RUSH: I mentioned at the top of the program that there were 11 or 12 audio sound bites in the roster today that deal with me. As you all know, I don’t like making this show about me. If I would have started with these sound bites, the Stick-to-the-Issues Crowd would have had a fit. So I started with the most important stuff of the day and have relegated myself here to third-hour status.

But you should realize that each hour here is unique and equal. There is no discrimination from hour to hour. In other words, I don’t look as the third hour as any less important than the first. I don’t look at the second hour as being less important than the third or the first. I don’t look at the first hour as being crucial and more important than the other two.

We spread the equality over all three hours on this program. I don’t want my hours feeling discriminated against. I don’t want my hours getting their feelings hurt. I would hate it if the third hour felt like a bastard stepchild, for example. I would hate it if the third hour of this program felt like it was just a perfunctory thing I have to do it to get outta here kind of hour. No, but I don’t want to give any hour favoritism, either.

I don’t want any hour feeling superior to any other hour. (interruption) Right. I want hour equality. I don’t want the first hour thinking it’s better than the second hour or the third hour. One of the ways of doing that is putting me in the third hour. What could be more important than me at the end of the day? See how this works, Snerdley? So here we go.

Last night, CNN’s Erin Burnett OutFront, she spoke with political commentator and former NBA player Greg Anthony. CNN legal analyst Sunny… Is it Hoss-tin or Hoe-stin? I don’t know. About me and my criticism of Attorney General Holder. Now, full disclosure. I know Greg Anthony. I first met Greg Anthony at the studios at the EIB Building in Midtown Manhattan with his agent at the time, Lee Steinberg.

He had just been drafted I think by the Knicks, and his agent, Lee Steinberg, brought him by and introduced us. I have since (full disclosure) played several rounds of golf with Greg Anthony shortly after I moved here to south Florida in 1997. Well, I started to play 1999 or 2000. Now, I haven’t seen Greg in years, but I just want to tell you up front that I know him.

I’m not gonna divulge anything about it, it’s not my place, but he’s a great guy. He’s extremely talented and smart. He’s got a great, great temperament, is a generous person, and he’s been doing NBA commentary I think for TNT or some cable network having to do with the NBA. And he shows up last night about CNN to talk with Erin Burnett about me (I didn’t know this, of course; I didn’t know this happened until I got the sound bite roster today) and my thoughts on Eric Holder and what he had said yesterday.

So Erin Burnett plays this clip from yesterday’s program to get it all started…

RUSH ARCHIVE: The president of the United States, attorney general of the United States, oh, poor guys, poor victims of a mean, racist America. … They point fingers at these mysterious, evil forces and then claim not to know what’s in their hearts. And then they talk about, “Oh, yeah, when I hear I want my country back, or I hear, ‘Take back our country,’ that’s code language,” said Holder. “I know I’m listening to a racist bigot.”

RUSH: Erin Burnett turned to Greg Anthony, said, “Greg, is Limbaugh’s criticism fair?

ANTHONY: To a certain extent. Listen, there’s no doubt that racism exists, but it’s not the permeating factor in this case. And I say that because had racism been so pervasive in our society, we wouldn’t have an African-American president elected twice. We wouldn’t have an attorney general who was put in office by that president. We wouldn’t have had a secretary of state prior in Condoleezza Rice. So while it exists, it’s still a fringe element.

RUSH: That’s exactly right. Oprah Winfrey couldn’t be the host popular and wealthiest television performer or entertainer in a racist country. Now, in all of this… You know, this is once again trying to put these guests on the spot. This is a neat trick. You play a sound bite from me where the safe thick to do is rip into me. The safest thing in the world is to say, “Oh, Limbaugh? Oh, yeah, racist pig,” blah, blah, blah.

It’s very easy to do this, because of the media construct, and Anthony didn’t do that. He got this right. How ridiculous is this for the president of the United States elected twice to start whining about racism everywhere — and this take our country back business? This is one thing Erin Burnett did not play for them is all the sound bites from Democrats we featured on the program yesterday who are also campaigning on the premise of taking back their country, such as Howard Dean, such as Mrs. Clinton.

It’s never considered racism when they say it, and here is why.

Here is whoever, Sunny Hostin or Hostin is. Do you know who this is? (interruption) You have? You have? Is she African-American? (interruption) She is, okay. You’re not even sure? See? Snerdley didn’t know. That doesn’t matter to us. I’m just curious here so I can provide all the information to the audience. So after Anthony said what he said, Burnett then turned to Sunny — is it Hoe-stin or Hoss-tin? I don’t care. It’s Sunny, and Burnett says, “Well, what do you think? Is Limbaugh right? Does Limbaugh have a point or not?

HOSTIN: I think that we shy away from talking about race. We shy away from the fact that this is happening, there is this coded language, and there’s this sort of dog whistle that, Greg, you and I both know as people that live in black skin — knows what they are saying when they say, “Take our country back.” When you’re talking about people who like Ted Cruz whose politics are very well known, I think when you look at that context, it is clear to me, at least, that it’s “take our country back from a black president.”

RUSH: No, it is not, Ms. Sunny. It has nothing to do with it! This is about liberalism! Taking our country back means regaining our freedom. Taking our country back means getting control of government and shrinking it and getting it more and more out of our lives. Taking our country back means returning to the principles and the traditions of the founding. It has nothing to do with taking it back from a black president. His race is irrelevant to me and probably to most of us. In fact, Ms. Hostin or Hostin, however you pronounce your name, the only relevance about Obama’s race is how it allows him to proceed without criticism.

Everybody’s afraid to criticize him because people like you are gonna run around saying it’s all racist when race has nothing to do with this. He’s president of the United States, for crying out loud. He’s the most powerful man in the world. What he thinks matters. His policies matter. We object strenuously to them. His policies are bad for the country. It has nothing to do with taking it back from a black president. And what is this, we shy away from talking about race? That’s all we talk about. We can’t get away from it. You people on the left won’t let us. You’re the ones that make everything racial, as you just did in this sound bite.

This has to do with policy. This has to do with ideology. This has to do with liberty and freedom, the view of a country run and dominated by an ever-expanding government, or one that’s not. A country rooted in individual liberty and freedom and the pursuit of happiness, or one that’s not. And there’s not a whole lot of happiness right now. There’s a lot of misery. Nothing to do with taking the country back.

What did Howard Dean mean, Sunny, when he ran around campaigning on the premise of taking the country back from Rush Limbaugh, as he said over and over? What did Mrs. Clinton mean when she ran around saying that it was time to take the country back? Is that a dog whistle, and if so, to who? What does it mean? George W. Bush wasn’t black when they were running around talking about this. Howard Dean’s talking about taking the country back from me, taking the flag back from me. I’m just a guy on the radio. I don’t own the country. I don’t determine what happens in the country.

You know what she would say to this? I know without knowing. I know what she would say if she were here answering my question, “Well, no, because Howard Dean isn’t a racist, so take back his country couldn’t mean that. But you Republicans, we know are racist. We all know it, so when you say take your country back, we know you mean from a black president.” You don’t know anything. In fact, I think it diminishes you, Sunny, to even think this way. It has nothing to do with it.

Sunny, can you find for me anybody who’s happy with the way things are going in this country right now? Outside of people on Wall Street, outside of some college professors, can you cite for me some average Americans who are happy and content with the direction this country’s going? A hundred million Americans out of work? Sunny, the president’s race has never mattered to me, not even this historical aspect because that was intended to paralyze opposition, too. Greg Anthony was then asked by Erin Burnett, “Okay, Greg, if you want to follow up, go right ahead.”

ANTHONY: As an African-American and someone who is somewhat conservative, that perception does become a reality for African-Americans. You do have to be above that at a certain point, because ultimately my grandma used to tell me, she says, “Baby, you can’t just be good. You have to be better.” And she was referring to racism in the country that we live in, and the attorney general and the president, in their positions, there’s no reason to even allow that to enter.

RUSH: Exactly. Exactly. They’re the president and attorney general. What in the world does racism have to do with it? How can there be any racism if they’re elected? Dominating racism, of course there will be wacko racists. I would like to know what other excuse they’ve got. Why are these two men so incompetent, Sunny? What explains the mess this country is in? It isn’t racism. It’s what they believe. It’s their policies. It’s their ideology that’s got us in this mess. And that’s what needs to be saved.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I have to make a contradiction. I didn’t know. But now I do know. And unlike others in the media, I’m gonna correct myself. Erin Burnett did play a montage of Democrats talking about taking back our country. She did play that sound bite, or a sound bite, a montage, of Democrats using the phrase, too. But these guests of hers I guess were not asked to comment on it or it was not played for them side by side with my comment.

But I’ll tell you what you need to do here. ‘Cause this is what the left does every damn time to shut down debate. It’s not about racism; it’s about liberalism. So the next time somebody goes on CNN and says “take back our country” is racist, substitute racism with liberalism. Every time you hear one of these people blame it all on race or accuse us of being racist, you substitute that word with liberalism, and you’ll be accurate. You’ll find out what it is that we oppose; what it is that we’re trying to save ourselves from; what it is that we’re trying to take back our country from. It is liberalism, socialism, statism, whatever the hell you want to call it.

Race has nothing to do with it! Certainly not Obama’s skin, nothing to do with it, nor Holder’s. That is the most irrelevant aspect of this. It is used to paralyze people from being critical, properly so, of this president. It doesn’t work on me, but it does work on most. They shut up ’cause they don’t want people like Sunny going on television calling them racists. I don’t care, because I know that you know that it’s bogus.

So just play this game. Whenever you hear some leftist on TV suggest that any of this criticism of Obama is due to racism, just substitute the word “racism” with “liberalism,” and you will understand every time what’s up here. Do I have time for one more? Yeah. Here’s Don Lemon of “did that plane end up in a black hole?” on CNN talking about how I pounced on Eric Holder.

LEMON: Conservatives, like Rush Limbaugh, pounced on the comments. And according to a transcript on his radio show, Limbaugh says, “Not true. The Republicans bent themselves into as many shapes as they could to agree with this president. They went out of their way to praise Holder’s nomination.” He said, “I will never forget that.” Then he went on to say “It was all an effort then by Republicans to curry favor from the Obama administration and show that they were not bigots.”

RUSH: Well! Well! At least an accurate quote from my website. That doesn’t happen much. I wonder how Media Matters feels to be aced out?

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Remember, I told everybody one year before Obama was elected, I told everybody one year before Obama was inaugurated that the fact he was black was gonna eliminate any criticism. One of the purposes would be to freeze any criticism, because all of it would be labeled as racist in origin. It’s exactly what they’ve done for the last five and a half years, any criticism at all, especially legitimate, right-on criticism. They relegate it to racism and bigotry and they try to disqualify it that way. I knew this was gonna happen, told everybody it was gonna happen. These people make me sound like the most brilliant guy on radio. Well, I am. But they help.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: There’s one more Don Lemon, but I’m gonna skip it. He just talks about (imitating Lemon), “Well, it’s the context, you know, depends on who’s saying it. We know that when Republicans say ‘take back our country,’ we know what they mean. We know they mean from a black president.” Screw that. It’s bogus, it’s simplistic, it’s easy, and anybody can say it, and it happens to be totally untrue. It’s such that even when you donate $25 million to the United Negro College Fund they will say you’re just trying to cover your racism, as the Koch brothers did. It’s insulting how stupid these people are, genuinely stupid, closed-minded stupid.