RUSH: Then there is this amazing story of Shirley Sherrod. This is an amazing thing to watch. We’ve got some audio sound bites we’re gonna get to here in just a second on this, but Shirley Sherrod was thrown under the bus by the Obama White House, and now they’re backing the bus up and they’re gonna pick her back up and put her back in the bus, but she may not want to get back in the bus because everybody is now saying, ‘Wait a minute, the context of what happened here, we fired this woman and we didn’t have the full context. We gotta go back and get the full context.’ Well, where was that during my St. Louis Rams circumstance as Erick Erickson pointed out on CNN last night? It’s a great point and we’ll get to that here in just a second. If we’re gonna fire Shirley Sherrod on the basis of racism, then why the hell does Eric Holder still have a job? If she was suspected of making decisions based on race in her — and the White House, they couldn’t wait, and the NAALCP couldn’t wait to throw her under the bus. And you know why? Why, Snerdley? Why did they throw her under the bus? That’s right. They had to keep their own credibility up if they’re going to sit there and call the Tea Party a bunch of racists and they’re gonna call conservatives a bunch of racists, if they’re confronted with racism in their own ranks they gotta get rid of it and so they didn’t care, they didn’t care about Shirley Sherrod, they didn’t care about the truth of her story, didn’t care about the context, all it took was that one little video, and, bam, she’s gone.
Now all of a sudden they’ve figured out the context, oh, they’re going to back the bus up, and they want to try to get her back to the bus. She was believed to have ignored a white farmer’s rights under the law. In fact, she said she learned something during all this. She learned that what it really is is rich versus poor and that she had sort of an epiphany during this whole process. But if she was summarily canned without any examination simply because she was believed to have ignored a white farmer’s rights under the law, what about Eric Holder? Eric Holder has ignored the voting and civil rights of white people in Philadelphia all because the perpetrators of the voter intimidation, the New Black Panther Party, were black. There is a video, a videotaped history of blatant, hateful to the extreme racism by perpetrator of the civil rights violations. And there’s a witness to the racism underlying the Department of Justice’s decision not to prosecute the New Black Panthers, a witness who recently worked at DOJ, maybe more than one witness. And yet there’s Eric Holder still serving in his gig while the White House and the NAALCP could not wait to throw Shirley Sherrod overboard. And they raced as fast as they could.
Now the US Department of Agriculture is reconsidering. ‘Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said Wednesday he will reconsider the department’s decision to oust Shirley Sherrod. … Vilsack issued a short statement early Wednesday morning after Shirley Sherrod said she was pressured to resign because of her comments that she didn’t give a white farmer as much help as she could have 24 years ago,’ even though the white farmer’s wife said she did. ‘Sherrod said her remarks, delivered in March at a local NAACP banquet in Georgia, were part of a larger story about learning from her mistakes and racial reconciliation, not racism, and they were taken out of context by a blogger who posted only part of her speech.’ Now, they talk about Andrew Breitbart here. I know Andrew Breitbart. He doesn’t purposely screw around with edits. I don’t know what he was given. I don’t know what he had. Maybe he was set up. I have no idea what went on here. But there was enough context for any fair person to gather what she was actually trying to say. Vilsack didn’t care. Vilsack didn’t care to get the context and the White House didn’t care to get the context. 
‘Vilsack’s statement came after the NAACP posted the full video.’ Now after the full video is posted all of a sudden everybody is backing up and they want to put her back on the bus. So the NAALCP saved the day. Obviously Mr. Vilsack could not be bothered to watch the end of the original clip, nor, for that matter, could the NAALCP. All this was because the NAALCP wants to go after Fox News; wants to go after the Tea Party; wants to go after everybody else on the basis that they are racist and it simply has gotten out hand. You know, folks, how all this could be brought to a screeching halt? There is a simple way all of this — and it’s getting tawdry now. It’s becoming, if not laughable, it is beneath all of us that this kind of stuff is happening. This is just genuinely beneath all of us. All it would take is for the president of the United States to go to the microphones and say, ‘Enough, America, stop this.’ All it would take is for the president of the United States to stay, ‘We must be better than this. All of this talk about racism here and there is bringing this country down; it’s dividing the country; it’s tearing it apart.’ The problem is he wants all that to happen. So he won’t do this. And the very fact that the president of the United States does not take one step, does not make one move toward healing any of these divisions is proof positive that he wants them, that he profits from them.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: All of a sudden the shameless State-Controlled… I don’t even want to call them ‘media.’ I don’t know what to call them, but there is no media. You know, I’m struggling here trying to make my point about this to people and I don’t know that I’m succeeding. But we don’t have reporters. There are not journalists. There are not editors and all of this. There’s no organization out there, at least in what we consider the mainstream press, that has as its objective, ‘There are things happening out there today. We’re going to go out and have people find out what they are and tell you and everybody else about them.’ That’s not what’s happening.
They’re people that simply advancing their own agenda. They’re just a bunch of liberals, Democrats and leftists, and they’re disguised. Some of them are lawyers. Some of them are judges. Some of them are elected to office. Some of them are legislative aides. Some of them are congressional staff. Some of them are scholars, teachers, professors. Some call themselves reporters. Some call themselves columnists. Some call themselves anchors, but they’re none of that. Nothing in their world is real. I mean, this Daily Caller piece, in addition to hoping I die — in addition to salivating, fantasizing over watching me die — you have a UCLA law professor Jonathan Zasloff (who had a total of five degrees from Harvard, Yale, and Cambridge) agreeing that the government ought to shut down Fox News, that the FCC ought to revoke their license.
Here’s a guy teaching law who doesn’t know that Fox does not have a license. The FCC does not regulate cable. Individual radio and TV stations have licenses, but ABC, CBS, NBC do not have licenses. They have owned-and-operated radio and TV stations which do, and the FCC can pull those licenses, but the networks do not, and there certainly is no regulation of cable. That’s why there’s no language barrier, there’s no porn barrier, you can do whatever you want to do on cable. And here’s a guy teaching law who doesn’t know it, and here’s a guy at the New Republic, John Judis (interesting name), who once wrote the biography of William F. Buckley, who agrees. ‘I think we need to shut Fox down.’ These aren’t journalists.
If we had real journalists this would be the story of the day, not Shirley Sherrod. Shirley Sherrod would be number two. But what we’ve learned here is that there is no media. So Kathleen, Cookie here, has given me a bunch of sound bites today from the State-Controlled Media suddenly discovering ‘context’ in the Shirley Sherrod case. We have a montage. All of a sudden now they care about context. They, up until now, never cared about selective editing. They didn’t care that quotes I never said were made up and attributed to me to stop me from being part of an ownership group in the St. Louis Rams. Only after they had sabotaged that did they say, ‘Oh, yeah you never said ’em. Too bad.’ But with Shirley Sherrod, we need the context on this. So here’s first the montage of these people who call themselves reporters or anchors or journalists or what have you.
MATT LAUER: Was she forced to quit her job for comments that were taken completely out of context?
ANDERSON COOPER: Her actual comments were misrepresented. You’re gonna hear the context tonight.
CAMPBELL BROWN: Comments that clearly have been taken largely out of context.
JOE JOHNS: The excerpt of the tape you saw there was taken out of context.
WOLF BLITZER: The remarks were taken completely out of context.
RICK SANCHEZ: What we’ve tried to do during this show is provide the context.
KYRA PHILLIPS: There’s no context with that clip!
RACHEL MADDOW: Ms. Sherrod’s completely out-of-context comments…
LAWRENCE O’DONNELL: (music) …took a story completely out of context and painted her to be a racist.
EUGENE ROBINSON: Nobody bothered to ask Ms. Sherrod the context of her remarks.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: The comments were taken out of context.
GILLIAN TETT: We teach any rookie reporter: If you’re gonna get a good story, first you need to try and get context.
RUSH: That last is Gillian Tett. I have no idea who she is. ‘We teach any rookie reporter: If you’re gonna get a story, first you need to try to get context.’ No, no, no, no. Who are they trying to fool? There are no reporters, and there are no rookie reporters, and there are no instructions, and there’s no how-to. There are only flacks for the ruling class. So I think the correct way to refer to all these people is they’re just flacks, the PR arm or whatever you want to call it. The propaganda arm. They’re not media. And I think it’s important because, you know, people say, ‘When are we going to get fairness in the media.’ We never are. Even the pretense of objectivity doesn’t exist. There’s no reforming these people. That’s like saying, ‘When are liberals gonna change their minds?’ It isn’t going to happen. So this morning, here’s a montage of correspondent Dan Harris’ report about conservative media.
HARRIS: The Shirley Sherrod episode is the latest in a string of viral video controversies driven by conservative media, controversies with one central theme: Racism against white people. … The New Black Panther Party controversy given wall-to-wall coverage on Fox News. … Sonia Sotomayor saying a wise Latina may have advantages over a white judge. Rush Limbaugh has called liberal policies ‘a form of reparations.’ Of course there have been plenty of controversies that paint conservatives as racist. Senate candidate George Allen calling an Indian man this name —
ALLEN: Macaca, or whatever his name is.
HARRIS: — and racist signs held aloft during tea party rallies. A presidency hailed by me as postracial has turned out to be anything but.
RUSH: Now, you tell me, this is a reporter named Dan Harris, and I don’t know who he is. I really have no idea where Dan Harris works. Should I know where Dan Harris works? I don’t know that I’ve ever heard of Dan Harris. I never heard of him. But there’s no journalism in that. There’s literally no reporting. There’s no reporting. George Allen, Macaca? They totally manufactured that. There aren’t any ‘racist signs held aloft during tea parties,’ and we were not the ones who said that the Obama presidency would be postracial; they were. They’re the ones had these hopes and dreams for all of these great things that were gonna be happening, this utopia, this panacea. ‘The Shirley Sherrod open is the latest in the string of…’
The only reason the Shirley Sherrod episode happened is because the so-called media, the ruling class flacks, are out attempting with the NAACP — which is really not about the ‘advancement of colored people.’ The NAACP is about the advancement of leftist ideals, agenda, and its own racism, and they’re out there trying to tar and feather the tea party as racist. So there are people gonna respond and defend themselves against this. That’s what you do when somebody calls you racist. This Dan Harris, whoever the hell he is, we know he’s not a journalist. There’s no journalism, there’s no reporting, there’s nothing of the sort in this. (interrupting) Oh, he’s Good Morning America, Dan Harris works. Okay, fine. No wonder. I don’t watch Good Morning America. They ask me every week to be on Good Morning America. Why would anybody go on any of these television shows from our side? There’s no reason. There’s no point in it. Why go on and talk to a bunch of flacks for the ruling class?
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Shirley Sherrod says now that she realizes instead of race our struggle in America is between the haves versus the have-nots, but that’s perfectly all right! I mean, that’s exactly what Obamunism is. Obamunism is the haves versus the have-nots and the need for redistribution. So no wonder they’re going to reconsider throwing her off the bus and backing the bus up and getting her back on the bus. She’s not sure she wants to get back on the bus. How terrible it is that, quote, unquote, ‘conservatives’ are using their own words against the left. Why, isn’t that what Democrats are begging their foot soldiers to do? Isn’t that what they want their accountability project to be? Remember when Reverend Wright’s comments first came out, wasn’t the media’s first reaction to say, ‘Hey, hey, hey! You’re taking his comments out of context.
‘These are part of the long sermons the. You can’t just go grab a sentence here, paragraph there. You’re taking Reverend Wright out of context!’ Remember that? Even though there were dozens of examples, they still said that they were the just ‘excerpts’ from years and years of sermons. ‘Of course he was bound to say some things that were a lot off kilter! For crying out loud, the guy does sermons every Sunday for 20 years.’ For some reason they don’t claim that anymore about Reverend Wright. Maybe Reverend Wright’s subsequent and often crazier remarks have shown that he actually meant what he said, so they’ve sorta gone into hiding. After all, he went to the National Press Club, and he went to the NAACP, and he doubled down on his racism and his America hating.
So you couldn’t say that he was ‘being taken out of context,’ which, by the way, did not faze either the National Press Club or the NAACP when he went there with his hate-America agenda, his G-damn America, his ‘America of KKK.’ They didn’t care about that at the NAACP. They applauded it. There’s not a double standard here. That’s not even the right way to look at this. This is us versus them. This is liberalism versus everybody else. This is the American left versus America, and they are marching daily with their agenda, and they have various groups that are interchangeable and incestuous connected by revolving doors advancing that agenda. Some call themselves reporters, some call themselves preachers, some call themselves congressmen and senators and judges and lawyers and professors. Some call themselves deans. But they’re all just leftists and they’re all just part of the ruling class and they’re all trying to advance up the ladder of the ruling class, which requires sameness. It requires obedient sameness. No individuality is accepted. Merit-based accomplishment is irrelevant. Merit-based achievement is irrelevant. Let’s continue with the audio sound bites. Last night Anderson Cooper 140. Here is David Gergen, David ‘Rodham’ Gergen, who represents ruling class conventional wisdom.
GERGEN: Anderson, this has RIPPED away the veil and shown us all that is wrong with politics today. An ideologue injects poison into the Internet, other people rush to judgment so they can — on camera and an administration, eh, g-g-gets — gets stampeded and — and — and commits this travesty of justice. What is needed now, the NAACP has at least had — at least had the courage to come back and say, ‘We were wrong,’ and apologize. Now the administration needs to do the same thing. The president tonight ought to order the agriculture department to reopen this case, give this woman a fair hearing, and if the facts are as they seem, reinstate her with an apology.
RUSH: There you have it. So it turns out that Andrew Breitbart single-handedly forced the NAACP and the White House to rush to judgment. Andrew Breitbart’s website, BigGovernment.com, single-handedly forced all of these people to rush to judgment. If the NAACP could be so easily wrong about Shirley Sherrod, couldn’t they also be wrong about the tea party? And I hate to bring myself into this, but where was the ‘context’ during the sordid episode, the sordid media episode when I was attempting to be a member of the ownership group of the St. Louis Rams? Falsified, made-up quotes attributed to me were reported not just by obscure bloggers, but from the highest levels of the so-called media on down. Even after it was established that those quotes were never uttered by me, that I had never said them, that they were made up, they continued to use them.
After the message or the whole objective was accomplished, the sabotage was complete, did you ever hear David Gergen say, ‘You know what? Somebody really injected poison to this whole episode. Other people rushed to judgment on camera, and then the Rams ownership group got stampeded into dropping Limbaugh, and commits this travesty of justice. What’s needed now is for the media to at least have the courage to come back and say, ‘We were wrong’ and apologize.’ Was there any of that? No. And I didn’t expect there to be, don’t misunderstand. We’re simply illustrating here that there is no media, that we’re just dealing with leftists. We are dealing, purely and simply, with extreme leftist liberals and Democrats. Pure and simple. That’s how you have to understand it. Yesterday afternoon, CNN’s Newsroom, the anchor Tony Harris talked to Shirley Sherrod. He said, ‘Why are you out?’
SHERROD: Why am I out? They asked me to resign. And in fact they hazard me as I was driving back to the state office from West Point, Georgia, yesterday. I had at least three calls telling me the White House wanted me to resign. The last one asked me to pull over to the side of the road and do it. Cheryl Cook, the deputy undersecretary, she said, ‘Well, Shirley, they want you to pull over to the side of the road and do it.’
RUSH: And they didn’t care about her. They didn’t care to find out context themselves. All they wanted was to make sure that if there was somebody in their ranks that was blatantly being racist they had to get rid of them so they could maintain their own so-called credibility when they were making false accusations of racism against others, such as the tea party. So everybody is throwing around false accusations here. The only time they’re concerned when they’re false and out of context is when it involves one of their own. Here’s F. Chuck Todd this morning on The Daily Rundown on MSNBC.
F. CHUCK TODD: There are no winners in this story. The, eh, only a very, a very now sympathetic victim here in Ms. Sherrod. I mean, it was a — an absurd story, but this is a story that is both a race story and a story about the media, but more importantly a story about how conservative activists are using race to bait the media and bait the White House — and what’s amazing here is that the White House fell hook, line, and sinker. Not a surprise that the media did. Jeremiah Wright, ACORN, Van Jones, it all seems to have — and we’re seeing — a pattern here and the White House may have overreacted.
RUSH: Wait, what’s the pattern, F. Chuck? What’s the…? Jeremiah Wright’s not racist? He didn’t say those things, F. Chuck? ACORN is not a bunch of racists? They didn’t say and do what they did on those videos? Van Jones is not a Marxist? He hasn’t said what we’ve all seen on video? The pattern here is that conservative media is able to get rid of people that were clean and pure as the wind-driven snow by simply calling them racist? What world are we living in? This is an alternative universe unparalleled. F. Chuck Todd has just described how his side does it! F. Chuck Todd has just described how he does it. F. Chuck Todd has just described how his network gets rid of conservatives that they don’t want anything to do with. Look at the power all of a sudden they have assigned to us. Look at how much power they’ve given us.
Why, when we got rid of poor old Shirley Sherrod, we got rid of Reverend Wright, we got rid of ACORN, we got rid of Van Jones. Look at that! And we did it by making up things about them. We use race? We use race? We, the people who are called racist for the past 75 years day in and day out? Not just racist, but racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes? All of a sudden? Is there anything about what F. Chuck Todd just did that sounds like journalism, like reporting? No! He’s a flack for the ruling class, and being a flack for the ruling class means never having to say you’re sorry. Now, apart from the racism and the rest of this nonsense, just look at how top government bureaucrats can’t even handle something like this. We want to put people like Vilsack and Sherrod’s immediate boss in charge of matters of life and death by putting them in charge of health care, and look at how bumbling foolish these people are.
Maybe F. Chuck Todd has not seen the Journolist story, maybe F. Chuck Todd does not know what his colleagues are saying and doing about silencing. No, F. Chuck does because F. Chuck has said it himself. F. Chuck Todd himself has lamented that a whole bunch of people who are claiming to be reporters aren’t. F. Chuck Todd has wrung his hands ’til they’re raw about how the business of journalism has been bastardized by people like Fox News, by people who have not been trained in the business. The journalists on Journolist conspired to do what F. Chuck Todd claims that the right wing does. It’s amazing to watch. This morning on The Daily Rundown on MSNBC, F. Chuck Todd spoke with Syracuse University Professor of Television and Pop Culture Robert Thompson about Shirley Sherrod and the media, and F. Chuck said, ‘I understand the White House and no doubt the NAACP, but let’s remember the media culture, the climate that has been created over the last two years. Does that not play a role?’
THOMPSON: Well, certainly it creates an environment which makes everybody want to respond immediately. Since the, uhh, coverage of the Kennedy assassination where we, uhh, went — the media went on wall-to-wall coverage, no longer were we waiting to file a story or to air a story until everything had been corrected. We were going live and just watching a story being collected. So that’s a — that’s a property now of 24-hour media. Th-th-th-that doesn’t mean that people, however, who have got important decisions to make should be letting the properties of 24-hour media dictate, uhh, the fact that they throw diligence to the wind and, uhhhh, respond to something like this.
RUSH: This is hard to digest. (chuckles) It’s hard to maintain a straight face while listening to all it is. You have to go back to the JFK assassination try and figure out how such a great injustice was done here to Shirley Sherrod? On CNN last night, they made the Shirley Sherrod story all about me.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: All right, here’s the pattern. The liberals who call themselves the media, they’re not journalists. They’re just propagandists. They are flacks for the ruling class. They’re out there attacking conservatives. But Chuck Todd, who appointed Van Jones? I think his name was Barack Obama. Chuck, who embraced Jeremiah Wright and sat in his church for 20 years? I think that was Barack Obama. Who accused the Tea Party activists of being racists? I mean that was Barack Obama and the NAACP. Who brings up this issue as the default issue every single time, particularly right before elections, is it not people like you, Chuck, and your so-called media colleagues? Remember that old line from an ad on TV, ‘I’m not a doctor but I play one on TV.’ Now we have journalists, we have people pretending to be journalists on TV. We have politicians pretending to care about voters. We have judges pretending to understand the Constitution. We have editors pretending to vet stories. We have a president pretending to be a leader, and we have what everybody thought was a great profession, journalism, the great institution, great tradition pretending to be fair and balanced. It’s all fake. None of it is real. None of what they say is real. None of the context that they attach to it is real. None of what they cover and the way they report it is real. CNN makes the Shirley Sherrod story about me last night. John King on CNN.
KING: Among those weighing in with a statement that I think is going to be talked about a lot is Rush Limbaugh.
RUSH ARCHIVE: The real thing you need to glean is that the Obama administration and the federal bureaucracy is full of incompetents like Shirley Sherrod and it’s not going to be very long before you’re going to be dealing with her for your health care. And if you happen to be showing up to a black bureaucrat appointed by Obama and you happen to be something other than black, you might have the same treatment regarding your health care that this poor white farmer got. I mean that’s the bigger picture here is that.
RUSH: I’ll stand by the whole competence of this. You know, I didn’t jump on her yesterday on the racist aspect. I didn’t even play her videos yesterday. I played the audio from her videos yesterday because I’m not one to jump on bandwagons. But it does worry me that we’ve got incompetent bureaucrats throughout the federal bureaucracy who are going to be your daily interface when it comes to your banking, when it comes to buying your car, when it comes to getting a mortgage for your house, a student lawn, or eventually your health care. Roland Martin then responded again on CNN.
MARTIN: John, I don’t really give a damn what Rush Limbaugh thinks. This is the same person who called George Steinbrenner a cracker the day he died, so he is utterly irrelevant to me.
RUSH: Yeah. This is what I mean. I called George Steinbrenner a cracker. Never mind the New Black Panther Party was out there reintroducing us to the term. Erick Erickson of Red State, also a commentator, had this to say.
ERICKSON: I think, Roland, your dismissal off-handedly of Rush Limbaugh goes back to this point, taking him irrespective of —
MARTIN: He’s an entertainer, so I treat him like a comedian.
ERICKSON: — automatically dismissing him.
MARTIN: He’s an entertainer, Erick, an entertainer.
ERICKSON: This is what happens to the right routinely, people on the left say, ‘Oh, he’s a racist.’
RUSH: Erickson continued because he was being talked over there.
ERICKSON: You know, this is a difficult situation. I’m actually reminded of the Rush Limbaugh situation when he tried to buy the St. Louis Rams, and for three days actual reporters, journalists, news anchors used quotes of his and sabotaged the bid and only after the bid was sabotaged said, ‘Oh, those quotes were made up, they were from the left,’ after 20 years on the radio. And this is a similar situation.
RUSH: Erick Erickson of RedState.com. And it’s a good point. Erick sent me a note last night when he got home. He said his e-mail was overflowing with hate for daring to point this out. But he is exactly right. Nobody made anything up here. There was supposedly a lack of context. Now, Roland Martin was one of the major apologists for Reverend Wright back during the whole Obama 2008 campaign. Ronald Martin was the guy who tried to claim that Wright was quoting a Bush Republican when he was talking about chickens coming home to roost. Roland Martin is not even qualified enough to be a comedian, yet we can all laugh at him. There’s nothing entertaining about him. He’s just a flack. He’s just a parrot. These people are obedient servants. They are blessed with sameness, and they cannot stand individuality, and they cannot stand success, merit-based success.