down to this. Well, all of them except one. They all involve the federal government or public education to spend more money than we already are.
My question would be this. When will people like Mr. Morial understand that the federal government and more money are the two reasons for the very problems he laments in this report regarding black men? More money has not helped for the past ten years. It hasn’t helped for the past 20. It hasn’t helped for the past 30. I have received calls from black women on this program who say that this kind of federal money actually created, or helped to destroy the black family, by taking the place of fathers. All the welfare and the whatever you want to call it, all the money that Mr. Morial says is still not enough, the federal government became the surrogate father, and the father didn’t happen to hang around and accept responsibility — and it’s not me saying this. I’ve had countless black women call the program and make this point, some of them quite passionately. It’s a rat hole. It’s throwing this money down, and there’s no evidence it’s working. At what point do you look at the current prescriptions for these problems and say, ‘They’re not working,’ and come up with something else? Well, the answer is never if you’re a liberal, because you’re never to examine results, as a liberal. You are only to examine ‘intentions,’ and of course these people’s intentions are great and honorable.
‘At least they’re trying to do something,’ even though they have been accomplishing nothing, and it’s for decades that the accomplishments haven’t been mounting up. It’s for decades that the failures have. Yet the Washington Post, ‘Urban League has some ideas worth pursuing.’ By the way: ‘The Urban League’s report calls for ‘greater experimentation with all-male schools and longer school days.’ While we have some questions about single-sex education, parents must have more choice in their children’s education.’ Really? There’s no mention of vouchers in this story in the Washington Post. I don’t know about Mr. Morial’s report, but that’s the one that would give parents the choice that the Washington Post says black parents must have. They must have more choice. It’s being denied them by the very organizations that issue these reports! It’s being denied them by leftists and liberals all across the country. So it’s just… Folks, I have to tell you, it’s sad. The evidence that the other way works, is all over this country. The evidence that there are ways of accomplishing what Mr. Morial wants to accomplish without the same failing prescriptions, are all over the country. Yet, for some reason, they’re not seen or they are seen and ignored, or they are considered threats to the continuing viability of the civil rights movement. I suspect it’s the latter.