RUSH: I want to start with the Reverend Sharpton last night on Hardboiled with Chris Matthews. As you know, the Reverend Sharpton is now the chief of the speech police. The Drive-Bys have anointed the Reverend Sharpton and the Reverend Jackson with that power. Now, you remember yesterday we played audio sound bites of Isiah Thomas, head coach of the New York Knicks. He was on the witness stand. He’s accused of sexual harassment by a female staffer. Apparently he called her a b-i-itch. He was asked on the witness stand, ‘Is it different who can say the word b-i-itch, or would you get angry if a white person called a black woman a b-i-itch?’ ‘Yes, sir. You can’t say that,’ I’m paraphrasing it. ‘What about when a black man calls a black woman a b-i-itch?’ ‘Well, I don’t think that’s as bad,’ he said. So the Reverend Sharpton was asked about this by Chris Matthews last night. And Matthews said, ‘Is there a difference, chief, between the word and who can say it?’
SHARPTON: No, I don’t think so. I think that the word is wrong no matter who says it. It’s a misogynist and sexist term. I do not agree with anyone using it. We in Action Network have fought it whether it was Imus or whether it was hip-hop artists. I think that a sexist word or a racist word or a word that is homophobic is that no matter who is the one using the word.
MATTHEWS: So that’s a bad word in your vocabulary, period?
SHARPTON: Correct.
RUSH: All right, so the NAALCP had a funeral some weeks ago for the N-word, and now the Reverend Sharpton on Hardball last night has officially banned the B-word from being used by anybody. Then Matthews said, ‘How did you get this throne, chief? You’re chief of the speech police. This position of influence, where you can decree that Don Imus must go or the conditions upon which he can come back, where did you get this position of power, chief?’
SHARPTON: What I said was that Don Imus and anyone else had the right to say what they want, but we have the right to organize people to say that we’re not going to pay for it, as I’m in Jena, Louisiana, right now, organizing against a decision we feel is wrong in the criminal justice system.
RUSH: All right, the Reverend Sharpton evaded the answer. Let me answer it for you, Chris. You want to know who it was that empowered the Reverend Sharpton to ban words and to sit in judgment over who can say what, where, in media? Chris, it was you and all your buddies in the Drive-By Media, and all of you guys in the Democrat Party. And it was CBS and it was NBC who bent over forwards and grabbed the ankles when the Reverend Sharpton came calling. Now, if you’re going to sit there and empower these charlatans as power brokers in the Democrat Party and in the American left, and then you’re going to sit there and wonder ‘Who gave you the power?’ you have to realize whose legitimizing these guys. They do not legitimize themselves. You do, Chris, by accepting what they say as scholarly leadership on behalf of the civil rights movement. There’s no mystery here.