RUSH: Now, how many days, Snerdley, have we been on this Imam Obama business? Is this the second day or the third? The third day. I’m now being blamed for the results in the Pew poll. Here’s Kirsten Powers, Fox News Channel’s Happening Now. Kirsten Powers and the Republican strategerist Chip Saltsman are the guests, and during a discussion about this new Pew poll, which is taken last week, this week, last month, it’s an ongoing poll — he-he-he — Saltsman says, ‘A year ago one in ten believed he was a Muslim.’ Again it’s not right, he’s not now. ‘And now it’s one in five think he’s a Muslim.’
POWERS: The reason for that is that you have people like Rush Limbaugh referring to him as Imam Hussein Obama.
RUSH: No, I have not said Imam Hussein Obama. I’ve never thrown Hussein in there, I just said Imam Obama. This is day three. Imam Barack Hoover Obama is the correct nomenclature, Ms. Powers, that I have been using. Imam Barack Hoover Obama. Now, anyway, the bottom line here, the raw number is not what really counts in this poll. You know, whether it’s 18% think he’s a Muslim or 34% don’t think he’s Christian, it’s the trend that’s happening here that is fascinating. It’s the direction, and it’s increasing. The number of people who think he’s a Muslim is going up and the number of people who think he’s a Christian is declining. Now, many people will define prejudice as fear of the unknown. But after 20 months now, Imam Obama is becoming more well-known and the media can’t protect him. The media can’t do its dance. The White House, they’re worried about otherness. Let this be a teachable moment for you. Let this be a life lesson.
Whenever you try to hide who you really are, like liberals have been doing for as long as I’ve been alive, the truth is eventually gonna surface. Who you are is going to be found out and discovered and it’s not a pretty site when that happens. Now, if you’re liberals, what do you do? Well, you go out and you hire some guy named Lakoff (rhymes with) to say you’re not a liberal anymore and you’re a progressive. I continually find myself stunned here. We’re talking about the president of the United States. How many millions of Americans voted in that presidential race in 2008? How many people voted? And look at the numbers of people who have no clue who this is. Now, here’s Kirsten Powers blaming me for the Pew poll because I’ve been calling him Imam Obama for three days. I must have an audience of 300 million people here. I’m flattered that Kirsten Powers thinks I have this degree of influence. But I have always explained, comedy, good humor only works when there is an element of truth. Comedy that’s based on total lies and falsehoods, it’s not even funny. It’s gotta have some connection to something that some people might think is true.
So why did I start calling him Imam Obama? Well, two reasons. It seemed like the natural thing to do when he came out in favor of the mosque. It’s no different than calling it the Hamasque, because Hamasque has come out in favor of the mosque. So we have Imam Obama advocating for the Hamasque. It seems natural to me. There’s elements of truth in this. But the left, they are humorless, they don’t laugh at anything, and now I, your host, El Rushbo, is single-handedly responsible for the confusion in the minds of millions of Americans who now aren’t sure what Obama is. What are they going to do about this? We had the story yesterday, Politico, they’re looking for a villain because they’ve given up on me. They’re thinking of going back and using Newt. They know Boehner is not a good villain because nobody knows who he is. And he’s too good-looking. You can’t have a villain that looks good, according to the people who make good use of villains. Like Boris Badenov in the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon. He was an appropriate villain because he was ugly.
Now, I’m not ugly. And that’s one of the reasons they’ve had trouble making me a villain. I’m too beloved. I’m too loved. I’m too appreciated. I’m too famous. They’ve tried to make me a villain for all these years. But, folks, I’m going to tell you something. Obama and the White House wish — and I mean this from the bottom of my heart, and this comment is about you. They wish they had the personal connection with their voters that I have with you. They can only dream of that. As many lies, as many attacks on me as they have mounted, where have you gone? Nowhere. You stayed right here and your numbers have grown. I’ve commented on this many times. You and I have a familial-like bond. This is unlike any audience relationship I’ve ever had in my star-studded broadcast career. I don’t hide who I am. I’m not phony and I don’t try to make you think I’m somebody I’m not. And I don’t try to act like somebody I wish I really were, ’cause I like myself. I throw myself out there, ‘Here’s who I am.’ And Democrats, particularly liberals, have to lie about who they are, and Obama is at the top of that heap.
If you go back now and look at that campaign, it was all phony. You and I knew it. (imitating Obama) ‘People will remember this day, the day the oceans began to recede.’ Come on! We weren’t gonna believe in 2008 in November was the day the oceans began to recede because we never believed they were rising. So what’s happening now is that the hard, cold truth, the hard, cold reality that Obama’s not what or who he says he is is slapping the Democrat Party upside the head. No, I’m not saying he’s Muslim. That’s not the point. The point is not whether he is or isn’t, ’cause I continue to ask, if he is, big deal, why is it a problem? The only reason it would be a problem is if he lied about it. If he’s a Muslim, that’s no big deal, right? What’s the problem of being a Muslim? They’re the ones acting like it would be something hugely embarrassing to be a Muslim, not us. But they’re the ones that have to cover up who they are. They’re the ones worried about otherness now. This bunch knows there’s been controversy swirling around the birth and all this sort of stuff. They’ve done nothing to quell the controversies. In fact, some of these people in the White House have tried to stoke it, you know, for their own entertainment, I’m sure, ’cause they’ve had a little fun doing it in the process.
But once you start telling lies and once you start living a lie, you are doomed because you will not be able to remember who you told what. You’re gonna get found out, you’re gonna get caught at some point. You will not be able to remember to whom you displayed what about yourself or to whom you said whatever it was that you said. You’re gonna get found out, you’re gonna cross yourself up. Phoniness is its own punishment. You know, if it were me, just to show the difference, if I were running for president and I had a media that was out there promulgating a notion that there had never been anybody like me before in politics, I would stop right there and I would say, ‘Ah, ah, ah, do not characterize me this way, don’t characterize me as something superhuman, don’t characterize me as The One we’ve all been waiting for. Don’t phony me up.’
Were I president and there were literally almost riots in major American cities among poor people trying to get vouchers to get some sorta help in getting a house, I would be embarrassed. I would be embarrassed that it’s happening in my country while I’m president. But not this bunch. This bunch looks at that as a sign of success. I’m talking about specifically that sad display that happened in Detroit last year and the near riots we had in Atlanta last week. This bunch and this party, they look at those signs and see success, because they see more and more people depending on government. Government is their god. Government is the source of their power. Were I president, were any of you president and this were happening on our watch, we’d be embarrassed and we would be doing something about it and we’d be making speeches trying to genuinely help these people by telling them the truth. ‘We, the United States government, cannot provide for you. It is not our responsibility, that’s yours. It may be a huge wake-up call but we are here to see to it that each and every one of you who want to access the opportunity in this country have the clearest path to that as possible. We’re gonna take away obstacles, we’re gonna get ’em out of your way.’
Instead we have an administration, we have a political party who wants to impede progress and punish those who are successful with increased taxes and regulation, even if they want to remove obstacles to dependence. We look at it, and it shames us, it embarrasses us for our country, and now, this is also embarrassing, I have to tell you we’re sitting here laughing at it, but frankly, folks, in the big scheme of things we are a great country at risk in a dangerous world. We have threats external and internal. And it is not a good sign. It is not something healthy for the American people to not know what religion their president is, to have doubts to the extent that they do about this man and his life and where he’s been and who he is, it’s not healthy, it’s not good. We can make fun of it, and we will, and we’ll have our fun with it, but at the end of the day, this is not good. And we have people who have promulgated this. We have the partisan political operative media who have facilitated this intricately woven web of deceit and confusion, all for the purposes of getting their party elected to power so as to advance their agenda, at the expense, in fact, of the country.