RUSH: Now, remember last week, ladies and gentlemen, I took grief — and I take grief all the time. In fact, I love grief. Grief is part and parcel of my professional life. And last week I made a comment
KURTZ: Now, Rush Limbaugh also loves to stir controversy, by design. And this week, he talked about the president and made a bit of news. Let’s take a listen.
RUSH ARCHIVE: That’s exactly the same thing you could say about Obama. He wouldn’t have been voted president if he weren’t black. Somebody asked me over the weekend why does somebody earn a lot of money, have a lot of money? I said because he’s black. If Obama weren’t black, he’d be a tour guide in Honolulu or he’d be teaching Saul Alinsky constitutional law or lecturing on it in Chicago.
RUSH: Now, those of you who were listening last week who heard that know full well that that’s the second half of something I said. You hear how this started. ‘That’s exactly the same thing you could say about Obama.’ Who am I talking about there? As you’ll hear in a moment I was talking about Cynthia Tucker as she was making racist comments about Michael Steele. Let’s keep going with the audio. Howard Kurtz then talks to political columnist Roger Simon about me and my remark about Obama.
KURTZ: And of course here we are talking about Rush, but did you find those comments to be more than just the usual Limbaugh rhetoric?
SIMON: Meaning did I find them to be racist and repugnant? Yeah, I found them to be racist and repugnant.
RUSH: And then Howard Kurtz finally says, ‘Roger, let’s keep going. Why do you think they were racist?’
KURTZ: Why racist? Can a case be made just on part of this that if Obama was a white freshman senator he wouldn’t have beaten Hillary for the nomination?
SIMON: I think anyone who beat Hillary for the nomination had something going for him besides race. Let’s be fair, his race was not going for him. We only said that after he won. He had to win in states where there was almost no black population. If he had lost in Iowa, the first Democratic contest, he would have been through. There are no black people in Iowa. He convinced white people that he really was an agent of change.
RUSH: This is not altogether true, Mr. Simon. We’re now learning from Gigi Gaston, who is a Democrat activist — this was on Fox News Sunday yesterday morning — she started out putting a documentary together to prove there wasn’t any voter fraud in the Democrat primaries of 2008 and she found out there was all kinds of Democrat voter fraud on the part of the Obama campaign, and specifically, Mr. Simon, in Iowa. Ms. Gaston documents that the Obama people locked the Hillary people out of the cauci locations. They simply locked the doors. Everybody was, ‘How the hell did Obama pull off this Iowa caucus thing?’ Because that’s the launch and Mr. Simon here mentions it, and Ms. Gaston, who says she can’t get coverage of her documentary anywhere but on, of all places, Fox News. She recounts all kinds of voter fraud on the part of the Obama campaign aimed at Mrs. Clinton. And Iowa was one of those places.
So Kurtz says, ‘Why racist? Can’t a case be made just on part of this that if Obama was a white freshman senator, he wouldn’t have beaten Hillary for the nomination?’ Now, what spawned all of this? This is where I’m actually kind of surprised at Howard Kurtz because whenever the media has joined these out of context, erroneous, made-up narratives on how I’m a racist, Kurtz has never done that. Now all of a sudden he airs a piece, but what did he leave out? Let’s go back, cut 11 here that I played, it starts with me saying, ‘That’s exactly the same thing you could say about Obama.’ So obviously I’m responding to something, but Kurtz either knew it and ignored it or didn’t know it and got befuddled by one of the CNN producers. Here is the entire sound bite from last Tuesday, and you will hear that a full 65% of this sound bite was not aired by Howard Kurtz.
RUSH: Cynthia Tucker, ABC’s This Week Sunday roundtable, they discussed Michael Steele. And, by the way, this woman is the editorial director of the Atlanta Urinal and Constipation, and she has been for a long, long time. Cynthia, you once called Michael Steele an affirmative action hire gone bad. What is your take — by the way, she can say this because she’s African-American. Here’s what she said.
TUCKER: Michael Steele is a self-aggrandizing, gaffe-prone incompetent who would have been fired a long time ago were he not black. Of course the irony is that he never would have been voted in as chairman of the Republican Party were he not black.
RUSH ARCHIVE: Same with Obama.
TUCKER: It is very ironic —
RUSH ARCHIVE: Stop the tape just a second. That’s exactly the same thing you could say about Obama. He wouldn’t have been voted president if he weren’t black. Somebody asked me over the weekend why does somebody earn a lot money, have a lot money, I said because she’s black. It was Oprah. No, it can’t be. Yes, it is. There’s a lot of guilt out there, let’s show we’re not racists, we’ll make this person wealthy and big and famous and so forth.
‘Any time anybody does anything that in any way pulls this campaign down and says let’s address reality and the problems we’re facing in this world, you’re accused of being racist, so you have to shut up. Racism works in two different directions. I really think they’re attacking me because I’m white. How’s that?’ And then she said, ‘In all honesty, do you think that if he were a white male, there would be a reason for the black community to get excited for a historic first? Am I pointing out something that doesn’t exist?’ said Geraldine Ferraro. ‘Obama campaign manager David Axelrod called Ferraro’s comments part of an ‘insidious pattern’ of remarks from Clinton supporters that have drawn attention to Obama’s race. ‘When you wink and nod at offensive statements, you’re really sending a signal to your supporters that anything goes.” And Ferraro said, ‘Sexism is a bigger problem. It’s OK to be sexist in some people’s minds. It’s not OK to be racist.’
So once again, Mr. Kurtz and all the rest of you in the Drive-By Media, what you had from me was reacting to comments made by others. Cynthia Tucker is no longer with the Atlanta Urinal and Constipation. I guess she’s a consultant at ABC or whatever, paid to show up and pundit, opine. ‘Michael Steele, he wouldn’t be chairman of the Republican Party if he weren’t black.’ I said, ‘Hey, you could say the same thing about Obama.’ And Bill Clinton a few months ago, said, (imitating Clinton) ‘You know what? If these were normal, sane times, Obama would be bringing us coffee.’ Bill Clinton said this. I forget if it was during the campaign or if it was afterwards, probably during the campaign. (imitating Clinton) ‘Oh, yeah, Obama, he’d be bringing us coffee.’ And yet Mr. Kurtz fails to find Ferraro’s comments, fails to air Cynthia Tucker’s comments which were part of the sound bite on me he did air.
So once again a virtual smear, veritable smear done on purpose. The thing that surprises me is that Howard Kurtz has never done anything like this before, not to me, anyway. I don’t know about other peoples he’s covered. But I wanted to set the record straight. I am by no means the first person to say if Obama weren’t black he wouldn’t be president. Geraldine Ferraro said it first and then Bill Clinton echoed it, and then Cynthia Tucker said Michael Steele wouldn’t be chairman of the Republican Party if he weren’t black. So once again your host, El Rushbo, simply commenting on the news, commenting on the comments that others have made.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: By the way, just for you to be able to hear it in her own words, March 7th, 2008, Torrance, California, newspaper the Daily Breeze, Democrat Geraldine Ferraro.
FERRARO: If Barack Obama were a white man, would we be talking about this as a potential real problem for — for Hillary? If he were a woman of any color, would he be in this position that he’s in? Absolutely not.
RUSH: That’s two years ago, 2008. And she was raked over the coals for saying this. And she came back and defended herself. ‘What’s wrong with what I said? There’s nothing racist about it. I happen to think it’s true,’ she said. She may have a point.