RUSH: John in Ocala, Florida. You’re up first. Great to have you with us.
CALLER: Rush, it’s an honor to speak with you, sir.
RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much.
CALLER: I want to take you back to your comments earlier about the events in Selma.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: I think it’s outrageous and even hilarious when the white liberal politicians go down there into the southern churches. Some of the funniest stuff I ever heard on your show was Algore doing that.
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: But do you think that maybe Obama has a more legitimate position there, and I want to relate it to you this way. You got a baseball background, and would you be critical of a black ballplayer speaking at an event celebrating the life of Jackie Robinson?
RUSH: Uh, huh? What? You gotta first tell me what I did with Obama that would equate to attacking a black ballplayer paying homage to Jackie Robinson.
CALLER: No. What I think is that you were putting Obama’s presence there at Selma in the same light as Mrs. Bill Clinton’s appearance there, and I think he has a more legitimate position there by the fact that he is black and he’s making a success of his life and he’s celebrating the events that happened in Selma.
RUSH: The only thing I picked on him for is that he, too, reverted to black-speak when he doesn’t speak that way normally.
CALLER: All right.
RUSH: I didn’t say he shouldn’t go. In fact, I said he drew the largest crowd, and his crowd was more receptive. Mrs. Clinton had to go down there and bring her husband to have any credibility because she doesn’t on her own. I don’t know what I did. Obama, I also pointed out that it’s the LA Times and others who have been saying he’s not black enough and he went down there to prove that he is and so forth. I wish we could get past all this stuff finally. This staying rooted in the past is not doing any of these people any good. It?s just shameless pandering on the part of both of these people that go down there for the express purposes of seeking votes. I understand how it works. But contrary to what everybody thinks, this is not honoring these people. Do you really think Dr. Martin Luther King, when he said, “I have a dream,” dreamed what happened in Selma yesterday?
CALLER: Well, I don’t think the way Mrs. Bill Clinton approached it honored him at all. But I think the things that Obama was saying made a lot of sense, and —
RUSH: Some of them did, which I pointed out — and I played him back-to-back with Bill Cosby who said the same things.
CALLER: And I agree with both of them.
RUSH: Yes. I do, too.
CALLER: Absolutely.
RUSH: But you’ll note he didn’t hear it anywhere else. The Drive-By Media didn’t play those sound bites from Barack Obama.
CALLER: Well, of course not.
RUSH: Only here, on the EIB Network have you heard them.
CALLER: That’s why we listen to you, Rush.
RUSH: I appreciate that, John. Thanks very much. Speaking of paying homage to Jackie Robinson, Tiger Woods was asked by William Jefferson Clinton — who was president at the time — to show up at Shea Stadium for an event that was to honor Jackie Robinson, and Tiger Woods said no, I’m not going. There were a host of reasons why. Tiger Woods does not want to get involved in anything political. But he also doesn’t want to be used. Well, I don’t know Tiger, so I can’t say any more about it. I can only speculate and conjecture as to why he didn’t want participate, but Clinton was stunned. Clinton was shocked and a little surprised that such an opportunity would be passed up. I’m not at all. That thing was as much about Bill Clinton as it was about Jackie Robinson. This is the thing that everybody is missing. These people are taking the occasion of these anniversaries and making it about
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Grab the Obama bite. This is Hillary Clinton in Selma yesterday. Just ask yourself if this is what Dr. King meant when he said he had a dream.
MRS. BILL CLINTON: Let us say with one voice the words of James Cleveland’s great freedom hymn: ?I don’t feel no ways tired, I come too far from where I started from. Nobody told me that the road would be easy. I don’t believe he brought me this far to leave me. And we know if we finish this march, what awaits us.? St. Paul told us —
RUSH: All right.
MRS. BILL CLINTON: — in a letter to the Galatians —
RUSH: All right! That’s enough! Now, here’s Obama.
OBAMA: This is the site of my conception. I am the fruits of your labor. I am the offspring of the movement. So when people ask me whether I’ve been to Selma befo’, I tell ’em I’m coming home.
RUSH: So apparently he’s been to Selma