RUSH: From InsideHigherEducation.com You will not believe this. Well, yeah. You believe it. Everything that used to be unbelievable is not only believable, it is happening. ‘Barack Obama has been called a lot of things since he hit the national stage: Celebrity, elitist and even one who ‘pals around with terrorists.’ But as his poll numbers come back down to earth, and an emboldened 
conservative movement sharpens its attacks, the label that seems to be sticking to Obama as much as any lately is that of ‘professor.’ Speaking to Tea Party activists in Nashville last week, Sarah Palin did her part to keep the ‘professor’ dig in circulation. ‘They know we’re at war, and to win that war we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern,’ the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee told a frenzied crowd. … The use of ‘professor’ as a term of derision may have hit its stride in the 1950s, but it dates back to scolding characterizations of Socrates, according to Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguistics professor at the University of California at Berkeley.’
Okay, fine. Frankly I didn’t know that professor had become the number one dig, but if it is, fine and dandy. Now, gets get it this: Charles J. Ogletree, Harvard Law professor, ‘founding and executive director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, says he sees the ‘professor’ label as a thinly veiled attack on Obama’s race.’ Yes, my friends, you heard me read that. I heard myself read it. So now when we call Obama ‘a professor,’ we are racist. ‘Calling Obama ‘the professor’ walks dangerously close to labeling him ‘uppity,’ a term with racial overtones that has surfaced in the political arena before, Ogletree said. Describing his divisive confirmation hearings as a ‘circus,’ Justice Clarence Thomas called the proceedings ‘a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas. …’
‘It is perhaps ironic, then, that Ogletree, who represented Anita Hill … now sees a bit of the ‘uppity’ label being placed on Obama.’ This is two different kinds of uppity that are being discussed here. So now is professor ‘the P-word’? We’ve got the N-word, we have the R-word, and now we have the P-word? He gotta speak in code, and only people who know what the P-word is will understand what we’re saying? ”The idea is that he’s not one of us,’ Ogletree says of the professor label. ‘He has these ideas that are left wing, that are socialist, that he’s palling around with terrorists — those were buzzwords, but the reality was they were looking at this president as an African American who was out of place.” You know, Professor Ogletree, I hate to burst the balloon, but the single most important reason Obama was elected was his race.
A bunch of white people who thought electing a black president would assuage all of their guilt and erase our racial past, voted for Obama. They couldn’t have cared less what he thought, what he said. They didn’t think of him as uppity; they were being selfish! They didn’t like feeling guilty over our racist past, slavery, and so they thought pulling the lever for Obama would absolve them. It wasn’t for his policies as we are now quickly learning! What Clarence Thomas meant by ‘uppity’ was he wasn’t a liberal black. When Clarence Thomas says ‘uppity black…thinks for himself,’ means he’s off the reservation, so to speak. He’s not following the civil rights speech codes set forth by the Reverend Jackson and Al Sharpton and whoever else in charge of them. Obama is ‘uppity’, but not as a black. He is an elitist. He does think he’s smarter and better than everybody else. That’s what he was taught. He’s ‘a Harvardman.’ There’s no question about it.
And what about this post-racial society Obama was supposed to bring us? None of this was supposed to be going on. But now calling him ‘professor’ is racist? It’s ‘thinly veiled’ racism? Wow. ‘Thomas L. Haskell, a professor emeritus of history at Rice University, agrees that racial bias may be implicit in the attack on Obama’s professorial past. ‘For me and a lot of other academic types, we identify with Obama precisely because he is an intellectual,’ Haskell says. ‘But what does that mean to John Q. Public? I don’t know. John Q. Public may be frightened of these people, especially because this particular intellectual is a black.” Let me ask you a question here, Mr. Haskell. How many intellectuals pronounce it ‘corpse-man’? And how many intellectuals think that there are 57 states in the United States? And how many intellectuals think that a breathalyzer is the same thing as an inhaler?
This notion that Obama is smarter than everybody else tricked a whole lot of people, including a bunch of uppity white Republicans who thought they were going to get one of their own in the White House. We’re not frightened by Obama as a person. We are alert to his policies. We think they’re idiots. You know, we need to redefine ‘smart.’ We really need to redefine ‘smart’ and ‘intellectual’ and all that. Intellectual is a behavior mode anymore. Intellectual is how I speak. Intellectual is where you come from. Intellectual cannot have anything to do with what you know because Obama’s dead wrong on virtually everything. So how smart is he? Whether he’s a professor or professorial or whatever, he’s just wrong on everything, and that’s what our objection is. He is so wrong, it is ruining the country! If you’re small business, you do not go to the bank for a loan to increase payroll, as he said yesterday. I mean, that put me on the floor. It is closest I have ever been to speechless, listening to the sheer ignorance and naivete from this intellectual professor that we have as a president.
So ‘professor’ is the new racist term. By the way, it says here that ‘Obama isn’t the only modern Democrat to see his higher education credentials derided as handicaps. Campaigning for reelection to represent New York’s First Congressional District, Democratic Rep. Tim Bishop has taken shots for the 29 years he spent as an administrator at Southampton College. Bishop said he’s faced such criticism periodically throughout his public life, and his Republican opponent, Randy Altschuler, revived the anti-academic charge in a press release last month.’ Whoa, folks, do you realize what you learn just listening to this program? Now you just have to be an academic and people who attack you are racist, and calling Obama ‘a professor’ is racist. This is the attempt to shut down as much criticism of Obama as possible. These people know what Republicans, particularly elected Republicans, are afraid of and this is just designed to shut them up because the criticism is working. The criticism is accurate. The criticism is persuasive.
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RUSH: Now, also for Professor Ogletree at Harvard: One of the reasons I don’t call Obama ‘professor’ is because he never was one! Calling him a professor is elevating him. He was a visiting lecturer. It’s just like Robert B. Reichhhh. He was never a professor. He was a guest lecturer, but he was never a professor. And this guy that said this is traceable back to Socrates? Socrates could not have been called a professor in his lifetime because professor is a Latin word. It woulda never happened. Socrates was Greek!
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RUSH: Gail, Birmingham, Alabama, I’m glad you called and waited, welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Yes, how are you today, Rush?
RUSH: I’m fine. Thank you.
CALLER: Listen, I’m a longtime listener but I called in to defend professors. I was a professor for about ten years at the university here in Birmingham and I worked on assignments occasionally with what was then called the Bureau of Education of the Handicapped. I have lots of experience with professors so let me defend them to this extent. I think what is offensive about Obama’s presentation is, let me tell you what happens to professors that go awry. Professors get in front of that lectern, Sarah Palin is right, they get in front of it and they become arrogant, they turn into this elitist little model. They surround themselves with similar professors, they think the same way, they use big words when little ones would do far better, they talk too much, they intimidate the students, and the students learn pretty quick to agree with them. I agree with you, there’s a bunch of professors out there like that. So what we’re complaining about when we say — and I agree — he comes off like an arrogant professor, he’s at the lectern, he tries to ridicule anybody including members of our Congress, be they Senate or congresspeople. You know, you become uncomfortable if you disagree with him because it’s either his way or it’s no way.
RUSH: Right, because there’s an arrogance, ‘I’m smarter than you, you aren’t in my league,’ but no way have you ever before today heard that the term ‘professor’ has racial connotations.
CALLER: No, but they actually stretch for things. They have to do that because they can’t really get their arms around the fact that Sarah Palin talks more like the average person. She can talk and she completes her sentences. She may not be right or wrong from the point of view that other people agree with —
RUSH: Well, I think that’s true, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. I said it before the election, people said, ‘Rush, this is going to end racism.’ No, it’s not. Every single bit of criticism of him is going to be called racism or rooted in race. And this is just the latest example of it. He’s doing such a bad job, they’re trying to deflect from that and once again discredit the credibility of the people criticizing who are dead right.