BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: In one of our sound bites in the last hour from Obama's speech, Obama was talking about his preacher, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, having a profoundly distorted view of this country. Yet he hung in there with it, and I don't know if he even tried to change Reverend Wright's distorted view of the country. Also, here you had Obama saying that he cannot disown Wright any more than he can disown his race or disown his grandmother. In that little passage he said that... In fact, let me find that. I'm going to... (muttering) It's on the bottom here. (muttering) I'm trying to avoid dead air here, folks. That's why I'm just scatting along. Yeah, grab number 19. Grab audio sound bites number 19. All right, let her rip.
OBAMA: Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence, and the shocking ignorance; the struggles and successes, the love and, yes, the bitterness and biases that make up the black experience in America. And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright.
RUSH: Hubba hubba.
OBAMA: As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me.
RUSH: Hubba hubba.
OBAMA: I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.
RUSH: Right on, right on.
OBAMA: I can no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother.
RUSH: Right on.
OBAMA: A woman who helped raise me.
RUSH: Right on.
OBAMA: A woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world but a woman who once confessed her view of black men who passed her by on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe. These people are part of me --
RUSH: There!
OBAMA: -- and they are a part of America --
RUSH: There!
OBAMA: -- the country that I love.
RUSH: There. You see that? My reaction to that... You have to understand something, folks. I'm an individualist. I don't want to be put in a group, other than an American. But I don't want to be put in some group, and I don't want to be told that I am who I am because of people I've known or my family or the genetic code that led me to be born the way I'm born. I don't want to be told that, because that gives me an excuse for being whatever reprobate I want to be. That gives me an excuse for excusing anything. "Well, I can't help it. That's who I am!" How come in Barack's litany of all these people that made him who he is, he left out Reverend Wright? How come if his racist grandmother is part of him, and if the black community is part of him, how come Reverend Wright isn't part of him? Well, he's like family? Okay. Are we to assume that Obama harbors some of the same distorted views of America that Wright does? Well, I think it's a legitimate question to ask, based on the very premise that he was making in that statement. It's damn legitimate to ask that question. (sigh) The more I hear about this, frankly -- the more I think about it and the more I hear about it -- the more angry I'm getting about it.
He can't disown Reverend Wright or his race or his grandmother. Okay, fine. Let's accept that. How many white politicians and people in public life, have been forced to disown this or that or some other thing, and "distance" themselves, or at least tell 'em they're wrong? How many times has it happened? It has happened a plethora of times, and I'm tired of the excuse: "Well, original sin, years and years of discrimination. We have to understand their rage. We have to cut them some slack." No. Not if we're going to have unity. We make racists of black babies and infants if we grant them this kind of latitude. We are, by definition, saying, "We have so much guilt, you guys can go ahead and be racists and hatemongers because we did it, to you -- and yeah, we'll occasionally let you spank us for what our ancestors did all those hundreds of years ago." That, to me, is insulting. That is derogatory in and of itself, when you adopt a guilt-based attitude that permits bad behavior -- incorrect, uninformed behavior and thinking -- to thrive and to continue. This whole speech is trying to put America on defensive. The Democrat Party is doing enough of that as it is.
Hillary Clinton is out there saying we can't win in Iraq. We can't win. Hell's bells, we are the United States of America! We can do anything we want when we set our mind to it. But we have a political party destined to see this country crumble, if for no other reason than so they can get their dirty little hands on it and control it and remake it as they want. Can I summarize Obama's speech for you, ladies and gentlemen? Here it is in a nutshell: "Racism is wrong. Barking-mad racism and hate -- yes, as uttered by Reverend Wright; yes, barking-mad racism and hatred -- is wrong, but it's justified, because we don't have nationalized health care." That's Barack Obama's speech. Reverend Wright's justified. Barack's justified. All the racism, all the hatred, all the bigotry out there for this country on the left is justified 'cause we don't have national health care and because we don't get the troops out of Iraq and because we're bailing out Wall Street firms, and because the schools are going to hell in a handbasket. Oh, that's another thing! Barack Obama correctly identifies that urban schools are failing. Well, who's fault is this? Who is maintaining these schools as they are? Is it not the American left and its cozy relationship with teachers unions?
I mean, the last time I looked there are a lot of Republican right-wing philanthropists who have come along and offered vouchers or free tuition to private schools, and the people I see lining up faster than anybody are African-American parents who want their kids out of these sinkhole schools they're in that Barack Obama just got through ripping to shreds. But who maintains 'em? Who established them? Who is it that's constantly speaking out against them and hoping that they change? It's people like us, who only want the best for everybody in this country. It doesn't matter whether they're black, white, indigenous American, whatever. This racism business is going back and forth and it currently resides primarily on the left of this country as the Democrat Party's presidential campaign has clearly shown. So what has happened now? America, I think, for the most part (there are, of course, exceptions to this) has transcended race. There's so much evidence of that that I don't even want to waste time citing it. But Barack Obama's church hasn't. Barack Obama's church has not transcended race nor has it transcended hate. Barack Obama has not spoken out about that until now, and as a good politician, he doesn't want to be left behind so he has to speak out about it. This speech was an act of political necessity, not courage. This was an act of political necessity.
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Read the Background Material...
• Wall Street Journal: The Obama Bargain - Shelby Steele
• AP: Obama Confronts Racial Division in US
• American Thinker: Obama: 'No Sudden Moves' When Talking to Whites
