RUSH: This is funny, Page Six of the New York Post today is reporting that Obama ‘claims to run a clean campaign, but someone in his camp took a swipe at Hillary Clinton through the candidate’s theme song. As Obama and his wife, Michelle, strolled triumphantly into his victory party in Des Moines, Iowa, on Jan. 3,’ a song started playing, a song by well-known rapper Jay-Z. The name of the song: 99 Problems. You know what the lyric line is in 99 Problems? ‘I got 99 problems, but a [b-i-itch] ain’t one of them.’ And so people are beginning to think that Obama’s camp snuck in a dig at Mrs. Clinton. The Obama camp, ‘We didn’t have anything going on.’ The Clinton people said, ‘We didn’t know he used that.’ In the meantime, let’s go to the audio sound bites. Let’s go back to last Monday in New Hampshire, Major Garrett of Fox News interviewing Senator Hillary Clinton, and this is what she said about the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
HILLARY: I would point to the fact that Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do, president before had not even tried. But it took a president to get it done. That dream became a reality, the power of that dream became real in people’s lives because we had a president who said, ‘We’re going to do it,’ and actually got it accomplished.
RUSH: And this started it all, ladies and gentlemen. Amazingly, when Andrew Young said that Bill Clinton was better than Obama because he’s known more black women than Obama has known, that didn’t get anybody riled up on the Democrat side, but this did because what she was in effect saying was, ‘I don’t care how much hope Obama’s got, and I don’t care how soaring his speeches are, and I don’t care how he can inspire and motivate people. It takes somebody like me to get what Obama wants to get done, done.’ Now, she ignored the fact that Obama might himself be president someday and, therefore, could theoretically begin to work on his own soaring and vapid vision. But this is what got the fireworks rolling. Then last Friday, on Al Sharpton’s radio show, this is what President Clinton said about Obama. He had to go out and defend himself on the fairytale comment.
CLINTON: It’s not a fairytale. He might win. I think he’s a very impressive man and he’s run a great campaign.
RUSH: Now, what he was talking about out there, ladies and gentlemen, was that he claims he was saying Obama’s story, that he opposed the war in Iraq from the get-go, was a fairytale. He wasn’t talking about Obama’s campaign so much as a fairytale, it’s just Obama’s role in the Senate opposing the war in Iraq. However, the New York Times, an interesting story today, in defending her war vote, both Clintons contradict the record. They are lying again. ‘Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton have repeatedly invoked the name of Senator Chuck Hagel, a longtime critic of the Iraq war, as they defend Mrs. Clinton’s 2002 vote to authorize the war.
‘Mrs. Clinton repeated the claim Sunday during an interview on ‘Meet the Press,’ saying ‘Chuck Hagel, who helped to draft the resolution, said it was not a vote for war.’ ‘It was a vote to use the threat of force against Saddam Hussein, who never did anything without being made to do so,’ Mrs. Clinton said. But the talking point appears to misconstrue the facts. In October 2002, Mr. Hagel had in fact been working with Senators Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, and Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana, on drafting a resolution that would have authorized the war.’ But it was the White House proposal using authorization for force, not just the threat, not Hagel’s, that Mrs. Clinton supported. She’s lying again. Both Clintons are tag-teaming Obama, saying, ‘He didn’t vote for this. This story is a fairytale.’
The real fairytale is the Clintons. The Clintons are saying that they supported the Hagel amendment. That’s not what the president signed. That’s not what she voted on. Hagel, by the way, is being silent here and offering no help to the Clinton tag-team operation.
RUSH: I want to go back to audio sound bites here. The uncivil war happening in the Democrat Party. This is Meet the Press with Tim Russert yesterday. He said, ‘When we arrived in South Carolina yesterday, this was The State newspaper, and the headlines greeted you with this. Let me share it with you and our viewers. ‘Clinton camp hits Obama, attacks painful for black voters, many in state offended by criticism of Obama, remarks about Martin Luther King,’ Bob Herbert, the New York Times, a columnist weighed in.’ What’s this all about, Mrs. Clinton?
HILLARY: I was 14 years old when I heard Dr. King speak in person. He is one of the people that I admire most in the world.
RUSH: Uhhh.
HILLARY: And the point that I was responding to from Senator Obama himself in a number of speeches he was making, is his comparison of himself to President Kennedy and Dr. King. You know, Dr. King didn’t just give speeches. He marched. He organized. He protested. He was gassed. He was beaten.
RUSH: Stop the tape. Stop the tape. Stop the tape. Two things here. First thing, Mrs. Clinton is saying, ‘Obama, you are not down with the struggle. You are not down for the struggle. You can’t compare yourself to King; you can’t compare yourself to JFK, and you won’t be able to until you’ve marched, organized, and been gassed, and then been beaten — and we, the Clintons, might take you up on it.’
HILLARY: He was jailed. He understood that he had to move the political process and bring in those who are in political power, and he campaigned for political leaders, including Lyndon Johnson, because he wanted somebody in the White House who would act on what he had devoted his life to achieving. So I think it’s important to set the record straight. Clearly, we know from media reports that the Obama campaign is deliberately distorting this.
RUSH: Ah! There we get to the nut of it, ladies and gentlemen! This is a typical Clinton move. She is the victim of all this race stuff. Obama is deliberately distorting what she has said. Then Russert quotes Congressman Clyburn, James Clyburn, Congressional Black Caucus. He’s from South Carolina. ”We have to be very, very careful about how we speak about that era in American politics. … That bothered me a great deal.’ A writer in The Washington Post today, a black woman, said, ‘It’s as if you are minimizing I Have a Dream. That you’re saying it’s a nice sentiment, but it took a white president to get blacks to the mountaintop.”
HILLARY: Tim, I can’t let you get away with that mischaracterization and those snippets. Dr. King had been on the front lines. He had been leading a movement. But Dr. King understood, which is why he made it very clear that there had to be a coming to terms of our country politically in order to make the changes that would last for generations beyond the iconic, extraordinary speeches that he gave. That’s why he campaigned for Lyndon Johnson in 1964. I think that is such an unfair and unwarranted attempt to misinterpret and mischaracterize what I have said. This is unfortunate storyline that the Obama campaign has pushed very successfully.
RUSH: Yeah. Once again, the Clintons are victims. Adam Nagourney, the New York Times today, says, ‘Race and Gender Are Issues in Tense Day for Democrats,’ meaning Sunday and over the weekend. A tense day? Do you know what this is illustrating, folks? The Democrats have been mired in race for decades. You know, Hillary throws down the gender card and race markers as Barack tries to run as a person. Barack’s not running as ‘a black guy.’ Barack’s not. He’s running as a savior; he’s running as a messiah. And there are a lot of liberal Democrats out there, by the way, willing to take that. It’s perverted, but a lot of liberalism is perverted. Here’s the next question from Russert. ‘Maureen Dowd said that ‘if the gender game worked when Rick Lazio muscled into her space, why shouldn’t it work when Obama and Edwards muster some mettle? If she could become a senator by playing the victim, surely she could become president by playing the victim.’ Ruth Marcus, Washington Post, ‘Hillary Clinton doesn’t need to play the woman-is-victim card. Using gender this way is a setback.”
HILLARY: I don’t think either of us should use gender. I don’t think this campaign is about gender, and I sure hope it’s not about race.
RUSH: (laughing) Come on!
HILLARY: It needs to be the individuals. Clearly, I bring the experiences of women. As a daughter, as a mother, as a wife, as a sister. That is who I am. Those experiences are part of me, and it is part of our American journey that we have moved from —
RUSH: Stop the tape! She says she’s not played the gender card, she’s not going to play the gender card — and she played the gender card!
HILLARY: — so much of what used to hold people back because of gender, because of race. So we still have to overcome barriers and obstacles, and the very fact that Barack and I are in this campaign, each of us having won one of the first two contests, being prepared to take our case to the country, I think will do more to put to rest so many of these old shibboleths and all of the commentary and punditry.
RUSH: Right. You’re only reviving it. I want to remind you something, ladies and gentlemen, last week, what this I think fairly clearly illustrates, is that the Democrats are in a bunch of chaos. I know a lot of you didn’t think I knew what I was talking about last week because here’s Obama winning big in Iowa, then Hillary winning New Hampshire and everybody looks like they’re happy and hunky-dory. I said, ‘Don’t buy this. This is a party in chaos,’ and the chaos has boiled over, and it boiled over to the weekend now with this uncivil war going on. The reason for all of this is that the Democrats — and, again, if you missed this, let me set it up by telling you what they believe is not correct, but what they believe is what they think, and they think — and they’re very defensive about this. They think that their opponents, Republicans, are racists and sexists and bigots and homophobes and all that, racism and sexism are the key things here, and they think they’re vulnerable on both counts, regardless who wins their nomination, Barack or Hillary, because they think — and they live in mortal fear — that we, the Republicans, are the experts at racism, the experts at sexism. This is how they view us, totally incorrect, but very clichéd.
They think that we’ll come up with some clever way to beat either one of them, and because they have this chaos and they have this fear, it’s bubbling up now above the surface for one and all to see. At the root of this — beyond Mrs. Clinton’s quest for power and Obama’s desire to win, at the root of all of this — is Mrs. Clinton trying to say she’ll have a better chance at winning because the Republicans will be able to take him out with racism and that they’ll be not as good with sexism and so forth because she’s gotten away with throwing the gender card and crying and so forth. So they’re trying to send a message to a lot of voters in the Democrat Party, the Clinton, Inc., bunch are. But the fact that this chaos has surfaced and the fact that they had a ‘tense day’ with racism? These people have been mired in race and sexism and bigotry for as long as I have been watching the Democrat Party. They look at people, and they don’t see people. They see skin color, sexual gender orientation, all of those things, and then they assign people to groups, denying them individuality, and it’s all surfacing now. It could well be just as the Republican side looks like it’s got a long way to go, it looks like this on the Democrat side may have a long way to go as well.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here is Obama yesterday in Vegas outside the Pentecostal Temple Church. By the way, I have to ask you people a question. If race is an issue in this campaign, then why are the Drive-Bys not reporting all the Clintons’ ties to segregationists over the years, including J. William Fulbright? Now, I mentioned this in the aforementioned best monologue ever. The Drive-Bys are really conflicted here. Here you’ve got Edwards playing the class envy card; you’ve got Hillary playing the gender card; you’ve got Obama playing the race card, and they’re all throwing these cards out on the table, and they’re liberals! The Drive-Bys have to overlook it, because in their world, only conservatives and only Republicans are racists and sexists and all these other things. But here it is on full display for the whole country to see who’s practicing racism to defeat a black guy, who’s practicing gender politics to defeat a black guy.
The bottom line, when you strip all of this away, what is happening? The Clintons are trying to keep another black man down. And this is not unique. Carl McCall ran for governor of New York. Maynard Jackson wanted to head up the DNC. Blacks are fine, as long as they know their place in the Democrat Party, but when they step up and say, ‘You know what, we’ve been slaves for you for 50 years. We’ve been voting for you, we’ve been putting you in power, and all you’ve done is destroy our families with your welfare programs. It’s about time you give us some power.’ And the Clintons go into action and we get what we get. If all these things that Democrats had said over the years about quotas and affirmative action and discrimination and all that, if they really meant it, Hillary Clinton would stand aside, resign the campaign, and say, ‘Senator Barack Obama, it is your turn. You speak for us and the Democrat Party.’ See, when these people step up, they want to claim their actual seat at the table, the big boots of Clinton, Inc., stomp on their throats, do their best to destroy them. What did Mrs. Clinton do as first lady in Arkansas on the race issue? She didn’t do anything, did she? Hillary has all this experience, she has all this compassion. You can’t cite any of it. What did she do on race? She made the education system worse, and that didn’t help race relations, did it? Anyway, outside the Pentecostal Temple Church of God in Christ, in Vegas, Senator Obama responded to Hillary with this.
OBAMA: I am baffled by that statement by the senator. And she made an ill-advised statement about Dr. King and suggesting that Lyndon Johnson had more to do with the civil rights act. I did not make the statement. I haven’t commented on the statement. And for them somehow to suggest that we’re interjecting race as a consequence of a statement she made that we haven’t commented on is pretty hard to figure out.
RUSH: He hasn’t talked about race. He’s exactly right. The Clintons are now blaming him for racism, comments that they made. Here’s what Bob Johnson of BET said.
JOHNSON: As an African-American, I am, frankly, insulted that the Obama campaign would imply that we are so stupid that we would think Hillary and Bill Clinton, who have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues, when Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood that I won’t say what he was doing, but he said it in his book.
RUSH: Whoa, there’s the drug-use allegation brought back up. Bill Shaheen, national co-chair for Hillary in New Hampshire, had to resign. Here’s Bob Johnson, BET, bringing it up again. Obama has not entered this fray. He’s exactly right.