RUSH: This is Dan in Lottsburg, Virginia, great to have you on the program, sir.
CALLER: Well, Rush, thanks for being you right off the bat.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: Longtime listener and the proud owner of two vast right-wing conspiracy coffee cups.
RUSH: Thank you very much, sir. I appreciate that.
CALLER: I, as a Tea Party member, which there are millions of us, I’ve been watching MSNBC, which you shouldn’t do, but I do just to understand what the other side is saying. What would happen, or what would have happened if a Tea Party member actually had been the shooter?
RUSH: What do you think?
CALLER: Well, I think they’d probably try to throw you off the air and probably throw the Tea Party members into reeducation camps.
RUSH: Well, it would be an ugly scene. You would not be able to get away from it on the media, and whoever they thought was influencing Tea Partiers the most would be identified as the leader of this cult-like influence. That would of course be Sarah Palin or me. Let me ask you, since you’re doing hypotheticals, what is to stop them —
CALLER: From doing it.
RUSH: — from doing it?
CALLER: Yep.
RUSH: You know, getting hold of a guy, paying him to go do something like this, and when it’s all over, claim that he’s a Tea Partier? Which is more believable to you, you know Tea Party people, which is more believable, a Tea Party person in light of all that’s happened here is actually gonna commit an atrocity like this or that the Democrats or the left would pay somebody to go do something like this and claim to be a Tea Partier, which is more likely of those two?
CALLER: I would go with the conspiracy —
RUSH: Yeah, obviously.
CALLER: We sit here and they say names hurt. Well, you know, every time they get up there and they call us tea baggers, I get a little bit offended. I mean I don’t want to be the person to sit down with my elderly Tea Party ladies and explain to them what a tea bagger is.
RUSH: Well, I think we should send Michelle Obama a letter asking her how we should answer that question when our children or other family members ask what is a tea bagger, what is the proper answer? I think only the answer from a source on high like that would suffice, don’t you?
CALLER: Yeah, yeah, I sure don’t want to be the one to do it. I didn’t know what it was until I checked it out. I am just horribly offended every time it happens.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: I’m also offended by the arrogance of — well, primarily Speaker Pelosi, former Speaker Pelosi, when she gets up there and says Bush did it.
RUSH: I was just gonna say that if you take a look at actual assassins, Lee Harvey Oswald, leftist. Democrats were behind the storming of the Branch Davidian complex, Bill Clinton and Janet Reno. If you look at the sixties, who was it that was blowing up bank buildings and kidnapping heiresses? It’s a bunch of leftists. I mean, the people prone to violence, the anarchists or what have you, they’re all left-wingers.
CALLER: Certainly.
RUSH: You don’t see this kinda stuff perpetrated by conservatives or right-wingers. Even James Earl Ray, I mean Martin Luther King’s assassin, you could not say the guy’s a Republican conservative. The people that were for segregation, Democrats. The people that opposed the Civil Rights Act were Democrats. It doesn’t happen. And I’ve, frankly, ever since McVeigh, I have been waiting for one of these events to happen and for the perpetrator, him- or herself to come out and say they’re Tea Party and to say X influenced me to do this. And I don’t put it past somebody somewhere in the left in this country to do that, as they grow desperate. They keep hoping for this. What do you think Tucson was? They keep hoping for it. Here, listen to this sound bite. This is Wednesday night, NPR, All Things Considered, Daisy Hernandez, a report on the Tucson shooting and the reaction from the Latino community. Daisy Hernandez, coeditor of the essay anthology Colonize This! Young Women on Today’s Feminism, said this about the alleged Tucson gunman.
HERNANDEZ: My eyes scanned the mobile papers, I held my breath. Finally I saw it: Jared Loughner. Not a Ramirez, Gonzalez, or Garcia. It’s safe to say there was a collective sigh of brown relief when the Tucson killer turned to be a gringo. Had the shooter been Latino, media pundits wouldn’t be discussing the impact of nasty politics on a young man this week; they’d be demanding an even more stringent anti-immigrant policy.
RUSH: Daisy, you don’t know how wrong you are. If the shooter’s last name had been Ramirez, Gonzales, or Garcia, the Republicans would have been blamed for this for driving the poor person to do it because of illegal immigration. But, see, nevertheless everybody’s waiting on bated breath, ‘Oh, gosh,’ because they know the media is gonna blame somebody other than the perp.