RUSH: I’m sure you know this by now. Reverend Wright is out there. There are excerpts of his interview with Bill Moyers. And let me explain something to you about Bill Moyers. A lot of people in e-mails ask, ‘Rush, does Bill Moyers actually agree with this guy? Why is Bill Moyers giving this guy all this time?’ Let me explain Bill Moyers to you. Bill Moyers despises the New Media. He despises that his Old Media is no longer a monopoly. He may find… I don’t know what his thoughts on Jeremiah Wright are; I don’t care. All he knows is that nobody would know about Jeremiah Wright, in his opinion, if it weren’t for the New Media. So his attack is on the New Media. His willing participation in the attempt to sanitize Reverend Wright is not really to help Reverend Wright. It is to get back at the New Media. He despises us, he hates us, and Reverend Wright was brought to the public attention by us. So this is Moyers’ reason. Then you have what Wright himself is saying.
Wright was asked by Moyers, ‘What are your thoughts on Obama here and all,’ and Reverend Wright said, ‘Well, look, he’s saying what he has to say as a politician, and I’m saying what I say as a preacher.’ Now, you can interpret that one or two ways, ladies and gentlemen. He may be throwing Obama under the bus. A lot of people are interpreting it that way. Because what he’s basically saying is, ‘Look, we all know that Obama doesn’t believe half the stuff he’s saying. He just has to say what he says. We know that Obama had to criticize me, but he really doesn’t dislike me. He just had to do this for politics.’ This is not good to say this about a messiah. It’s not good to say this about somebody who’s going to bring hope and change and unity and all that. The second interpretation is — I think there’s some validity to that, but I also think this is going on — the Obama campaign and the Democrat Party realize they have got to sanitize this guy. They have got to put him out there as a teddy bear, and that’s their hope.
Now, it’s a roll of the dice because it doesn’t take much to get old Reverend Wright revved up, but he’s out there; he was very gentle, and he was very happy. There were a couple of moments where he almost launched into sermon behavior, but he reined it in. He’s going to be at the National Press Club. The whole point of this is to put him out there so the American people can see him this way so that then the campaign can say, ‘This guy? He’s harmless! He works with prisons. He works with AIDS relief. He has soup kitchens. This is one of the greatest Americans around, a former Marine.’ This is the primary purpose of the Jeremiah Wright Sanitization Tour that begins tonight with Bill Moyers on PBS.
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RUSH: Reverend Jeremiah Wright, ladies and gentlemen. Let’s review. On this program, as opposed to McCain campaign, we don’t want you to forget the man who Barack Obama ‘cannot disown any more than he can disown’ his racist white grandmother here’s a montage of sermons — well? Snerdley’s in there laughing, but see? This is the thing. It sounds funny, but it’s absolutely the truth. We don’t. Here at the EIB Network, we are not going to let anybody forget the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, a man Obama ‘cannot disown any more than he can disown’ his racist white grandmother. That’s what he said! Here’s the montage of the best of Jeremiah Wright.
WRIGHT (screaming): Barack knows what it means to be a black man living in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people! [snip] Hillary ain’t never been called a nigger! [snip] Bill did us just like he did Monica Lewinsky!
CONGREGATION: (cheers)
WRIGHT: He was riding dirty. [snip] In white America, US of KKKA: black men turning on black men. [snip] I am sick of Negroes who just do not get it. [snip] Not God bless America, God (bleep) America! It’s in the Bible. For killing innocent people, God (bleep) America! [snip] (Screaming) And now we are indignant because of stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards!
CONGREGATION: (cheers)
WRIGHT: America’s chickens are coming home…to roost.
RUSH: Those are just the highlights. And let us not forget that we know of all this simply because the Reverend Wright’s church was proudly selling DVDs of these sermons. Now we move on to PBS. Tonight, Bill Moyers’ Journal will feature an interview with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the official pastor of Democrat Barack Obama. Here are excerpts. They released them. They were over TV last night, but if you’ve missed them, here is Reverend Wright commenting on the controversy surrounding his controversy.
WRIGHT (speaking calmly): When something is taken — like a sound bite for a political purpose — and put constantly over and over again, looped in the face of the public, that’s not a failure to communicate. Those who are doing that are communicating exactly what they want —
RUSH: Hold it just a second. I can’t sit here. Hold it. I cannot sit here and listen to this and not say anything. Nothing was ‘looped.’ These are pretty lengthy sound bites. Let me tell you about looped, Reverend Wright. Put that back to the top, Mike. Let me tell you about looped. I have vast firsthand experience at being looped on video with my video sped up. I have vast experience with being lied about on that looped tape. You all remember the Michael J. Fox controversy here during the campaign of 2006. You were not looped, sir. You were not taken out of context, and you were not… (sigh) Well, the length of the sound bites in question here are not just little snippets. They’re trying to say, ‘Oh, they take snippets of what he said.’ These are from your own released DVDs! Here. I’ll shut up here and we’ll listen to the whole thing again.
WRIGHT: When something is taken — like a sound bite for political purpose — and put constantly over and over again, looped in the face of the public. That’s not a failure to communicate. Those who are doing that are communicating exactly what they want to do which is to paint me as some sort of fantastic — or as the learned journalist from the New York Times called me, a ‘wackadoodle.’ It’s to paint me as something; something’s wrong with me. There’s nothing wrong with this country. There’s nothing — or it’s policies. We’re perfect, we are — we are — Our hands are free. Our hands have no blood on them. That’s — that’s not a failure to communicate. The lesson that’s be — being communicated by the sound bites is exactly what those pushing those sound bites want to communicate.
RUSH: Unreal. It’s just unreal. But he knows (and I don’t even talk about Moyers) he has a sympathetic media, and the whole purpose of this is to sanitize Reverend Wright; so that when he’s through with this sanitization tour, the media can say, ‘See? He’s harmless. He’s a friendly guy! He loves his country. He does a lot of charitable work. Those sound bites were taken out of context, and they were looped over and over again, and the worst was made to look when it wasn’t really the worst — and some of those things he didn’t even say himself. He was quoting other people, but the people that quoted him made it look like he was saying it for himself,’ blah, blah, blah. You know how this is going to go. This is a coordinated effort. Some people think, I have heard, that Wright is mad at Obama and is doing this as a freelancer on his own. No, ladies and gentlemen, that’s not the point here. You got a radical like Ayers or radical like Obama or radical like Wright, and they want Obama elected. This is far more serious, I think, than a lot of people understand. Moyers then said, ‘Well, what do you think they wanted to communicate about you?’
WRIGHT: I think they wanted to communicate that I am, uh, unpatriotic, that I am un-American, that I’m filled with hate speech, that I have a cult at Trinity United Church of Christ — ‘and, by the way, guess who goes to his church? Hint, hint, hint. That’s what they wanted to communicate.
MOYERS: What did you think when you began to see those, uh, very brief sound bites circulating as they did?
WRIGHT: I thought it was unfair. I felt it was unjust. I felt it was untrue. I felt that those who were doing that, were doing it for some very devious reasons.
RUSH: Twilight Zone time. Alternate universe time. This is no different than that guy Josh Steiner. Was that his name? The guy used to work for the Clinton administration. There was some scandal they were involved in, and he got called up to Congress to testify, and they said, ‘Look, you wrote right here in your dairy…’ and he said, ‘Yeah, I lied to my dairy.’ He actually said this in testimony on Capitol Hill. ‘I lied to my dairy.’ Well, it’s no different than Monica Lewinsky. Hillary said ‘right-wing conspiracy.’ It was almost as though we hired Lewinsky. We got her in the White House; we ordered the pizza. She went and picked up the pizza, brought it to the Oval Office, and the Lewinsky started. It’s like we did that. We put the words in Reverend Wright’s mouth. They’re trying to sanitize the guy. One more bite before we go to the break. Bill Moyers: ‘Did you ever imagine you would come to personify the black anger that so many whites fear?’
WRIGHT: No, I — I did not. I — I have been preaching since I was ordained 49 years ago.
RUSH: I can’t take this.
WRIGHT: I pointed this out to some persons in Chicago who find all of this new to them, that the stance I took in standing against apartheid along with our denomination back in the seventies — and putting a ‘Free South Africa’ sign in front of the church —
RUSH: See?
WRIGHT: — put me at odds with the government. Our denomination’s defense of the Wilmington Ten and Ben Chavis put me at odds with the establishment.
RUSH: Ben Chavis?
WRIGHT: So being at odds with policies, uh, is nothing new to me. The blowup and the blowing up of a sermon preached ten, 15, seven, six years ago —
RUSH: Two years ago.
WRIGHT: — and now becoming a media event; again, not the full sermon —
RUSH: Last year.
WRIGHT: — but snippets from the sermon, the sound bites; having made me the targets of — of hatred? Yes, that is something very new and something very, very unsettling.
RUSH: You see, folks? We’re just dummkopfs. When he was into his anti-American screed and his hateful diatribes, that’s not what he did. That’s just how we’re interpreting it. So it’s all our fault, and it’s our fault because of the way devious minds cut up the tapes and ‘looped’ them — and then furthermore, it’s not even true. He didn’t say those things. He didn’t say what he said! He didn’t say it. And Moyers is — you should see this. Moyers is sitting there nodding pensively. He didn’t say it. So you who have heard these Reverend Wright tapes, what you’re to take away from this was, and is, is, ‘He didn’t say it.’
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RUSH: Okay, just two more sound bites from Reverend Wright and then back to your phone calls. Next question from Bill Moyers: ‘In that speech at Philadelphia, he had to say some hard things about you. How did those words…? How did it go down with you when you heard Barack Obama say those things about you?’
WRIGHT: It went down very simply. He’s a politician; I’m a pastor. We speak to two different audiences. And he says what he has to say as a politician.
RUSH: Uh-huh!
WRIGHT: I say what I have to say as a pastor. Those are two different worlds. I do what I do. He does what politicians do. So that what happened in Philadelphia, where he had to respond to the sound bites, he responded as a politician.
RUSH: Whoa ho-ho-ho, baby! Well, the bloom is off the messiah rose. He’s just a politician! Reverend Wright has just told us: all he is, is a politician. And that’s exactly right. This notion that… Folks, I want to tell you something. It is not possible… How old is this country? Two hundred and twenty-five-plus years. In all of our political history, it is no longer possible for a politician to come along who is new, who is unique, who’s got ideas that have never before been advanced, who has a charisma that has never before been present. It is not possible. We’ve had ’em all. We’ve had the bottom of the barrel, and we’ve had our messiahs. There’s nothing different about Barack Obama than any of them, except he’s only got a couple years in the Senate; nobody knows much about his past.
We’re trying to learn about it. He’s benefiting from media coverage. He’s just a guy. He is just a left-wing, radical guy. There is nothing special, nothing brand-new, nothing at all that American politics has never seen before; and Reverend Wright just as much as said so. ‘Well, he’s a politician.’ He had to answer to his ‘audience.’ ‘I’m a pastor; we speak to two different audiences.’ ‘He says what he has to say as a politician.’ He’s just a politician, and he’s just one of countless politicians who have trod the American political landscape, and that landscape is strewn with the carcasses of many a politician who thought they were brand-new and unique and unlike any who had ever trod that landscape before. Here is the final bite. Bill Moyers: ‘In the 20 years that you have been Obama’s pastor, have you ever heard him repeat any of your controversial statements as his opinion?’
WRIGHT: No. No. Absolutely it is not. I don’t talk to him about politics, and so here at a political event, he goes out as a politician and says what he has to say as a politician. I continue to be a pastor who speaks to the people of God about the things of God.
RUSH: Reverend Wright, we are not stupid, sir. You know, we have so much damn stupidity at the top levels of American politics today, it’s depressing. We have some genuine idiots. You may at time preach the Word of God-d, but every sound bite we have heard, ever excerpt has been a political statement! Once again he says here, ‘I don’t talk to Barack about politics.’ I don’t believe that! For twenty years they have known one another. They don’t talk about politics? That’s a lie. It has to be. I’m sorry! I’m sorry, ‘lie’ is too harsh. That has to be a ‘misstatement.’ He had a political event. He had to go out as a politician, say what he ‘has to say’ as a politician? I thought Obama spoke of visions (gasp!), truth (gasp!), change (gasp!), future (gasp!), unique (gasp!), heartfelt honesty (gasp!), unlike anyone had ever spoken of before (gasp!); and now his pastor comes along and punctures the balloon.
Well, the balloon has been punctured a while ago, but if there’s any of it still floating up there, the pastor just grabbed a BB gun and finished off the balloon. He’s just a politician. He’s just saying what he has to say as a politician, which means he may not have even meant it. He had to say what he had to say as a politician. Now, some of you might be asking, ‘What’s Bill Moyers doing here?’ It has nothing to do with Bill Moyers liking what the guy said, although he might. My theory on why Moyers is doing this and giving the guy airtime, is Moyers hates the New Media. We have destroyed his little Camelot, his little monopoly. You don’t know. He just one of many literally detest the changes in the media landscape; and since we are perceived as the as the Evil Ones (gasp!) who have brought to the American people’s attention the rantings and lunatic ravings of the separatist, hate-filled anti-American Reverend Wright; we have to be gotten even with. So if Moyers is asked to help rehabilitate the man and the sanitization tour, he puts his hand up, ‘I’ll be first,’ because he doesn’t like us. It’s not about Reverend Wright as far as he’s concerned.
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RUSH: So let’s review, shall we? The Reverend Wright said that he never talks politics with Barack Obama and yet from the pulpit of his church, we hear the line (Wright Impression): ‘Bill Clinton was doing dirty with Monica Lewinsky, ‘riding dirty.’ Hillary Clinton ‘has never been called’ the N-word!’ Now, what is that if it’s not politics? (interruption) I know it’s not true. He didn’t say it. In normal circumstances, politics, I could deal with it. But literally, this week… I have trouble interacting with arrogant condescension. The superiority of literal empty suits, glittering jewels of colossal ignorance who think that they’re five times as smart as everybody else; and it’s so obvious. We’re dealing with some genuine stupidity at the highest levels of our politics. Having my intelligence insulted like this… I mean, you laugh at it for a while, but one of these people is going to be elected.