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RUSH: I want to go back to January 16th on this program. I want you to listen to my whole notion on ‘I want and hope Obama fails.’ The reason Obama is having big trouble with his policies right now is just as I warned you. He was elected on platitudes; he was elected on feelings; he was elected on atmospherics and cult-like things, not specifics. So here come the specifics, and the specifics Obama’s pushing don’t match any of his rhetoric. We were going to get rid of all the angst; we were going to get rid of all the arguing; we were going to get rid of all the racism, and now look at us. The polarization is as it’s always been and I told you it would be. I predicted all of this, but here’s what I said about I wanted Obama to fail.

RUSH: If I wanted Obama to succeed, I’d be happy the Republicans have laid down. And I would be encouraging Republicans to lay down and support him. Look, what he’s talking about is the absorption of as much of the private sector by the US government as possible, from the banking business, to the mortgage industry, the automobile business, to health care. I do not want the government in charge of all of these things. I don’t want this to work. So I’m thinking of replying to the guy, ‘Okay, I’ll send you a response, but I don’t need 400 words, I need four: I hope he fails.’ (interruption) What are you laughing at? See, here’s the point. Everybody thinks it’s outrageous to say. Look, even my staff, ‘Oh, you can’t do that.’ Why not? Why is it any different, what’s new, what is unfair about my saying I hope liberalism fails? Liberalism is our problem. Liberalism is what’s gotten us dangerously close to the precipice here. Why do I want more of it? I don’t care what the Drive-By story is. I would be honored if the Drive-By Media headlined me all day long: ‘Limbaugh: ‘I Hope Obama Fails.” Somebody’s gotta say it.

RUSH: And they did. They just trumpeted it all over the place, ‘Limbaugh, I can’t believe he said, ‘I hope Obama fails.” What this was in reaction to was some publication wanted me to do 400 words on my hopes for the new administration. They had a bunch of people on their editorial page and I said, ‘I don’t need 400 words. I need four: ‘I hope he fails.” That’s what got the whole thing started and it’s important to remember this because he is failing and I’m happy and you’re happy. Fifty-four percent of the American people think no health care change is better than his plan. Fifty-seven percent say the stimulus isn’t working and it might be making things worse. I’m winning. He’s failing. The American people don’t want Obama to succeed. This just has the state-controlled media out of control. They are just off the reservation. They are so mad they can’t see straight. Here is last night’s CNN’s Newsroom, the anchor Don Lemon interviewing the author Tim Wise who has a book called Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama. Don Lemon says, ‘Some of the conservative talk show hosts there, should they be more responsible with their language ’cause people may be buying into what they’re saying and not realizing it’s coded racism.’

WISE: When you portray Obama as Hitler, as some of these folks have done, what you’re saying, and this is very interesting, think about Hitler, we think of Hitler as not just a fascist but a racial fascist so if what they’re saying is this man, Obama, is a racial fascist the question that gets begged in a lot of white people’s minds is, hmm, I wonder what race he’s going to come for, oh yes, us, because Glenn Beck said it’s reparations and Rush Limbaugh said Obama hates white people. It gins up this type of hostility and really white racial paranoia and white racial resentment at a time when we need to be seriously talking about issues that face us as a nation and not being engaged in this kind of racial politics. But that’s what’s going on.

RUSH: So this is the kind of lying that passes for reporting and wise commentary on the left. I never said Obama hates white people. I said got a chip on his shoulder about the unjust and immoral past of this country. I never called him Hitler. And let’s not forget, you dopes at CNN and everywhere else, could you please, for 21 years behind this microphone I have listened to people like you try to equate conservatives with Nazism and with Adolf Hitler and I’m fed up with it. Hitler was a man of the left. Adolf Hitler was much closer to you guys than he is to me or any of my friends. And Nancy Pelosi started this. She called the people showing up at town hall meetings Nazis wearing swastikas. And you’re purposely leaving that out of this so you can run with your template. And then, of course, the White House, the Obama machine starts attacking half the American people calling them an unruly mob.

You guys have got it ass backwards here in terms of what’s happening out there. Nobody called him Hitler, but if you compare his health care plan to the National Socialist health care plan of Germany, I’m going to find a lot of similarities there. You won’t find any similarities between whatever conservative health care plans there are and what the national socialists did. We’ve written about this extensively, Andy McCarthy, nobody is talking genocide here, nobody is talking racism, we’re talking socialism and we’re talking how it doesn’t work. We’re trying to make comparisons to people for historical perspective so that rather than just believe us when we say it doesn’t work, we can point to places where it hasn’t worked. Same program, Don Lemon had this exchange with the same author, Tim Wise.

LEMON: I was at a town hall yesterday, and I really had to take some people to task. They were using those buzzwords that I don’t think people realize all the time, like ‘real Americans’ or ‘give me back my America’ was one of the songs or ‘take back America.’ It was like, what do you mean by that?

WISE: When you stand up and wax nostalgic and say things like, ‘I want the country that the Founders envisioned,’ when the country the Founders envisioned was a system of white supremacy, I think that race is playing a pretty big role.

RUSH: You know, now, this steams me. This steams me on a number of levels. But here’s a guy, Tim Wise, writing a book about Obama who is ignorant about the founding of this country. This give me back my America, take back my country, that’s Howard Dean, we’ve got that sound bite montage coming up, Howard Dean was talking about that all through 2004. But the country the Founders envisioned was a system of white supremacy? Mr. Wise, you ought to be ashamed. This country was not founded on the premise of white supremacy. What happened was the original 13 colonies, there were 13 of them and they needed all 13 to be unified, to declare independence, to send the message across the pond that we’re breaking away. There were some of these colonies that were slaves, states, colonies, whatever you call them, and it was an agonizing thing for many of these founders. John Adams, particularly agonizing, and they knew that it was going to cause problems down the road because the whole principle of one man owning another did not jibe with the Constitution they wrote, the Declaration that they wrote, and so guess what? They wrote a Constitution which allowed for that to change, and it did.

We lost 500,000 of our own citizens getting rid of slavery. We went to war with ourselves over it, and the Constitution and our laws have made many changes. It is not the America of 200 years ago. What’s really frosting me is, you know, I like being right, but I don’t really like being right about this. I predicted pretty much every bit of this. Any criticism of Obama no matter what is going to be called racist and I’m going to hit back, and just like they say you hit us we’re going to punch back twice as hard, I’m punching back twice as hard. Nancy Pelosi calls my audience, calls me, calls my friends Nazis. I’m hitting back twice as hard. I’m not putting up with this anymore. And you dunderheads, you people who have the smallest minds who think you’re the brightest and most brilliant people among us, you’re not even qualified to write a credible book on Obama, Mr. Wise, and this anchor at CNN is likewise an embarrassment. Now, you wonder where this phrase ‘take back my country, give me my country back’ came from? Well, listen to, at the time, the chairman of the Democrat National Committee during the 2004 primaries.

DEAN: We are taking our country back piece by piece from the Rush Limbaughs. You have the power to take back our country so that the flag no longer represents solely Rush Limbaugh. You have the power to take back our country so that the flag never again is the sole property of Rush Limbaugh. You have the power to take back our country so that the flag of the United States is no longer the sole property of Rush Limbaugh. This country does not belong to Rush Limbaugh. Move over, I want my country back again. Because the flag of this country does not belong to Rush Limbaugh. You have the power to take back the flag so it does no longer belong solely to Rush Limbaugh. Aaarrrgggh!

RUSH: Howard Dean back in 2004, the Democrat primaries. And these two dunderheads on CNN wonder where in the hell this all came from.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: We’re going to go to Roundup, Montana, and start there. Sandy, hi. Great that you called. I’m glad you waited. Welcome to the EIB Network.

CALLER: Thank you, Rush. It’s a privilege to be on your show.

RUSH: Thanks very much.

CALLER: I just wanted to comment on the Belgrade town hall meeting in Montana.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: My family and I were first-time attendees for any kind of protesting at all. I’m a stay-at-home mom, raised four children, homeschooled them. But, you know, just like many other people in America, it’s high time that we state our opinion and exercise our First Amendment right, you know, freedom of speech and we went there even though we didn’t have tickets. We wrote out our signs, signs saying things like, ‘Government Hands Off,’ ‘Give Me liberty and Give Me Life,’ those sort of things. When we showed up, we didn’t really know where to stand. We saw many other first-time protesters, as well. They were equally confused on where to go. But all we had to do was listen and look, and we heard a tea party group set up on a five-acre lot, and we actually heard your program being aired, and as soon as we heard your voice, we said, ‘A-ha, that’s where we’re supposed to be.’

RUSH: Well, it was just like being at home!

CALLER: (giggling) So we went ahead and followed that area, and some of the people that were holding protesting signs that were first-timers also went in that direction. When we arrived, though, there was a whole lot of confusion because all we heard was your voice over a loudspeaker. But then we heard a big group saying, ‘Hush Rush! Hush Rush,’ and we thought, ‘Wait a second, what’s going on? Are these for or against? What in the world?’ We later found out that the tea party group that rented the five-acre area were infiltrated by the ACORN group. The ACORN group had another area but it wasn’t as strategically placed in as good of an area to protest or support and they had actually come and mixed themselves among the protesters, and there was utter confusion. I could not believe it, because every time you turned around you saw an Obama sign supporting it, and then you’d see sprinkled throughout protesters here and there. But my point is that ACORN clearly infiltrated the area where the protesters were. And one of the things that was so glaring that I noticed is I know the media has this big thing about how, ‘Oh, the conservatives, you know, the people that are protesting this health care are angry mobs that are showing up at town hall meetings.’ Well, we find the opposite to be true. All the conservatives that I saw, my family includes, were simply holding up our signs. And what would happen was these ACORN people would come up — or people that were walking to the town hall would come up — and literally shake their heads and start screaming something at you. And our response was never venomous back to them. You know, at one time there was a gentleman that walked by my husband’s sign and he had all these, you know, ‘No Universal Health Care’ signs and so forth —

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: — and he literally shook his head and had a position as if he was going to hit my husband and all my husband said back to him was, ‘It’s great to be an American, isn’t it, sir?’ which I think of course made him even angrier. But what ended up happening was after, you know, the whole scene went we looked back and noticed that ACORN was such an organized group that most of the protesters were people just like myself — people that love their country, that simply want their voice to be heard and they may never have done that before in their life. And I don’t consider myself a political activist, you know, I pray for my country, I love my country but I finally got to the point where I said, ‘Hey, there’s an area that we can, you know —

RUSH: Right. Here’s what happened —

CALLER: — show up and look like we’re in support. And I’ll tell you, Rush, the terrible thing, too, that every time the media would come, these ACORN people would get out of their vehicles. They would be waiting until the perfect time, they’d get out of their vehicles and then they tried to crowd out where we were holding our signs. And I had heard that also when the tea partiers had tried to ask the folks to leave the area because it was a rented area for the tea party group, they were arrested. And, you know, I was so outraged when we had gotten home after it was all over… We had gotten home I knew that, you know, it was going to be on the media, on the TV, on the news, we even went to some conservative news sites like NewsMax.com. And we were so disheartened because the consensus was that, ‘Oh, he was fairly well received.’ That’s not the way we looked at it. We looked at it as we were crowded out by an organized group that has their job.

RUSH: Right. Sandy, here’s what happened to you. This is a great story. It’s a great illustration, too. You show up because of passion. You show up for the first time ever anything like this because of passion, fear, whatever it is. You don’t want what is being proposed. You don’t want what is being shoved down the throat. It doesn’t remind you of what your country is. And the Obama people are not showing up at these town hall meetings because of passion. They’re not showing up to support this. They’re showing up because they’ve been given orders. ACORN is part of this organizing group. They’re showing up here to try to disrupt; they’re showing up trying to intimidate. That’s why I said last week, I’m so proud of people like you and the people that are showing up at these town hall meetings because it’s genuine. It’s the truth versus lies. It’s real passion versus fake and it’s available for everybody to see, like you saw it. And it’s always more powerful when somebody experiences something rather than has it described to them. Now, listen, I’ve got a sound bite here that will go very well with her call. This is Saturday on NPR, All Things Considered. The host was interviewing a senior writer for something called ‘The Root,’ and I’m not even going to try with these names. The question: ‘There’s a lot of confusion and misinformation out there on the various plans for changing the health care system,’ and an essay on the website TheRoot.com argues, the rage isn’t really about health care at all. The author, Kay Wright, says it’s really about the anxieties of a whole segment of America that increasingly feels shut out.

MAN #1: We’re seeing a number of folks trying to exploit those anxieties. The fear of Barack Obama not being (haughty laugh) a citizen to those notions that people would have to stand in front of a death panel and defend their right to live, we’ve seen a handful of folks — both in corporate media and the Republican Party — try to elevate those ideas in an effort to exploit those anxieties.

MAN #2: Mmm-hmm.

MAN #1: And they do seem to be coming from the militia movement, when you — when you trace some of who the leaders are particularly amongst the birthers, they’re folks that had a history in the militia movement.


RUSH: Now, you just heard Sandy from Roundup, Montana; and I guarantee you Sandy from Roundup, Montana, is not in the militia. These people are doing their level best… This is NPR, this is part of State-Controlled Media, impugning on behalf of Barack Obama, the American people, attacking them as all ‘birthers,’ as all part of the militia movement. They’re all racists. They’re not any of that. What they are is Americans, and they don’t want what Obama is trying to peddle. They don’t want the Democrat version of health care reform. They are not worried about death panels and being lined up and having to plead for their life. What they’re worried about is the government deciding who gets treated and who don’t! It’s their decision. It’s a family’s decision, made with a doctor. It’s not Barack Obama’s decision. It’s not anybody at NPR’s decision to decide who gets treated and for what. That’s always taken care in the private sector. People do not want the government making these kinds of decisions. So the host at NPR then says, ‘So your argument is that the anger and the rage of many people being expressed is just being channeled in the wrong direction?’

MAN: I’d say it’s being exploited more than channeled. Um, the GOP particularly is trying to exploit it. Rush Limbaugh is trying to exploit it.

RUSH: We’re not ‘exploiting’ anything. We are watching it! You know, it’s part and parcel. These egghead elitists, wherever they are in state-controlled media, think that you are incapable of coming up with a thought on your own; that you are incapable of seeing something and reading something and deciding you don’t like it. You have to be ‘exploited.’ You have to be given marching orders. It’s the Obama people that have the marching orders! It’s the Obama people in the media who have been given the marching orders. This is the media meeting their Waterloo, and their Waterloo is Barack Obama and carrying his water.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: You know the past two sound bites that we played, this guy Kai Wright, his website is TheRoot.com and this is the guy that said the health care debate is all about race? You know whose website that is? Skip Gates. That website is Henry Louis Gates, the professor from Harvard who screamed racism. So the racists are out there charging race when the health care debate has nothing to do with race, it has nothing to do with militias, it has nothing to do with birthers, it has nothing to do with anything other than genuine substance and passion, and that is a growing majority of the American people want no part of what Obama is offering. I think it’s fabulous. These people in the media, wherever they are, you guys are really going to have to step back and you’re going to have to start looking at yourselves. You are making idiots, fools of yourselves. I mean it’s getting worse than it has ever been and you’re losing right along with Obama. You’re not persuading anyone. You’re just talking to each other in your highbrow little template ways that don’t relate to anything going on in this country.

West Chester, Ohio, next. This is Jerry on the EIB Network. Hi.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Real pleasure to be here.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: Just calling to let you know I’ve been trying for about 20 years to start with, and I’m a senior citizen, I want to say, ex-military for 41 years and police officer, retired, and come from a family of 12 in Tennessee. So I got that out of the way. And my big thing is I happened to be sitting watching TV like I usually do on the Saturday morning shows sometimes. I have to be real careful what you get on to, but they had that Geraldine Ferraro there, and it was another Republican — young Republican congressman, I don’t know what his name was, I can’t remember right now, but one of the up-and-coming stars, I guess, I don’t know, but they were talking about how people were getting in your faces, you know, at these town hall meetings, and I’ve been to all the tea parties from Ohio and around, close by, Columbus and everywhere else, and anyway, they were talking about being in your face, and I thought, you know, here they are, what elitist this Ferraro is, I mean I’ve watched her come up through the years as a young woman and now she’s sort of mellowed out and here she is talking about, you know, you’ve got to be a little bit more, use common courtesy. Well, where is the common courtesy come when you tell your representative to go back to Washington when they come to their —

RUSH: Look, let me tell you something. This is a subject here that has been brought up a number of times. These members of Congress out there, they’re part of the crowd that’s saying people like you showing up are part of an unruly mob, and everybody knows that it’s ridiculous. And there were people at the beginning of this, ‘Oh, they need to act a little bit more civil. This tactic is going to backfire, it’s going to irritate the independents.’ Well, you know, sitting back and acting civil is what gave us the stimulus package. Sitting back and saying, okay, it’s his first initiative, we’ve got a honeymoon, the president should get what he wants, that’s how we got the stimulus. Now, the fact of the matter is that these protests, people standing up to their congressmen, has been something that has worked. It has worked because it is real. This notion that we shouldn’t get in congressman’s faces, nobody is getting in congressmen’s faces, but damn it, I would if somebody’s trying to ram a plan down my throat that is gonna take away my freedom and liberty and I’m an American citizen.

I am going to scream about it and I’m going to stand up and I’m going to do what I can to stop it. What do you mean, shouldn’t get in their faces? Nobody is getting in their faces. They’re standing up behind microphones and they are shouting and they are passionate. But the members of Congress are many feet away. Nobody is running up to podiums and getting in anybody’s face. But even if they did it would be justified based on what this plan is attempting to do. If you don’t stand up and protest something like this you’re going to end up having it rammed down your throats and people have figured this out. It’s how we got the stimulus; it’s how we got all these bailouts. Nobody said a word. ‘Oh, we have to act civil.’ And there’s something else about this that really rubs me the wrong way, and I’ve mentioned this number of times. It seems to me, I never hear anybody on either side of the aisle, in the media or anywhere else, saying ACORN needs to dial it back.

I never hear that the union people need to act a little bit more civil. I never hear anybody criticizing the out of control ribald behavior that the left engages in at all times. I never hear whenever there are protests, globalization protests and these bombers take to the street and they throw rocks through windows of buildings and so forth, I never hear anybody say, ‘You know, that’s a bad tactic, they shouldn’t be doing this, they’re only hurting their cause.’ It’s only when conservatives stand up with genuine passion and emotion and basically put their hand up and say, ‘Stop,’ that people come out of the woodwork and say, ‘Oh, no, this is a bad tactic, this is going to drive people away to the Democrat Party.’ No. It’s proving to be just the opposite because what is real versus what is phony is on display here.

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