Maybe General Powell can help us out here in understanding why it is that Sarah Palin is so unqualified and Joe Biden, a genuine dunce, who has taken this campaign to the last place it wants to be. General Powell, are you prepared to go out and campaign? I know you said you weren’t going to campaign. Are you prepared now to try to clean up this mess by telling us how qualified Obama is to deal with this test that’s coming? By the way, General Powell, in a number of other things that he said about endorsing Obama, he said the Republican Party’s getting too narrow. Did you catch that? He said the Republican Party is getting too narrow. Now, I’m beginning to wonder about Secretary Powell’s powers of perception. That means the Republican Party’s nothing but a bunch of right-wing extremists that he doesn’t like. He doesn’t like people that are against affirmative action, apparently. He doesn’t like people who are pro-life, apparently. The Republican Party’s getting too narrow? How many monologues have I given saying that with McCain the Republican tent’s too damn big? The Republican Party, Secretary Powell, has been out trying to attract people like you!
Do I need to calm down here? Am I a little — the Republican Party, General Powell, has been trying to throw people like me out of it. The Republican Party, with Senator McCain, has been trying to get independents, trying to get moderates, people like you. We have been trying to get independents and moderates and Democrats, by the way, to come into our party as Democrats, not conservatives. We’ve been trying to get independents to come into our party as independents, which means Democrats, not as Republicans. That’s what the McCain campaign is all about; that’s what the McCain nomination was all about. General Powell, for you to say that you don’t support McCain because the Republican Party is getting too narrow is a dead giveaway, sir. That’s the last thing anybody would say about John ‘Amnesty’ McCain. When you go down the list of McCain’s Democrat positions, McCain-Feingold, McCain-Kennedy, to say that McCain’s campaign is narrow because of Sarah Palin? And of course Tom Brokaw wasn’t going to call him on any of these things. He wasn’t going to call him on the surge or anything of the sort.
Yeah, the party has moved too far right. Look here: ‘Schwarzenegger to Campaign for McCain in Ohio.’ Schwarzenegger! He’s not exactly your pro-life, anti-affirmative action hick hayseed going to NASCAR races, General Powell. Isn’t this, by the way, the Colin Powell who was first appointed to a big job by Mr. Conservative, Ronald Reagan? Wasn’t it Ronald Reagan who pinned the four stars on General Powell? It was, ladies and gentlemen. And wasn’t it George H.W. Bush who named him chairman of the Joint Chiefs, another Republican? And wasn’t it George W. Bush who named him secretary of state? Yes, another Republican. By tomorrow this time, the political impact of the Powell endorsement will be mostly irrelevant, but his betrayal will be forever. And you people in the Drive-Bys who have been out there claiming that my disagreeing when Powell says his endorsement of Obama is not about race, and I say, yes, it is, it’s totally about race, is a transformational figure, what else is transformational about Obama if not his race?
Everybody knows that Democrats in the media think history is being made here. What’s so hard to admit you’re supporting a guy because of race? And they’re trying to tell me that I’m being racist and that I’m accusing Secretary Powell of being a racist. I’m not accusing him of being a racist. The Democrats have gotten away with defining our language or redefining our language for far too long. You bring up William Ayers, you are mean-spirited. You bring up Wright, you’re a racist, and now you say that General Powell’s endorsement of Obama is because of race? ‘You can’t say that, who do you think you are? Who does Limbaugh think he is?’ Let me tell you a little story. A friend of mine has a daughter in high school. Yesterday, the daughter shows up, it’s a history class, a constitutional history class or some such thing. She’s a senior in high school, shows up, and the teacher starts lambasting me to these seniors in high school. ‘Did you hear what Rush Limbaugh said about Colin Powell? Can you believe Rush Limbaugh’s a racist? Rush Limbaugh is as racist as anybody I ever — I can’t believe that Rush Limbaugh would say that about Colin Powell, that’s horribly racist,’ and apparently there are a lot of black students, and the teacher is asking, ‘What do you think of Limbaugh? Do you think he’s racist?’ All their hands go up.
So what you have here is electioneering going on in a high school history class, citing what I said. These kids are 18, some of them are 18, they can vote. So you’ve got this teacher who’s electioneering. What I said, my simple quotes to Jonathan Martin. ‘Jonathan, he says it’s not about race. Okay. I’m going to search all the inexperienced white liberals that he’s endorsed. I’ll get back to you with what I find.’ Not only is that not racist, it’s brilliant, if I say so myself, because it expresses it in a number of ways. What I’m saying is, well, this is interesting. He says it’s not about race, but where all the inexperienced white liberals? Of course it’s about race. And then when I said — now, nobody brings this one up — but he said he couldn’t deal with two more Republican appointments to the Supreme Court. I said, ‘I didn’t know he disliked John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia.’ I guess he also doesn’t like the fact that it was Republicans that made him who he is. This is betrayal.
What General Powell did is betrayal, and of course he’s gonna say it’s not about race, but if Biden were the nominee you think he’d be endorsing Biden? Do you think he would endorse Hillary? It’s possible. I’ll tell you why. Because in addition to the race factor here, what’s most important to Colin Powell is Colin Powell. And that means what’s most important to Colin Powell is his standing in the New York-Washington elite corridors of power, and he has been on thin ice since the Iraq war and since he went up there to the United Nations and made the case for Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. So this gets him back in good graces, this gets him back in good stead. In addition, do you think General Powell knew that Scooter Libby had not leaked anything, that his own assistant, Richard Armitage did? And do you think that General Powell might have just sat on the sidelines during the Scooter Libby investigation as a way of getting back at the Bush administration because he thinks they embarrassed him by sending him up there to make that statement, which so threatened his relationship with the people he most covets, the New York-Washington power elite? So with the endorsement of Obama, takes care of that. Look at what he had to look past, by the way, too.
Claudia Rosett, National Review Online, big, important piece. He had to ignore the United Nations oil-for-food program in making this endorsement, a number of other things. It’s clear that General Powell is looking out for General Powell, which a lot of people do. But to say that my saying that he’s choosing to endorse Obama is racist, I never said that. I said he’s making the choice based on race and a number of other things. Plus, now the Republican Party’s moved too far to the right. How does that strike you, you conservatives who think the Republican Party is trying to do everything it can to disavow conservatives running the party. So, by this time tomorrow, the political impact of the Powell endorsement will be mostly irrelevant, but his betrayal will be forever. And I would still love to hear what General Powell has to say about what Biden said. Maybe he can explain again why he supports Obama and Biden after what Biden said. And maybe those who say that Sarah Palin is not qualified, can explain to us again how Biden is, despite being the biggest dunce in a presidential campaign I can remember in the last 20 years.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Just one more stab at this, folks, this Colin Powell business. I’m not calling him a racist. I’m saying he’s disingenuous. It’s not about racism. It’s about his lack of candor. He can’t admit what’s obvious. Race plays a huge role. The whole campaign is about race. It’s ‘historic.’ Why is it historic? There’s only one thing that makes it historic, and that’s the race of the Democrat nominee. It’s certainly not his issues, not his policies. He’s not The Messiah. He didn’t come from a virgin birth. There’s nothing out there that makes this historic other than that. Why can’t you Democrats acknowledge this? What’s so hard about it? Just say it! Be proud of it! It would have been refreshing if Secretary Powell had stated the obvious, not danced around it. But, see, if he’d admitted it was about race it wouldn’t have helped him with the media. So… You know, in all these things you gotta take ’em into account.