The views expressed by the host on this program make more sense than anything anybody else out there happens to be saying.
And the whole Barack the Magic Negro controversy of last week is a perfect illustration of that.
The views expressed by the host, that would be me, documented to be almost always right 98.8% of the time.
It is a thrill and a delight to have you back with us.
I am Rush Limbaugh, and this is the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Telephone number 800-282-2882 if you want to be on the program.
Email address is lrushbo at eibnet.com.
All right, Barack the Magic Negro.
First aired in 2007.
Let me tell you what the controversy last week taught me.
It taught me that being right is irrelevant to winning elections.
It taught me that winning arguments is irrelevant to winning elections.
It taught me how apparently, sadly, dangerously uninformed people in the drive-by media and people on the on several Republicans on our side of the aisle are.
It was breathtaking.
It was amazing to watch this unfold.
Something that had happened in the spring of 2007.
I'll tell you something else, just to illustrate, I made the comment in the previous hour that all of the drive-bys last week that were raising holy hell about this.
I actually need to amend something.
They know exactly what this is about.
They know where it came from.
They know what inspired it.
That didn't matter.
This is what I mean.
Truth doesn't matter in politics.
Winning arguments, being right, doesn't matter in politics.
Not today.
Not at this moment.
It has in the past.
It may in the future.
But right now, it doesn't.
During the height of the crisis, not the crisis, during the height of the original airing of Barack the Magic Negro, there was not nearly the controversy as there was last week.
In fact, the greatest controversy I had with Barack the Magic Negro was at one of my radio stations, one of our affiliates, one of the top 10 markets.
An African-American employee threatened to quit, and the general manager of the station called me and said, you got to stop playing this.
And I said, what?
Do you have any idea what this is about?
So I, on three different occasions, started at point A and went to point Z explaining all this.
Did it two or three different times, all during 2007.
Now, it tells me that a lot of people on our side didn't hear it or not smart enough to understand it.
But what was Barack the Magic Negro?
Well, let's start at the beginning.
I, El Rushbo, am sitting here minding my own business one day when all of a sudden, and in fact, let's start at the very beginning of this.
The very beginning of this goes back to 1984 when Jesse Jackson is the first black Democrat to have a chance at winning the Democrat Party presidential nomination.
He has a lot of support from a lot of liberals, but of course he doesn't get there.
In succeeding years, the Reverend Jackson is joined in his quest by the Reverend Sharpton.
Both the Reverend Sharpton and the Reverend Jackson ran campaigns of grievance.
They were owed.
They had been mistreated.
African Americans had been mistreated for their lives, their entire lives, throughout this nation's history.
They ran campaigns of grievance.
Campaigns of grievance don't get you anywhere except they do pad your fundraising.
We ran a parody during one of these periods of Reverend Sharpton saying, Mama told me not to run.
Take off on three dog nights, mama told me not to come or told me not to go or whatever.
And one of the lines in the song is from Sharpton, soon as I get my matching funds, I'm out the door.
Which is what the campaign was about.
Plus being able to stay in nice hotel rooms without paying full price.
So after all the after all this, through all these experiences, Barack Obama says, you know, I want to be president.
And out of the blue, Joe Biden.
Now, this is where this gets critical.
This is where this gets crucial.
And I refuse to believe I'm the only one that knows this.
But maybe I am the most informed person in media.
Maybe I am the only person in media who learns things that are relevant and salient as events unfold after events occur.
Joe Biden, the Chia Pet, upon learning that Obama is going to run for president, announces that it's finally good.
It's great that finally we have a clean and articulate black man running for president on the Democrat side.
Now, the Democrats don't think anything of this because, of course, Biden's a Democrat and Democrats are incapable of putting their feet in their mouth.
When they do, it's, oh, that's just Joe.
He didn't mean anything by it.
Well, to me, that's big news.
When a Democrat says of Jesse Jackson, what he was, he was talking about Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, not Obama.
When he says that Jackson and Sharpton are not clean and not articulate, that to me is news.
And it was news to Sharpton, who was not thrilled about it.
Sharpton takes showers.
He thinks he's clean.
He thinks that he can speak okay.
He thinks he's articulate.
And he also, when we parody Sharpton, don't forget, what's his image leading protest marches with a bullhorn?
So every time we use Sharpton, it's through a bullhorn.
The drive-bys last week portrayed us as having altered his voice to make it sound racially.
No, it's a great Al Sharpton impersonation through a bullhorn.
So then Obama gets close to getting a nomination and Sharpton's still not happy.
And all of this is on my website.
Anybody who cared could have gone at any time and looked at this.
There were a couple newspaper stories, one I think out of Chicago, that Sharpton was miffed and wasn't going to endorse Obama because he felt like the Democrats were sort of ignoring him and screwing him.
Who is this guy?
He doesn't have any experience.
He hasn't been down for the struggle.
He doesn't know what the civil rights movement's all about.
Sharpton was saying all of these things.
That led us to run parodies of Sharpton standing outside Obama's headquarters, demanding Obama come out, and Sharpton started telling a bunch of fat mama jokes about Obama.
Obama, your mother's so fat, when she cuts, it bleeds gravy.
Things like this.
Nobody's put in a word.
This stuff is hilarious.
It is stuff in my mind that is cutting edge.
Then the LA Times runs a piece by a black liberal called Barack the Magic Negro.
And this piece, in addition to using that term, asks the question whether or not Obama is authentic enough, meaning, does he come from the civil rights struggle?
Is he down with the struggle?
And it wasn't just David Ehrenstein at the L.A. Times.
There were countless columns written by leftist journalists questioning the authenticity as a black man of Barack Obama.
I'm watching the racism in this country take it root right in the Democrat Party during their primaries.
So out of all this came Barack the Magic Negro.
We were sitting here, I was sitting here on the program one day, basically writing the lyrics to the tune Puff the Magic Dragon.
Barack the Magic Negro lives in D.C., L.A. Times, they call him that because he's not authentic like me.
Sharpton singing this stuff.
I mean, the dirty little secret here is that Barack the Magic Negro is a parody of Al Sharpton.
Obama's incidental.
Obama's incidental in it.
It is making fun of Al Sharpton and his peak over the fact that the Democrat Party has basically thrown him under the bus and is adopting this clean and articulate black guy.
Now, we illustrate the absurd by being absurd here, and regular listeners know this.
Not only was this funny, and if I may say so myself, it was brilliant.
However, as is the case with many elements on this program, if you just tune in one day and hear Barack the Magic Negro and have not heard all of the news that led into the creation of this parody, then I admit you might be a little stunned and shocked by it.
How many times, however, over the course of 20 years has this happened where drive-by listeners hear something, take it out of context, raise holy hell, only later to be embarrassed when they find out what the roots.
This is why we wrote the song specifically as it's written.
If you listen to the lyrics of Barack the Magic Negro, it is clear who is being made fun of.
It is clear the origins of this.
As in when Sharpton says they say Barack's articulate, it's all there.
And as I say, if I pat myself on the back here, to me, it was a funny and brilliant assemblage and parody of news events that the drive-by media fully ignored.
Folks, there were times during that Democrat campaign where Southern Christian Leadership Conference people in Atlanta said, hey, just because Barack may get elected doesn't mean that the race business or the race wars in this country are over because he doesn't have slave blood.
Michelle has slave blood, but he doesn't.
I see this.
And I asked him, does nobody else see this?
Does nobody else see this stuff?
The drive-bys report this stuff.
So back to close the loop here.
So this whole thing breaks out last week, and I was waiting.
I was waiting to hear from my trusted chief of staff, HR.
I was expecting to get voluminous requests to appear for comment and a quote by the drive-by media.
And there wasn't one.
Now, I've been on vacation before.
Things have happened, and they've sought me out in hotels.
They've had HR try to find me at any corner of the planet.
But in this one, nobody sought me out.
Now, this tells me something.
They didn't care what I had to say about it because they knew they knew that what they were doing with this and the way they were reporting this last week was a total scam.
They took the occasion of what actually was the inappropriate use of elements of this program, but that's another story.
They took the occasion of somebody running for the RNC chairmanship, sending out a CD that had this song on it to revive it anew and frame it and cast it as they wanted it cast.
The last person they wanted commenting on it was me because I'm the one who could have said it straight.
Newt Gingrich couldn't set it straight because Newt Gingrich was clueless about what this was all about.
Instead, Newt Gingrich sends a note to the drive-by media saying, This is wholly inappropriate.
I can't believe this is not what we're doing.
This is not how we reach out.
This was not reach out, and this show is not the Republican Party.
And this show has never been the Republican Party.
This show does not exist for the Republican Party.
It does not exist to empower the Republican Party.
This program is a business.
It is in the broadcast business.
It has its own requirements and ingredients for success in the broadcast business.
And those ingredients do not include the election of incompetent, foolish Republicans, nor do those ingredients include the defeat of Democrats.
That is not what this show is about.
And it never has been.
And I have written about that in my books.
My success is not determined by who wins elections.
But had the people on our side who decided to jump off the cliff and try to please the drive-bys by castigating this just taken a moment to figure, okay, what's this really all about?
And then put it in some sort of context, which would not be hard.
They could have diffused this the first day.
Instead, Snerdley took an international vacation.
Is it okay if I tell them where you went?
Snerdley went to the Philippines.
He said, the only media they get over there is the BBC and CNN.
And all week long, he's on vacation.
All week, he's watching Barack the Magic Negro from Manila on CNN and the BBC.
And of course, he's watching these chuckling.
You can't believe, my gosh, even when we're on vacation, we lead the news.
So the truth of Barack the Magic Negro in this instant last week didn't matter.
Winning an argument over Barack the Magic Negro would not have mattered last week because this was about something totally different.
It was not about Barack the Magic Negro.
It was about the drive-by media and the Democrat Party once again being able to promote the myth that racism exists only on the Republican side of the aisle when, in fact, all of the racism in the 2008 presidential campaign was found on the Democrat side of the aisle, and we laughed at it.
We parodied it with Barack the Magic Negro.
It also illustrated that there was this bit of analysis from some Republicans.
Well, this is not the way to reach out to minorities.
This is simply, this is harmful.
This is 2007.
Look at you, Republicans, better understand something.
You had the candidate you wanted.
You had the moderate who was going to go out and get the Hispanics.
You had the candidate who was going to go get minorities.
You had a moderate who was going to say the Republican Party is not what it's always been.
And look what happened.
You tanked.
And the Republican Party tanked because it's afraid to use the blueprint for landslide success, which is called Reaganism.
And Reaganism is simply freedom.
Reaganism is conservatism.
Reaganism is not beating the Soviets.
Reaganism is not just tax cuts.
Reaganism is about individual liberty.
That's what conservatism is.
Conservatism is devotion to the founding of this country, the entrustment of the individual, working among other individuals to make this the greatest country on earth based on freedom, ambition, capability, and desire.
It has nothing to do with specifics on this issue.
Reaganism, conservatism doesn't need to be redefined.
It doesn't need to be rebranded.
It needs to be used.
And the Republican Party refuses to use it.
There's a simple way to reach any American.
There is a simple way to reach minorities, Hispanics, women, gay straits.
There is a simple way to do it.
You look at them as human beings.
You don't look at them as victims like the Democrats do.
You don't look at them as people of color or gender or orientation.
You look at them as Americans.
And you campaign on the basis that this is what you are going to have to do to make this and keep this the greatest country on earth.
You campaign on the notion that your prosperity and the country's prosperity are intertwined.
You campaign on the notion that our objective is to make life more prosperous, safer, and healthier for everybody.
Not that we want government to do more for everybody and contribute more and more to this notion that more and more Americans are victims and incompetent and incapable of doing for themselves.
We don't want to live on this class envy business.
At any rate, that opportunity was squandered during the 2008 presidential campaign, squandered in the 2006 midterms, squandered during the Barack the Magic Negro controversy, all because our side remains petrified of itself.
Back after this.
Gotting lots of emails.
Rush, why don't you play Barack the Magic Negro?
We're going to.
Sit tight.
Hang tough.
Obama losing a battle that he doesn't know he's in.
This is from the UK Guardian.
The UK Guardian is a socialist publication.
The writer here named Simon Tisdall.
Now, I don't know if Simon Tisdall's a token conservative writer at The Guardian.
But nevertheless, The Guardian, ladies and gentlemen, a leftist extremist rag, Barack Obama's chances of making a fresh start in U.S. relations with the Muslim world, the Middle East in particular, appear to diminish with each new wave of Israeli attacks on Gaza.
That seems hardly fair, given the president-elect does not take office until January 20th, but foreign wars.
Don't wait for Washington inaugurations.
Obama has remained wholly silent during this crisis.
But evidence is mounting that Obama is already losing ground among key Arab and Muslim audiences that can't understand why, given his promise of change, he hasn't spoken out.
Arab commentators and editorialists say that there is growing disappointment at Obama's detachment and that his failure to distance himself from George Bush's strongly pro-Israeli stance is encouraging the belief that he either shares Bush's bias or simply does not care.
Al Jazeera is giving Obama grief.
What does this tell us?
If The Guardian is writing this, it tells us that interests in the Middle East expected a president who would be less friendly to our ally, Israel.
And now that he won't speak out and stop what's going on, they're having second doubts about him.
They are saying, where is this change?
An army is wringing its hands.
Oh, my gosh, he's inheriting a mess in the Middle East.
What president has not inherited a mess in the Middle East?
Ask yourselves a question, folks.
Why is Israel attacking Gaza?
Actually, that's not even.
Why is Israel responding to attacks?
Why are they firing rockets into Gaza?
Ask yourself that question.
Hey, I love this Blago story.
Blago sticking it to the Democrats in Washington and sticking it to the one, the Messiah, the most merciful, Barack Obama.
This Roland Burris guy holding a press conference now saying, hey, I'm going.
Illinois needs full representation.
As I said earlier today, Mr. Burris, if Harry Reid will not seat you, go to Demi's.
They will seat you if Harry Reid will not.
Try this.
Harry Reid calls Blagoyevich, and Blagoyevich then spills the beans, and Harry Reid now calling Blogoyevich a liar.
So's Dick Durbin.
Reed calls Bogoyevich says, I don't want Burris.
I don't want Jesse Jackson Jr., and I don't want Emil, what's his name, the godfather of Obama.
They all happen to be black.
This is a seat occupied by a black, Obama, although an inauthentic black, according to David Ehrenstein of the Los Angeles Times and others.
And so Dingy Harry says, I don't want these three guys.
If a Republican called a governor and said, don't give me three people who are black, can you imagine?
I want Tammy Duckworth or I want Lisa Madigan.
I want a white woman in there, said Dingy Harry.
And Dingy Harry made a ridiculous, humorous attempt to show that he's not racist on Meet the Press yesterday by saying, hey, I searched high and low to find a black woman to make a federal judge, and he lied about that.
Folks, the Democrat Party liberalism is built on myth after myth after myth.
There is no foundation of reality whatsoever.
I got caught myself.
I asked you a question right before the break.
I say, ask yourself a question, going back now to Obama and his problems in the Middle East, a bunch of Middle Eastern countries and leftist newspapers in the UK.
They don't believe Obama's being silent.
They thought Obama was going to come out and be harder on Israel than Bush has been.
And he won't say a word about this.
And they say he's losing credibility in the Middle East because of this.
And I asked you to think of something.
Why did Israel attack Hamas in Gaza?
And right as I went to the break, I slapped myself because that's not what happened.
But if you didn't know any better, and all you read was the drive-by media, you woke up one day last week and understood you read that Israel had attacked Gaza.
The truth is that the Hamas organization has been launching rockets into Israel in voluminous numbers for six months, while the Israelis have been pretending to be the Republican Party and figure out the response to it.
They've been arguing amongst themselves, well, we better make sure that whatever we do, the world still loves us.
But finally, after six months, they couldn't take it anymore, so they started returning fire.
Israel no more attacked Hamas than we have attacked Iran.
And yet that's how the drive-bys portrayed it.
But let me ask the question again and forget the truth here for just a second.
Let's assume, just to make the point, let's assume what is not true.
Let's say that one day out of the clear blue, Israel did attack Hamas and Gaza.
A question for you in the drive-by media.
Why do you think Israel would attack Gaza?
Is it for their national treasure?
Is it because Israel wants all of the scientific discoveries that are being made by Hamas intellectuals?
Is it because Israel wants that sand pit of territory?
Israel was more than happy to give it away.
So why the hell attack?
What's there that you want?
Do you want the oil deposits?
There aren't any.
Do you want the golf courses?
There aren't any.
Do you want the major economic infrastructure?
There isn't any.
Do you want the sanitation plants?
There isn't any.
Why attack?
The Israelis left Gaza years ago.
They gave Gaza to the Gazantas.
They gave Gaza to Hamas.
They gave Gaza to the Palestinians.
Why do you think Israel attacked Gaza?
God gave you a mind.
The fact is they didn't attack Gaza.
Israel is finally defending itself.
John, Palm Springs, California, you're next on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hello, sir.
Hey, Rush.
It's always a pleasure.
This is the second time in the history of man I've spoken to you.
Let's see, just not to take away from your main themes, but just a quick aside here, if you don't mind me tweaking you and striking a blow for those who are right for it to mean something when we're right.
And I believe I'm right about this.
Your characterization on the I know you can't do Shakespeare on the air.
It has to be, you know, for expediency's sake, a caricature.
I'm well aware of that.
But when you go down south in your mind's eye and then you put it out of your speech pattern, I think it's a mischaracterization to do, you know, hicks and out in the boondocks with no hope or no education or no hope for education.
I was watching on the educational channel PBS some weeks ago a show of people that I thought the same of until halfway through the show I discovered they were farmers up in Maine.
I think these hicks, as you know, have you been listening to this presentation?
Oh, no, no, sir, forever.
Trust me, I'm not on my high horse, and I'm not meant to shake.
John, really, you really, this is so, it breaks my heart.
This is, this is.
It can't be true.
You are making the point, and I must be honest, Mr. Snirdley took your call for that very reason.
You're making the point I just made about Barack Obama.
It is not I who calls people from the South hayseeds and hicks.
It is not I who think that they are dumb, inbred idiots.
It is not I who think they're incapable of learning.
It is not I who think that they're nothing more than NASCAR drunks.
It is not I who think their only way out of their dire circumstances is to join the military.
That's how liberal Democrats portray them.
And that's precisely what I said.
Why is hearing context so difficult?
For those of you just tuning in, let me give you the story again.
Barack Obama says he's going to create 3 million new jobs, 20% of them in the private sector, or 80% in the private sector, which means 20% will be government jobs.
That's 600,000.
600,000 government jobs.
Where's he going to be able to do that real quick?
Where could you do this in a matter of months?
I said you could reinstitute the draft.
And why not institute the draft?
If you're Obama, who's a Democrat, Democrats believe that people who live in the South and in poor economic circumstances have no way out of those circumstances other than join the military.
Don't you remember, people who join the military are not patriots.
They're stupid.
They're uneducated.
They're economically depressed.
They live in these little hicktown shacks like Obama's brother, and they have no chance to get out other than joining the military.
And that's why they do it, not to protect their country.
These people are besmirched and impugned by Democrats in the drive-by media.
And I was simply saying, since that's what they already think of them, why not institute the draft and spare them the trouble of having to sign up?
Just conscript them.
It is not I who think that way of those people.
I don't think that way of any American.
It's liberal Democrats who have contempt for the average American, not me.
Here we go, folks.
By popular demand, people have been requesting it since last week.
If you're hearing it for the first time, listen to the lyrics.
It's all there.
Stop the tape.
Stop the song.
Barack Obama, not authentic like me, Al Sharpton miffed.
That Joe Biden called him articulate and clean.
Sharpton takes showers.
The Democrat Party shifting and just shuffling Jesse Jackson and Sharpton aside for this new guy who hadn't done Didn't East Squat.
He hadn't been down for the struggle.
By the way, this is Al Sharpton through the protest bullhorn, which is how we all came to know him.
Stop the tape.
A guy from the L.A. paper said whites will vote for him because he makes them feel good.
Magic Negro.
David Ehrenstein, black columnist, Los Angeles Times.
Stop the tape.
How many times does this song have to say it?
The L.A. Times, they called him that because he's not black authentically like me, which is the whole point of the Democrat campaign during the 2007, even a little bit into 2008.
Who is this?
He's not authentic.
He's not down for the struggle.
We're making fun of Democrats.
We're making fun of Al Sharpton.
And we didn't invent the term Magic Negro.
Here's more.
Joe Biden reference.
Stop tape.
At this point, Al Sharpton is so frustrated that he can't continue the lyric line.
He resorts to protesting.
He's so upset by the whole notion of what's happened here that he starts protesting and he starts worrying all the sacrifice that he's made, all the time that he's spent is worth nothing now because the Democrat Party is investing totally in this clean, articulate guy that nobody's ever heard of.
And he's mad.
He can't handle it.
So he reverts to that which he knows best, protesting, totally abandons the lyric line while the chorus continues to sing the song.
As I said earlier, liberalism has established itself on a series of myths, many myths.
I think all of liberalism is a myth or a collection of myths.
One of the myths of liberalism is that they are smarter than everybody.
They are the ones who have the true intellect, the true understanding.
They're the ones who are the best and the brightest.
They, ladies and gentlemen, may be educated, but they are ignorant.
They are close-minded.
They are shallow.
They are mean-spirited.
And some of them are downright inarticulate and uninformed.
Some of them, I firmly believe, are IQ challenged.
Now, we just established the sheer, and pardon me for saying this, we just established the sheer creative brilliance of me on this program with Barack the Magic Negro taking weeks and weeks and weeks of Democrat news items and compiling them into a hilarious parody of less than three minutes.
Let's now listen to perhaps the next senator from the state of New York.
And in my own case, I think in our family, you always think about going into politics.
After 9-11, I thought about, and I think everyday New Yorkers.
And so I think as well as myself, all over again.
And so I thought, what can I do?
I really ought to give it some thought in the future.
And while I was thinking about it, just sort of in my own, saying, why don't you be senator?
You'd be great.
Go for it.
We're rooting for you.
Coming up to me, thought this was real.
So I thought, well, because.
But I think public service is really, and I come at this as a mother.
What made America?
All right, point made, you know.
Let's now listen to the next president of the United States.
I also want to thank Miss of their work.
Okay, now, ladies, let's listen to them together.
You know, sort of, you know, and those are the kinds of visibility that I have.
You know, we are losing.
And, you know, I would love, you know, it's not good opinions.
You know, I can tell you that, you know, in our family, you know, there was a sense that we have to work twice as hard.
Barack Obama's not loud enough.
The woman's shouting him down.
Raise him up.
Lower the volume on Carolina's right now.
You know, this is just a lot of people.
You know, I think, you know, I think a lot of things about that.
So let me take these off.
You know, she looks pretty good.
You know, public comments.
It is true that.
You know, I don't pay a lot of attention to, you know, this is the kind of thing that, you know, everybody likes.
You know, and I think when I first saw that, it was liberals, these Democrats, they're the smartest among us.
They have the most experience, the most compassion.
They alone are able to articulate in ways that will not embarrass their country around the world.
They're the ones who have substantive things to say.
Lord help us.
Lord, please.
Having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have Russia Limboy.
Get this AP headline from yesterday.
Illinois state workers to get ethics training.
Illinois is set to hold ethics courses for state workers this Wednesday.
More than 200 state employees are expected to take part in the ethics seminar at the University of Illinois Chicago.
The course is structured around teaching people how to do what Blago did without getting caught.