RUSH: (story) ‘Calling for an end to the war, democratic [sic] presidential candidate Barack Obama spoke in Kansas City Saturday afternoon. In his first campaign visit here, Obama spoke to a crowd of more than 1,500 people at the Downtown Marriott, hitting hard on the war, health insurance and the president. In a packed auditorium, sweltering with body heat, Obama greeted the crowd. ‘How’s it going, Kansas City,’ the presidential hopeful said speaking over applause and cheers. He warmed up the crowd playing up his roots as a Harvard grad, turned civil rights attorney, and his life long battle with name recognition.’ Now, this, folks, is the Democrat presidential primary, and all these guys can do is go out and talk about Bush. I don’t care who the Democrat presidential candidate we’re talking about is, be it Mrs. Bill Clinton or Obama, they talk about Bush. They don’t even try to debate each other to distinguish their views from each other. Is this supposed to be an impressive crowd size, 1500 people?
I tell you, if I said I was going somewhere and only 1500 people showed, we’d cancel it. (interruption) Yes, we would, Dawn! We would cancel it because it would be embarrassingly low, and it would be reported as such. ‘Only 1500 came out to hear Limbaugh!’ I know people that get 25,000 people at book signings, for crying out loud, where people actually pay! They have to buy a book to get in there. I remember I once went to South Carolina early on in a Rush to Excellence Tour, 5000 people in some arena. There were three protesters outside, a mother and two daughters, and that was the picture the next day on the front page with the headline: ‘Protesters Appear at Limbaugh Appearance.’ There were 10,000 people inside, three protesters. With Obama, we don’t know if there were protesters. There probably were. Fifteen hundred people! Meanwhile, Obama is being called a hypocrite because of his wife’s link to Wal-Mart. (story) ‘As a fluent public speaker, independent-minded wife, devoted mother and professional woman, Michelle Obama has been hailed as an invaluable asset to her husband Barack’s mission to capture the Democratic 2008 presidential nomination.
‘Yet, while her style and performance are winning plaudits on the campaign trail, a little-reported business interest of Mrs Obama may open her husband up to one of the criticisms that politicians fear most – the taint of hypocrisy. She is taking a break from her main job, as a well-remunerated Chicago hospital executive, to campaign for her husband. But she has just been re-elected to the board of an Illinois food processing company, a position she took up two years ago to gain experience of the private sector. ‘And the biggest customer for the pickles and peppers made by Treehouse Foods,’ that’s the company she’s on the board of, is Wal-Mart, ‘the world’s largest corporation and [hated corporation] of American liberals, including Obama…’ He rips Wal-Mart, their hiring practices and their ’employment practices, most notably its refusal to recognise trade unions.
‘As the Illinois senator prepared to join the presidential fray late last year, he threw his weight behind the union-backed campaign against Wal-Mart. He declared that there was a ‘moral responsibility to stand up and fight’ the company and ‘force them to examine their own corporate values’.’ I tell you, just look at the Democrat Party’s enemies list, and that ought to be enough to get nobody with a brain voting for them. Wal-Mart, an enemy of the Democrat Party? I mean, it’s understandable because the union connection that they have. But so what? Only in the Democrat Party could it be that the wife of a candidate who is on the board of a pickle company who happens to sell pickles to Wal-Mart, could that be an embarrassment. Have the people forgotten that Mrs. Bill Clinton was actually on the Wal-Mart board when she lived in Arkansas, supporting her husband when he was governor?
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I was sitting here thinking about Michelle Obama. I wonder if Joe Biden thinks that she’s ‘clean and articulate,’ too. He’s no doubt heard Michelle Obama speak, and I wonder. We had the story last week — and we reported this because it was no doubt celebrated in the Democrat Party — that Wal-Mart had its worst quarter in 28 years. That’s cause for celebration when you are a liberal Democrat. A capitalist entity that’s doing a better job of servicing the American people than government programs are, had the worst quarter in 28 years? That makes Democrats happy. Did you stop to think that Wal-Mart had its worst quarter in 28 years while Mrs. Obama was connected to them at the pickle company? A pickle and pepper company. By the way, an e-mailer suggests, a brilliant point: the fact that Mrs. Obama’s pickle and pepper company supplies Wal-Mart and Wal-Mart is their largest customer and so forth? The fact of the matter is that Wal-Mart is