RUSH: This is Bea in Kingston, New York. Bea, I’m glad you waited. I appreciate your patience. Hello.
CALLER: Oh, hello, Rush! And mega educated conservative homeschooling mom to my Rush Babies dittos.
RUSH: Thank you!
CALLER: Oh, it is just wonderful to talk to you after ten years. I was listening to you this morning talking about the whole Spanish ad and getting ready to go out with my kids on a little errand, and I’ve been holding, but it’s been wonderful, and it hit me like a bolt of lightning: You or the McCains or the Republicans need to take out an ad in Spanish to combat this Obama ad.
RUSH: I disagree.
CALLER: Why?
RUSH: I am not going to insult the Hispanic people in these four states by putting out an ad in Spanish. We could do it in English or I could do it on this radio show, but I’m not going to hide what I do, I’m not going to hide what I say in some language that’s not English that only a few select people can hear. This whole thing, this whole thing is just viciously vile. It is openly stoking racism. It is disgraceful what Obama has done here.
CALLER: Absolutely. It’s contemptible, and I agree with you a hundred percent, then do it in both languages. If we need to fight fire with fire, which I believe we do, then we need to play by their rule book, the Obama/Chicago politico rule book, we need to play the same way. We need to get our truth out there, the truth, the only truth in any way possible. Obviously they’re getting the lies out there in any way possible. We need to get the truth out there in any way possible. So I think somebody out there needs to hear it and we need to combat it with the truth, in whatever languages it takes, in my humble estimation.
RUSH: Well, I might call President Bush to do it. He speaks Spanish. (laughing) Look, you know, I understand what you’re saying, and I could be wrong. What percentage of the population in Florida — I don’t know this, so I’m seeking information, we could probably find out some guesstimates here. What percentage of the Hispanic population in these four states — Florida, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada — do not speak English? Do you think it’s a pretty significant number? I know they don’t speak English at Miami International Airport. I know you need an interpreter when you go in there just to board the airplane, but throughout the whole city? Well, I’ve never encountered this. I go to Miami a lot. I never encountered this. Well, don’t give me this ‘other Miami’ business. I go to Miami. Thanks out there, Bea. We, of course, will consider this.
This might be an opportune time here to share with you how the Drive-By Media dealt with this. There are two people in the Drive-By Media that dealt with this straight up. Now, what happened, we finished the program, maybe it was right before the program ended, I got a note, an e-mail note from Jonathan Martin at The Politico, and he said, ‘I see Obama has dinged you. Do you want to reply?’ I sent him the transcript of the Update from 2006, which is a parody of Mexican immigration law, and it was from that parody that they took the phrase, ‘You shut your mouth or you get out,’ and attributed it to me in the Obama ad in these four states, and then there was another statement from me that they pulled called, ‘Stupid and unskilled Mexicans,’ and that was from 1993 and a NAFTA debate. Jake Tapper and Jonathan Martin at The Politico got this right on the money. Let me read to you what Jake Tapper said at the ABC blog entitled: ”Political Punch’ — Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., has launched a new Spanish-language TV ad that seeks to paint Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., as anti-immigrant, even tying the Republican to his longtime conservative talk-radio nemesis Rush Limbaugh.
‘As first reported by the Washington Post, Obama’s ad features a narrator saying: ‘They want us to forget the insults we’ve put up with…the intolerance…they made us feel marginalized in this country we love so much.’ The screen then shows these two quotes from Limbaugh: ‘…stupid and unskilled Mexicans’ — Rush Limbaugh. ‘You shut your mouth or you get out! — Rush Limbaugh. The narrator then says, ‘John McCain and his Republican friends have two faces. One that says lies just to get our vote…and another, even worse, that continues the policies of George Bush that put special interests ahead of working families. John McCain…more of the same old Republican tricks.” Now, forget me for a second. This is just absurd because Bush and McCain were both for amnesty! Bush and McCain were these illegals’ best friends, along with Ted Kennedy. So this ad is a lie from the opening word to the closing, ‘I’m Barack Obama and I approved this ad.’ It’s a lie from the get-go, and the lie is compounded countless times.
Now, continuing here with Jake Tapper. ‘There are some real factual problems with this ad, which is titled ‘Dos Caras,’ or two faces. First of all, tying Sen. McCain — especially on the issue of immigration reform — to Limbaugh is unfair. Limbaugh opposed McCain on that issue. Vociferously. And in a larger sense, it’s unfair to link McCain to Limbaugh on a host of issues since Limbaugh, as any even occasional listener of his knows, doesn’t particularly care for McCain. Second, the quotes of Limbaugh’s are out of context. Railing against NAFTA in 1993, Limbaugh said–‘ Now, this was in response to a caller. A caller called here and was giving me grief for not wanting to do what it took to protect American jobs, and so I said to him, ‘If you are unskilled and uneducated, your job is going south. Skilled workers, educated people are going to do fine ’cause those are the kinds of jobs NAFTA is going to create. If we are going to start rewarding no skills and stupid people, I’m serious, let the unskilled jobs that take absolutely no knowledge whatsoever to do — let stupid and unskilled Mexicans do that work.’
Now, Jake Tapper says, ‘Not one of his most eloquent moments, to be sure, but his larger point was that NAFTA would mean that unskilled stupid Mexicans would be doing the jobs of unskilled stupid Americans,’ which is dead right. And there was not a racial component in this NAFTA debate, if you’ll recall. ‘I’m not going to defend how he said it, but to act as if this was just a moment of Limbaugh slurring Mexicans is not accurate. Though again, certainly if people were offended I could understand why.’ He had to throw the bones here to his Drive-By buddies. ‘The second quote is totally unfair. In 2006, Limbaugh was mocking Mexican law,’ in fact, let’s listen to it. It runs a minute. I gotta take a break. If I don’t take a break here we’re going to run up, so we’ll take a break here, we’ll come back and play you the audio of the audio sound bite of the Morning Update 2006 in April that the second quote is taken from, totally out of context.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay, time now to illustrate the second lie, purposefully done, with full knowledge by Barack Obama in this ad he’s running to Hispanics, Spanish-language ad in Florida, New Mexico, Colorado, and Nevada. He said that I said, ‘You shut your mouth or you get out,’ and they present this as though I said this in the last few years, recent times about illegal immigration. This, that you will hear now is from April 6th of 2006, a Morning Update commentary. This is where that out-of-context quote was lifted.
RUSH ARCHIVE: Everybody’s making immigration proposals these days, let me add mine to the mix. Call it the Limbaugh Laws. First, you emigrate to our country you have to speak the native language, you have to be a professional or an investor, no unskilled workers allowed. Also, there will be no special bilingual programs in the schools with the Limbaugh Laws, no special ballots for elections, no government business will be conducted in your language. Foreigners will not have the right to vote or hold political office. If you’re in our country, you cannot be a burden to taxpayers. You are not entitled to welfare or food stamps or other government goodies. You can come if you invest here an amount equal to 40,000 times the daily minimum wage. If not, stay home. But if you want to buy land, it will be restricted: no waterfront, for instance, and as a foreigner, you have to relinquish individual rights to the property. And another thing, you don’t have the right to protest. You’re allowed no demonstrations, no foreign flag waving, no political organizing, no bad-mouthing our president or his policies. You’re a foreigner. Shut your mouth or get out. If you come here illegally, you’re going to jail. Now, you think the Limbaugh Laws are harsh? Well, every one of the laws I just mentioned are actual laws of Mexico today. That’s how the Mexican government handles immigrants to their country. Yet Mexicans come here illegally and protest in our streets. How do you say, ‘double standard’ in Spanish? How about, ‘no mas’?
RUSH: And so there you have it, ladies and gentlemen, clearly lifted out of context, purposefully and with knowledge aforehand, done on purpose. This is why I said earlier, Obama is a disgrace. He is acting no different than a 1950s segregationist trying to stoke racial hatred, a man running for the presidency of the United States trying to get there on the basis of stoking racial discord in this country. I just think it is beneath the dignity of anybody seeking the office. He does not deserve to be anywhere near the White House in this country. This man is nothing more than a street agitator and organizer. He has no intention of unifying anybody. He has no intention of getting along with people who disagree with him. He is not about anything that the early months of his campaign portrayed him to be. He is about what he is showing himself to be now. He is nothing more than a Saul Alinsky-inspired guy who doesn’t like this country the way it is. He has deep resentments. He cannot help himself. Wherever he goes, he has to criticize this country. He criticizes this country more than he criticizes this nation’s enemies. He will do whatever he has to do. He will drop 30 thug lawyers into Alaska trying to dig up dirt on Sarah Palin. He’ll have thug hackers get into her private e-mail account and post whatever they find on the Internet to the glee and satisfaction of the AP. The Secret Service called the AP and said, ‘Could you help us here figure out who did this?’ The AP declined. The Associated Press declined. And so, this is the real Barack Obama. Plus, using insulting language and lying to Hispanics in order to get their votes.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I’m now being flooded with e-mails from people reminding me that McCain really didn’t give up any information. He admitted they broke him but stuff he’s written about, the things they said about him at the convention, when they demanded names he gave them the offensive line of the Green Bay Packers and things like that. But this is just more of the pap BS and lies that the Obama thugs are putting out. If they’ve reached that bottom of the barrel to say that McCain’s not worthy of being president because he gave up information as a prisoner of war, for crying out loud, this is even better than I thought, and we got great polling data to share with you as well, folks. Welcome back. Rush Limbaugh at the Excellence in Broadcasting Network. Here’s the phone number, 800-282-2882, if you want to go the e-mail route, it’s ElRushbo@eibnet.com.
Ladies and gentlemen, I should tell you that I was offered this morning the opportunity to write 800 words of an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal tomorrow on this Spanish-language ad of Obama’s that smears John McCain and me, lies about McCain, takes quotes of mine totally out of context. I was reminded, by the way, of something when I saw this, I read Clarence Thomas’ book, and there’s a passage in Justice Thomas’ book discussing his confirmation hearings. He was blindsided by a question from Joe Biden, where Biden used a quote from a long-ago Clarence Thomas speech. Justice Thomas at first tried to say he didn’t recall the quote the way Biden was reading it, and then Biden sneered that it was an exact quote. Remember Charlie Gibson misquoting Sarah Palin from an AP story and then saying, ‘exact words, exact words.’ And she didn’t remember it that way, either. ‘Charlie, I don’t remember that.’ The same thing happened to Clarence Thomas, when Biden gave him a quote, lifted out of context, Justice Thomas said here, ‘I don’t remember it that way,’ Biden sneered that it was an exact quote. Clarence Thomas was left trying to defend the original intent of his point with a supposedly exact quote hanging over him saying the opposite.
It’s the old ‘were you lying then or are you lying now?’ trap. And during a break Thomas’ staff reviewed the speech in question, discovered that in fact Biden had used the exact quote but lifted it out of its context to suggest a completely opposite meaning. But by then the moment had passed, the damage was done. Now, I want to warn Sarah Palin and the McCain campaign, her debate opponent is going to be the Chia Pet, Joe Biden, and he is famous for this. This is a liberal tactic. I will guarantee you that even as we sit here now, Biden’s Senate staff or somebody is poring through Sarah Palin remarks, and in this upcoming debate that they have October 2nd in St. Louis, Biden is going to lift a quote of hers out of context that means the exact opposite of what she said, and then the moderator, ‘Well, what about that, Governor Palin, sounds very much at odds with what you’re saying now, and Senator McCain,’ and so forth. She’s going to have to be prepared. This is one of their favored tactics, and it is, I’m sure, being plotted for use even as we speak.
So I wrote the Wall Street Journal op-ed this morning, while at the same time doing feverish show prep, and sent it off. They liked it. They said, ‘Wow, this is pretty hard hitting.’ So it’s going to be on their website, it’s going to be in the newspaper as well in the Friday editions. They asked for 800 words. When I finished up it was about 700, which they also love. They love you coming in under the word count, and I said, ‘Brevity is the soul of wit.’ The shorter the time it takes you to make the point, the more power the point has.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I have made an executive decision. On Monday, we will have for broadcast on this program Spanish language translations of my April 6, 2006, Morning Update for Hispanic speaking peoples across the country, not just in four states. We will also have Spanish-language audio of selected edited aspects of monologues today that I have made on this issue. We have two Spanish-speaking people on the staff, one female, one male. I want to use a male voice in this case since it was a male voice on the fraudulent McCain ad. That Spanish-speaking employee, typical slacker, is on vacation, but he’ll be back over the weekend. Nobody goes on vacation during the campaign, but he did. Just kidding. Just kidding. But on Monday we will have this. It was a good suggestion from a caller today. Si se puede, whatever you said, it’s si se puede. You’re saying ‘sushi.’ You’re saying ‘sushi puede!’ I know it’s not.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here is Mark in Fairfax, Virginia. Hello, sir. Great to have you on the EIB Network.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush, and thanks for taking my call. I’ll get right to my point. I’m so glad to hear that you’re going to write an op-ed piece tomorrow for the Journal, and I just wanted to remind you how the Spanish-language stations, Telemundo and Univision didn’t even broadcast the Republican convention. And I just think it’s so patronizing —
RUSH: That’s right!
CALLER: — of the Democratic Party to tell lies on the radio and then to censor from the Latino community the Republican convention.
RUSH: I had forgotten that, but you are exactly right.
CALLER: Hey, all right!
RUSH: You’re exactly right. And I remember what I said at the time, it kind of made me frustrated in a way. The whole point of the Republican Party, members of the party adopting this amnesty position was to show that we can reach out to the Hispanic community, get them to vote for us, get them to register and vote for us. McCain led the charge there, and the very objects of his love and affection and his outreach refused to even televise his convention in Spanish to their people. Yeah. I’m glad you reminded me.