RUSH: To the audio sound bites we go. This is — I was going to say it’s amazing. It’s not amazing. They’ve taken a two-week-old story, the Drive-By Media and the Obama campaign working in solidarity, a two-week-old story that has been put to bed. There is no Michelle whitey tape. The Obama campaign has said so. After the Obama campaign said that, after Obama himself said it, nobody’s out there claiming that there is. The first guy that said there was, was a Democrat by the name of Larry Johnson, who was also discredited earlier on when he said that Karl Rove had been indicted by Patrick Fitzgerald. A Democrat started the rumor. The rumor was given foundation by another Democrat, the lovable and huggable Bob Beckel on the Fox News Channel’s early morning show Fox & Friends. He went out there, and he said, ‘I don’t like to repeat rumors. I’m not going to specify what this is, but I’m worried about it. I’m really worried about this. I’m worried it’s going to drop tomorrow,’ the day after some series of primaries. Two or three weeks old here. This, of course, caused some to say, ‘Whoo, look at what Beckel said!’ This has been classic rope-a-dope on the part of the Democrats in conjunction with the Drive-By Media.
Yesterday, Jay Carney, who I have spoken to, who has interviewed me, it was earlier this year, and it was in TIME Magazine, and he was on the phone, and he was very nice, very polite, said, ‘By the way, my wife, Claire Shipman, would love to talk to you for her ABC show.’ I said I’d be willing to talk to her. AP comes out with this story two days ago or three now that says right-wing bloggers and Rush Limbaugh are spreading this rumor. Now, other people are saying that I not only spread the rumor, I said the rumor was true, which I never did. The Obama campaign now has a website refuting all this, and there’s my name right there at the top. And I know frankly why, me and the bloggers, and they’re doing this because they know that the mention of my name agitates their supporters like nothing else does, maybe only the president’s name agitates ’em even more. But here again is a totally fallacious story. The people in the Drive-By Media, from Jay Carney to the Associated Press to whoever, know it is a nonstory, that nobody in the blogosphere or me or on talk radio has ever said this tape existed, has ever said that it was real. And yet they continue to try to get mileage out of it.
To me, I think it’s a very defensive move on their part, trying to keep this alive. It means they want to distract people from some of the other weaknesses of their little candidate, Barack Obama. Now there’s another rumor going around out there, by the way. I got a note yesterday from a fellow talk show host, a friend, said, ‘I’ve been listening to you every day. I haven’t heard you mention the latest rumor on Barack Obama.’ I wrote back, ‘I haven’t heard about this rumor ’til you mentioned it to me.’ The rumor is — are you standing by, Obama website, are you standing by, Drive-By Media? Let me repeat the rumor. (laughing) The rumor — and I don’t know who’s spreading this, I don’t know who started this — the rumor is that Barack Obama was not born in America, therefore, he’s not an American citizen, therefore, he’s not qualified to be the Democrat Party presidential nominee nor is he qualified to be president. So right on cue, the Obama website produces a copy of the certification of birth, showing he was born here, what his dad’s name was, his name, his mom’s name, the time of birth, so forth. It was 7:24 in the evening, on whatever date it was.
Now, the blogosphere is saying, ‘Wait a minute, this doesn’t tell the whole story. A certification of birth is not a birth certificate.’ So they are feeding these kinds of things to get people to report these rumors. It’s just like, Obama is a Muslim, Obama is — whatever — all these other rumors, they’re finally now countering these things. One of the theories is that the haughty John Kerry, who served in Vietnam, did not respond quickly enough and so the truth stuck. What upset Kerry was when people were telling the truth. It’s what upsets every liberal, what upsets every leftist, upsets every Democrat. A personal attack is when you tell you the truth about them. So a quick audio sound bite here, this is Suzanne Malveaux, CNN’s Situation Room on Obama’s new anti-smear website and me.
MALVEAUX: Barack Obama has had enough. While he’s been dogged by rumors over the Internet for months, it was the claim that his wife Michelle was on videotape in church referring to someone as whitey that propelled his campaign to fight back. His new website, www.fightthesmears.com takes on that rumor first. It cites conservative Republican blogs and talk show host Rush Limbaugh as the sources behind the smear.
RUSH ARCHIVE: They’re waiting to use it in October, of Michelle going nuts in the church, too, talking about whitey this and whitey that.
MALVEAUX: The website counters, the truth is, no such tape exists.
RUSH: Did you hear that? Did you hear how they took my comment out of context? I was describing for you in this audience what supposedly the tape says. They sliced up what I say — this is Michael J. Fox all over again. This is a coordinated effort — pathetic though it is — a coordinated effort by the Drive-Bys. I never said that like that. I said it, but in the context of explaining what others were saying about this tape. Never said it existed. You people are pathetic!
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: You know, you Obama people, you’re going to have to wise up to something here, and those of you in the Drive-By Media who are in the tank for Obama, we all know it, everybody can see it. Here’s the dirty little secret, you people. We don’t have to make up things about the messiah, and you know it. This is all a deceitful plan designed to create in the eyes, the image in the minds of as many of Americans that partake of the Drive-By Media as possible, that every criticism of Obama is a lie. That’s what this is all about. The reason they’re doing that is ’cause they know this guy is vulnerable on all kinds of things, from the Reverend Jeremiah Wright to Bill Ayers to Tony Rezko, to his lack of experience, to the fact that he cannot speak without a teleprompter. They’re trying to inoculate and prevent any kind of criticism of Obama at all. Can’t talk about his mother, can’t talk about his dad, can’t talk about his race, can’t talk about his middle name, can’t talk about his wife, can’t talk about Rezko, can’t talk about his grandmother. We can’t talk about him being liberal. We can’t talk about his past associations. All that is the politics of distraction, the usual politics that we must change and get beyond.
All those things about Obama are true. He has a lot of baggage, and they are trying to suggest that any criticism of Obama at all is just rumors, just lies made up by the usual right-wing noise machine. So that’s why they’re making all this noise about the so-called rumor that nobody on the right ever said they had seen, nobody on the right ever said it was true. It was Democrats that started this for the express purpose of luring a bunch of people in. So now that it worked, it lured a bunch of people — did not lure me in, never once said this thing was real, never once said I had seen it, never once passed it off as something — the Democrats all did this. I want you to listen to how this shook out on Larry King Half Alive last night on CNN. He was talking with Townhall.com’s Amanda Carpenter about Obama’s new anti-smear website and me. Also Stephanie Miller, waif-like liberal talk show hostess with a dwindling audience — well, it’s hard to dwindle from nothing, but nevertheless was also a guest.
CARPENTER: A lot of the things on that website blame conservative blogs for perpetuating this rumor about Michelle Obama making this remark, when the actuality is it was started by a blogger named Larry Johnson, who is a former Hillary supporter on a blog called No Quarter. Then the other people picked up, but that’s where it started. So I think we’re going to have a fight over where the smear came from, probably because he made this website that he might not want to talk about.
KING: Stephanie?
MILLER: Well, you know, but then what happens is then Rush Limbaugh repeats it — see this is the era we’re in — that we’re in, Larry, that you have to have a website to refute things that aren’t true.
KING: Rush repeats untruths?
RUSH: Did you hear that? Did you hear that? You mean Rush repeats untruths? This is easily explainable. Larry King is jealous. He has been jealous ever since this national program started. Larry King used to be the so-called king of talk radio when nobody listened to it, from midnight to six in the morning. My show came up, they moved Larry to the afternoons, three to six because they found out maybe we can make money with Rush’s show. Larry’s show never made money. It was a loss leader for mutual radio. Larry got skunked and is outta radio because of me. He’s never gotten over it. He’s just a jealous beady-eyed little host here who has a lot of fun talking to people who are two feet from the grave, occasionally gets his liberal bloggers and liberal talk show hosts in there to make him feel at home, but he’s just jealous. I don’t take any of this personally. Hey, the gloves are coming off here, folks. I do not tell untruths. Larry King knows it. As do all of the liberals. They all know it. So, you know, they want a little fun here talking about this and that and the other thing. Hey, Larry, have you gotten back to a million viewers a night, pal? And are any of them under 70, Larry? I love the Prep H commercials. Okay, to the phones. Dawn’s hyperventilating in there, ‘I’ve never seen this side of you.’ Get used to it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Open Line Friday, El Rushbo and more fun than a human being should be allowed to have, doing the job of the Larry Kings of the world. Average Americans who are more informed than the so-called dean of talk show hosts on television. Average Americans who take more time to learn rather than sit in their cliched waste. A caller to C-SPAN’s Washington Journal today from Myrtle Beach said this about Obama’s new anti-smear website and El Rushbo.
CALLER: I want to say something about the comment. I don’t know whether this was from you or from bloggers or something about Rush Limbaugh starting a comment about the whitey that Ms. Michelle Obama was talking about. The thing that Rush Limbaugh, he just pointed this out, this was something that Bob Beckel put out on Fox News, and he wasn’t sure, so for you to say that the right-wing bloggers, all people like Rush Limbaugh and these talk show hosts, all they do is repeat what Democrats say.
RUSH: Here you have an average American, a caller to C-SPAN who knows more than Larry King does, and Larry King makes $7 million a year at CNN. Everything CNN spends is a waste of money. Get a crew that knows news, you people at CNN. Aren’t you embarrassed, after years and years and years of utter embarrassingly defeat by the Fox News Channel and you can’t do anything about it, do you maybe think it’s time to get rid of the tired, retread has-beens and get some people in there who understand and know what’s going on outside your newsroom? And, by the way, about Obama, if Obama is not accusing people of editing tapes — isn’t that what he did? Obama went out there and accused people of snippeting, taking snippets of Reverend Jeremiah Wright. ‘That’s not the Jeremiah Wright I knew. I never heard any of that,’ and now the Obama people and the Drive-By Media are editing tapes of me. Nothing about Jeremiah Wright was edited! These were from Jeremiah Wright’s own sermons and own DVDs at the church.
I’m under snipper fire from the Obama camp, that’s exactly right, snipper fire aimed at me. This is quite telling. I’m an innocent bystander. I had nothing to do with this. For two weeks I had nothing to do with this. It is so predictable. These people are just — when I say these people, I mean the Drive-By Media, leftists, they’re just anything but the truth, anything but the truth. Remember, all this is designed to discredit people who tell the truth about Obama.