RUSH: This is John in Bogota, New Jersey. Welcome, sir. I’m glad you waited. How are you doing?

CALLER: Hello Rush. I’m doing well. How are you doing?

RUSH: I’m fine, sir. Thank you el mucho.

CALLER: That’s great. Glad to hear that — and that’s “Buh-GO-tuh,” New Jersey — and I just want to thank you for all you do.

RUSH: Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Did I mispronounce it?

CALLER: Uh, slightly.

RUSH: What did I call it Bogota. Oh, that’s right.

CALLER: Yeah, that’s in Colombia.

RUSH: That’s right. Well, it is a foreign country, your state is it to me, because of that stupid governor.

CALLER: Yes, sir. (laughing) You’re right.

RUSH: Bogota. You’re right. You’re right. All right. I stand corrected. I’m sorry about that.

CALLER: That’s okay. I don’t mean to correct the host, but I just want to thank you for all you do and thank you for your annual Thanksgiving refresher. I look forward to hearing that every year, and I want to wish and your family and your staff a happy Thanksgiving.

RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much.

CALLER: Mr. Snerdley told me I need to get to my point, so back in 2008 you took an awful lot of criticism and a lot of heat for saying that you hope that Obama fails, that you don’t want him to succeed. I think that this year there would be a lot more people that would understand if you were to say that again.

RUSH: You think so?

CALLER: (laughing) I know so!

RUSH: Let me go back and for people that… Remember, we’ve got listening to this program people who’ve never heard that. Well, they might have heard about it. I’m sure they heard about it, but they didn’t get the truth of it. After Obama was elected in 2008, the Wall Street Journal reached out to several prominent opinion leaders, one of whom was me — a powerful, influential member of the media.

They asked me to write 400 words (as they asked everybody else that they were inviting) on their hopes for the Obama administration, the first African-American president. I wrote back to the Wall Street Journal and I said, “I don’t need 400 words. I only need four: ‘I hope he fails.'” Well, all hell broke loose, and I embarked on what was a…

It must have been a three-week explanation tour which was totally unnecessary, because everybody that was objecting to it knew exactly what I meant. I wanted Obama’s socialist policies to fail. I wanted Obamacare not to be implemented. I didn’t want national health care run by people that had never done anything in health care. Obama hasn’t had any experience in the private sector running anything.

Why is he qualified to run the health care system? He’s never worked at a hospital. He doesn’t understand it. None of his people do, either. They’re just a bunch of theorists that work at the faculty lounge at some university. These people were not qualified, other than having won an election. So I hoped Obama failed. Now, my critics said that what I was doing was hideous, that I was saying I hoped America failed.

Nothing could have been further from the truth, and anybody that knows me knows I would never, ever hope for that. I was hoping for the exact opposite. If Obama’s policies failed, then America was saved. If Obama’s policies bombed out, then America would be okay. That’s what I was hoping for, and that’s what I meant, and every critic of mine knew it.