RUSH: This Obama stuff, that stuff is serious. Opening these race wounds like this, taking us back 30, 40 years, making it look like no progress has been made, what Barack Obama has done… I’m going to say something here that might offend — not offend, but might make some uncomfortable. But it is clear to me that there has been a major transformation in Senator Obama, and it is this. Up until the videos of the Reverend Wright showed up, Barack Obama had succeeded in transcending race, and there were a lot of people — on the Republican side, too — who felt really good about the guy. He was smart, well-spoken. He was competent. He was able to excite crowds. He looked young and fresh and new. Furthermore, he was black, but it didn’t matter to him. He transcended race. Then the Reverend Wright stuff hits. There’s no escaping this, I don’t care what kind of speech you make. With average Americans… Forget the Drive-Bys. With average Americans, there’s no escaping that. There’s no escaping what people heard Reverend Wright say.
And if, as I have heard some Drive-By Media analysts say, most white people in America were shocked at Reverend Wright when we are told that Reverend Wright’s not that common in America in terms of black churches and what he said is not that uncommon in terms of what many black Americans believe… ‘White America was shocked! They thought so much more progress had been made on this,’ and so Obama, in dealing with this, has thrown his white grandmother under the bus and then yesterday drove the bus backwards and ran over her where he threw her under the bus, by calling her ‘a typical white person.’ It is clear that… This is the stuff, this is the part that might bother some of you. It is clear that Senator Obama has disowned his white half. He’s decided he’s got to go all in on the black side. Therefore… I saw this endorsement, Bill Richardson. Let’s grab sound bite 22. Bill Richardson showed up with goatee and a dangling mustache like Fu Manchu with a little goatee there. That’s not by accident, ladies and gentlemen. You know, there’s a big argument between the Hispanic community and black community over who is the official American minority, because the official American minority gets the goodies, and so there’s animosity. I’m thinking we might be looking at the Democratic ticket here. What little I was able to listen to because of commercial breaks and everything, Richardson was on fire. Here is the actual endorsement that we got today of Obama from Bill Richardson.
RICHARDSON: Barack Obama, you’re a leader who has shown courage, judgment, and wisdom throughout the years. (cheers) You understand the security challenges of the 21st Century, and you will be an outstanding commander-in-chief. (applause) Above all you will be a president who brings this nation together and restores us to American global leadership. Your candidacy — and this is an expression of your candidacy — is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for our nation, and you are a once-in-a-lifetime leader who will make every American proud to be an American, and I’m very proud today to endorse your candidacy for president. (cheers)
RUSH: Now, as I said earlier, there have never been any tell-all books on the Clinton administration from members of it, but I’ll tell you, a lot of Clinton people, ex-Clinton people are certainly endorsing the anti-Clinton. They run from them in droves here. Not all of them, but a lot of them are. I don’t know. Bill Richardson might have been be holding out to endorse whoever would make him VP, and the Clinton campaign might have said, ‘Sorry, bud, it’s not you,’ and Obama might have said, ‘Well, you’re in the running, and you’re in the top tier.’ I don’t know if they’ve made a deal yet, because Richardson was on fire, and Obama looked really beat down. He was hang dog. His head was hanging. He laughed a couple times toward the end of Richardson’s speech. Richardson was the one out there yelling and screaming and all animated and everything. So it’s going to be interesting. But clearly now the original initial attraction to Obama is gone, and it’s his doing, and now he’s had to shift gears.
One of the best things I may have ever read on race was posted yesterday at the AmericanThinker.com by a contributor there by the name of Ed Kaitz, and it’s entitled, ‘Obama’s Anger.’ Let me read you some excerpts of this. ‘Back in the late 1980s I was on a plane flying out of New Orleans and sitting next to me was a rather interesting and, according to Barack Obama, unusual black man. Friendly, gregarious, and wise beyond his years, we immediately hit it off. I had been working on Vietnamese commercial fishing boats for a few years based in southern Louisiana. The boats were owned by the recent wave of Vietnamese refugees who flooded into the familiar tropical environment after the war. Floating in calm seas out in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, I would hear tearful songs and tales from ex-paratroopers about losing brothers, sisters, parents, children, lovers, and beautiful Vietnam itself to the communists. In Bayou country I lived on boats and in double-wide trailers, and like the rest of the Vietnamese refugees, I shopped at Wal-Mart and ate a lot of rice.
‘When they arrived in Louisiana the refugees had no money (the money that they had was used to bribe their way out of Vietnam and into refugee camps in Thailand), few friends, and a mostly unfriendly and suspicious local population. They did however have strong families, a strong work ethic, and the ‘Audacity of Hope.’ Within a generation, with little or no knowledge of English, the Vietnamese had achieved dominance in the fishing industry there and their children were already achieving the top SAT scores in the state.’ This is Louisiana. ‘While I had been fishing my new black friend had been working as a prison psychologist in Missouri, and he was pursuing a higher degree in psychology. He was interested in my story, and after about an hour getting to know each other, I asked him point-blank why these Vietnamese refugees, with no money, friends, or knowledge of the language could be, within a generation, so successful. I also asked him why it was so difficult to convince young black men to abandon the streets and take advantage of the same kinds of opportunities that the Vietnamese had recently embraced.
‘His answer, only a few words, not only floored me but became sort of a razor that has allowed me ever since to slice through all of the rhetoric regarding race relations that Democrats shovel our way during election season: ‘We’re owed and [the Vietnamese] aren’t.’ In short, he concluded, ‘they’re hungry and we think we’re owed. It’s crushing us, and as long as we think we’re owed we’re going nowhere.’ A good test case for this theory is Katrina. Obama, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and assorted white apologists continue to express anger and outrage over the federal response to the Katrina disaster. But where were the Vietnamese ‘leaders’ expressing their ‘anger?’ The Vietnamese comprise a substantial part of the New Orleans population, and yet absent was any report claiming that the Vietnamese were ‘owed’ anything. This is not to say that the federal response was an adequate one, but we need to take this as a sign that maybe the problem has very little to do with racism and a lot to with a mind-set.
‘The mind-set that one is ‘owed’ something in life has not only affected black mobility in business but black mobility in education as well. Remember Ward Churchill? About fifteen years ago he was my boss. After leaving the fishing boats, I attended graduate school at the University of Colorado at Boulder. I managed to get a job on campus teaching expository writing to minority students who had been accepted provisionally into the university on an affirmative action program. And although I never met him, Ward Churchill, in addition to teaching in the ethnic studies department, helped to develop and organize the minority writing program. The job paid most of my bills, but what I witnessed there was absolutely horrifying. The students were encouraged to write essays attacking the white establishment from every conceivable angle and in addition to defend affirmative action and other government programs. Of the hundreds of papers that I read, there was not one original contribution to the problem of black mobility that strayed from the party line. … [M]ost of these students became ethnic studies or sociology majors because it allowed them to remain in disciplines whose orientation justified their existence at the university. In short, it became a vicious cycle.’
The piece goes on, and it’s got another page and a half here to go. ‘We now know that Barack Obama really has no interest in the ‘audacity of hope.” This is the second-to-last paragraph. ‘With his race speech, Obama became a peddler of angst, resentment and despair. Too bad he doesn’t direct that angst at the liberal establishment that has sold black people a bill of goods since the 1960s. What Obama seems angry about is America itself and what it stands for; the same America that has provided fabulous opportunities for what my black friend called ‘hungry’ minorities. Strong families, self-reliance, and a spirit of entrepreneurship should be held up as ideals for all races to emulate.’ ‘Eric Hoffer said: ‘…you do not win the weak by sharing your wealth with them; it will but infect them with greed and resentment. You can win the weak only by sharing your pride, hope or hatred with them.’ … In the end, we should be very suspicious about Obama’s anger and the recent frothings of his close friend Reverend Wright. Says Eric Hoffer: The fact seems to be that we are least open to precise knowledge concerning the things we are most vehement about. Vehemence is the expression of a blind effort to support and uphold something that can never stand on its own.’
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: This is David in Millinocket, Maine. It’s great to have you on the program, sir.
CALLER: Hello there, hey!
RUSH: Helloooo there!
CALLER: We’re owed? We’re owed? My large white ass, we’re owed. Oh, my gosh. If Snerdley’s comments to me on the phone motivated me to clarify my thoughts, this ‘we’re owed’ mentality pisses me off royally, Rush. I’d like to give a quick shout out, though, first at the two unhappy national-level politicians in the country right now: John Kerry and Andrew Cuomo. What must these two be thinking? Also a quick word to your former caller, earlier caller, Paris. I got rid of television reception 15 years ago last month, and I haven’t looked back.
RUSH: Well, that can improve anybody’s outlook.
CALLER: Oh, my gosh. Thanks to Mr. Snerdley’s comments, I’ve decided to kind of couch the question a little more delicately. It’s not about… For me, it’s not a question about race. It’s a question about opening up the floodgates and just how much more do we have to do as a society for people. I’m going to throw out the R-word, the other R-word, ‘reparations’ — Civil War-era reparations. Given Obama’s relations, given the preacher’s comments, the hate speech coming out of this guy, and Obama’s 20-year association with the guy, I just have to wonder whether or not a liberal Congress, the Congressional Black Caucus, civil rights leaders, and others are going to have heightened expectations about Civil War-era reparations. This is personal for me. This is not just a race or reparations.
RUSH: Well, we don’t know. This is one of the problems here that we don’t know. We have Obama’s 20-year association with this hatemonger. We know that he has subjected his two daughters to this hatemonger. We know that he has finally said that he has found some of what the hatemonger said repugnant. Yet he neither disowns nor dissociates himself from the man. He instead trashes white America in the form of throwing his grandmother under the bus. Now, I wonder if his grandmother was enough of a racist that when his grandmother found out that her daughter was going to marry Obama’s dad, who was Kenyan, black, if the grandmother said, ‘No, no, no, you can’t do this!’ I don’t know this, but wouldn’t a genuine racist have tried that? This is the woman that raised him! Now, we go back to Reverend Wright. Reverend Wright has spoken out in favor of reparations. There are quite a few civil rights leaders who have over the years. There have been some members of the Congressional Black Caucus who have. We cannot just sit here and assume that because of the way Obama has presented himself prior to Reverend Wright’s mass exposure, because up until that time…
This is what I mean by him transcending race. This guy has to go down there to Selma and put on a fake accent to make it look like he is down for the struggle. He has no direct link to the civil rights struggles of blacks in this country. He has none whatsoever. Oh, but he does, doesn’t he? No direct, but he’s got the cred, thanks to Reverend Wright. So, Reverend Wright’s a mentor. We don’t know if we’re looking at somebody here who, after they’re elected president, is going to move forward on reparations. We don’t know. We’d like to think, based on our impression of Obama before Reverend Wright, ‘Oh, he’s not. That’s kook stuff. It ain’t going to happen.’ But we don’t know, and with his reluctance to dissociate himself and disown Reverend Wright, and now with his transformation here into a full-fledged ‘black candidate’ as opposed to one who has transcended race, it’s a decent question only because we’d have to assume one way or the other. ‘I don’t think he would do that.’ I’m telling you, just two weeks ago nobody would have thought that that would be anywhere on Obama’s mind, until we learned about Reverend Wright. So I can’t answer it, and neither can anybody else — and to the extent that that concerns people, it may be relevant.