RUSH: I want to take you back, folks, as we stay with the audio sound bite roster, I want to repeat something you first heard on this program on February 22nd, 2008, 11 months before Obama will be inaugurated as president. This is during the campaign, February 22nd, 2008.
RUSH ARCHIVE: If Obama gets elected president, “wouldn’t it be good to just get this done, Rush, we could end the civil rights squabbles that we’re having.” It wouldn’t do that, folks, it wouldn’t do that. It might even exacerbate them. Let me explain how. It takes somebody like me who can read the stitches on the fastball. Let us fast forward to January of 2009. Obama has been inaugurated president. And he proposes his first bit of legislation. And let’s say that it’s, I don’t know, some civil rights oriented thing, and a bunch of people start howling. You know that the race industry can’t wait for this. Any criticism of Obama, the first black president, is going to be met with charges of racism by the likes of the Reverends Jackson and Sharpton. It will make their race business all that much more prominent.
RUSH: And I said it a number of times during the campaign. The reason I did was because we all knew there were a bunch of people that were gonna vote for Obama hoping to end forever racial strife. There were people that voted for Obama for only one reason. They wanted it shown that the country was no longer racist, and how best to prove that? There’s no better way to prove that than to elect a black man president, and that’s why they voted for him. They didn’t care about anything else. And my point, I was trying to reach them, trying to say it’s gonna make it worse.
It’s not gonna solve anything because any criticism of Obama is going to be immediately tagged as racist and it’s going to be disqualified. There isn’t going to be any criticism of Obama permitted. This was a year before the election — well, a year before the inauguration. And once again, ladies and gentlemen, I have been proven prescient. It has been that in spades. In fact, it has gotten worse. It’s not just that any criticism of Obama would be labeled or tagged as racist.
What has happened is, the Republican Party has by and large been shut down. Their reluctance to be critical of anything Obama is doing is rooted in the fact that they don’t want to be called racist by the media. This is why the Democrats are salivating at Hillary or Elizabeth Warren being the next president because it would be the same thing. Any criticism of the first woman president would be sexist, and it would be therefore unqualified. Then after that, if they succeed, then they’ll go out and recruit the first Hispanic, and it’ll be the same thing.
No criticism of the next two or three Democrat presidents will be tolerated because it will all be said to be sexist or racist. The blueprint is what we’re living through now. And let me offer you some further evidence of this. Attorney General Eric Holder said yesterday that he and President Obama have been targets of a racial animus by some of the Regime’s political opponents. He was on This Week on ABC, Pierre Thomas interviewed him, said, “You’ve talked about the fact that you and the president are sometimes treated differently. Those were your words. What did you mean by that, Mr. Holder?”
HOLDER: There’s a certain level of vehemence, it seems to me, that’s directed at me, directed at the president. You know, people talk about taking their country back. I can’t look into people’s hearts, look into people’s minds, but it seems to me that this president has been treated differently than others. There’s a certain racial component to this for some people. I don’t think this thing is a main driver, but for some there’s a racial animus. It’s interesting to me that for whatever reason, Republicans decided early on that this was a president they were simply not gonna cooperate with.
RUSH: Not true. The Republicans bent themselves into as many shapes as they could to agree with this president. They went out of the way to praise Holder’s nomination. I’ll never forget that. All of these so-called conservative media types praising the nomination of Eric Holder, and all they were doing, they didn’t mean it, because it wasn’t a good nomination, but they were simply trying to curry favor and say, “See, we’re not racists. See, we’re not bigots. See, we’re not prejudiced or any of this stuff.”
They were trying to manufacture an image in the media that was contradictory to what they thought the conservative media image is, and it didn’t work. Newt Gingrich praised Obama and his choice of national security director, I forget who it — oh, it was James Jones, I think. I remember Newt went around (paraphrasing), “If you’d have told me that this president would have chosen somebody like this, I would not have believed you.” And then we had these conservative media columnists who wrote, “Oh, man, this guy’s so smart, why, look at the crease in his slacks.” The Republicans were bending over backwards to support this guy. They were bending over backwards to not be seen as racists, and yet here’s Holder saying, “Republicans decided early on they were not gonna cooperate.”
But this technique of smearing straw men and playing the role of victim. The president of the United States, attorney general of the United States, oh, poor guys, poor victims of a mean, racist America. We are being governed by the most divisive and some would say the most lawless president and attorney general ever, and they accuse everybody else of despicable motives? Notice they don’t name anybody. 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 “take back our country,” that’s code language, said Holder, I know I’m listening to a racist bigot. Let’s listen to some people who’ve said this. Let’s go back, 2004. The Democrat primaries, a montage of former Vermont Governor Howard Dean.
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. We 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 with Rush Limbaugh. Aaagggghhhh!
RUSH: Howard Dean in 2004 going crazy on the stump talking about taking his country back. Eric Holder said when he hears that, that’s code language, and there’s a racial component to that. By the way, not a single Republican senator opposed Eric Holder’s nomination.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: John Kerry, 2004, talking to John Edwards: “John, Teresa and I would like to ask you and Elizabeth to join us on our ticket to take back our country.” That’s announcing John Edwards as his veep to “take back our country.” At a Democrat fundraiser in 2003, Hillary Clinton pledged to work on behalf of a campaign to “take back our country.”