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May 12, 2015 - Rush Limbaugh Program
31:52
May 12, 2015, Tuesday, Hour #3
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Every time I tell anybody on the staff and I want to do this, they say, don't do it.
You can't.
You can't win.
They're gonna distort whatever you say.
If you broach the subject at all, they're gonna cram you.
You shouldn't go there.
All except Snerdley.
Snerdley encourages me to go there.
Talking about the subject of race.
Greetings, welcome back, Rush Limbaugh, the EIB network and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies at telephone numbers 800 282-2882, the email address, L Rushmore at EIBNet.com.
Where to start with this?
Let me start again with Eric Holder.
Shortly after becoming attorney general, maybe during his confirmation hearings, Eric Holder said the United States is a nation of cowards, subject of race, that we desperately need to have a huge national conversation about it, but that people are afraid to.
People will not engage in it.
And that's not true.
We never stop talking about race.
We've been talking about race in this country every day in most recent uh illustrations of it since Ferguson, Missouri, last August.
There hadn't been a day.
There has not been a day, certainly not a week that's gone by.
And you can go back before that, Trayvon Martin if you want.
In fact, with Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton in the news every day, we never stop talking about it.
So I didn't quite understand the comment.
I mean, on its surface.
I know what he tried to say that the effort actually is one of intimidation.
When you get down, the left does not want to have a conversation on race.
What what that's code language for saying that we need a national conversation on race, it means we need to stop opposing the objectives of the civil rights coalitions in this country.
And what is meant by we need to have a conversation about it, what that really means is that the people who disagree with us with us on this need to be silenced.
That's how you finish the conversation is just by eliminating opposition to the agenda of the civil rights coalition, which you might think civil rights, what could be wrong with that?
Nothing is wrong with it, but that's not what civil rights coalitions are about.
Well, anyway, I've never shied away from it.
Because I frankly think it's something we do need to overcome.
I think we do need to get past it.
I think it is weighing our culture down, it's weighing our society down.
Unnecessarily, and the biggest damage that's being done is to African Americans themselves in this whole thing.
And this is where I've got to start being very careful.
Because it's undeniably true, and I could give you illustrations of what I mean, which easily taken out of context could be plastered all over the nation's newspapers and cable news networks in an effort once again to portray me as something that I'm not.
In fact, quite the opposite.
Bottom line for me is that it it it depresses me.
You know, I'm I'm an American.
I love this country.
I know what is possible in this country for everybody.
And I see immigrants, various parts of the world coming into this country and just doing gangbusters.
I see people natively born in this country doing gangbusters.
I know it's still possible.
I know that it's likely if certain steps are taken.
I know that the American dream is alive and well.
It's sad that so many people have given up on it, but it's it's because of the way they've been conditioned.
It's the way their influences, the way they're taught.
The sad thing about all this is that the there's a beneficiary to this, the beneficiary to economic stagnation among our Minority communities, and that beneficiary is the Democrat Party.
Democrat Party benefits from people being unable to provide for themselves.
Democrat Party benefits from people believing that the rest of the country is out to get them.
The Democrat Party benefits from all of this strife.
The Democrat Party benefits from economic stagnation.
Democrat Party benefits from the fear and the bullying.
And it breaks my heart, folks, because it's so unnecessary.
It's not cliched to refer to the U.S. as a land of opportunity.
Always has been, still is.
There are steps one needs to take in order to access it.
It just doesn't come knocking.
Well, maybe once in your life it will.
You have to know to open the door when that happens.
But for the most part, the recipe is pretty much the same.
Hard work, dedication, desire, preparation, study, passion, those things are still required.
And if they're present, you can write your ticket.
Not say it's easy.
Not say there won't be setbacks.
We all suffer them.
We all suffer some form of discrimination.
We all have obstacles out there in our way.
Many of them we put in our way ourselves.
Many of the obstacles that we face are self-imposed.
But others aren't.
You go back to the campaign of 2007 and 2008.
I'm convinced that a huge number of Americans voted for Barack Obama, hoping that in so doing, his victory would be a giant step in progress, a giant forward step in demonstrating the folly that this is still a racist, slave-based nation.
Which sadly, young people are still taught in some of our worst public schools.
And people had a lot of hope.
The hope and change, the hope in hope and change was that.
There was no other reason to vote for Obama.
I mean, nobody knew who he was.
The press hadn't really vetted him.
He was young, he was articulate, he was an open canvas.
People hated the current regime, Bush, Iraq, anybody saying they're going to do things different would have benefited from it.
You had the added benefit of Obama being African American.
Man, would that what would that say about America?
The American people elect a black president.
Now that has to say.
That has to mean we're not a racist country, not like they tell us we are.
So many people desperately hoping that that would have been the outcome.
And it would have been had it not been for the people that do not benefit from that.
There are people that do not benefit from the country moving forward on race.
Okay.
There are people who profit on the basis of the country never improving or never changing.
And those are the people that largely hold us back.
So to step forward a couple of years, Michelle Obama and Barack Obama are now into their sixth year as president and first lady.
Being elected president of this country is not an accident.
It requires certain steps.
It means a lot of specific good things.
It's not something you happen stance into.
It's not something that happens to you when you look together.
You have to go out and ask people to vote for you, and they have to do it.
And that's what Obama did, and he won.
And how that's a negative, well, how you cannot look at that as a positive if you're the Obamas is beyond me.
I just, that's the first thing I don't understand.
Excuse me.
I understand roots, history, and all that.
What I don't understand is apparent desire not To escape it.
We all have a past.
I mean, you'll hear some sound bites or excerpts coming up shortly, some sound bites that.
Well, the Obama's expertise is race.
And you've got to let them be black.
You've got to, that's their expertise, and that's their experience.
You can't relate to it.
Your great great great grandmother wasn't a slave.
Okay, well, obviously true.
But neither were they slaves.
Don't know how far back they can trace it, but at what point does at what point do you acknowledge progress?
I mean, that would be like saying that nobody in Germany who has genealogical traces to members of the Nazi Party back in the 1940s can ever be thought of as anything but that.
Why would you why would you forever want those people to be attached to that past instead of escaping it?
When they weren't alive.
Had nothing to do with it, whatever was going on in the 1940s.
They're just descendants of people who were.
So Michelle Obama goes to the opening of a new wing of the Whitney Museum in the meat packing district of New York and takes the occasion to talk about how people who look like her are not welcome in museums.
Well, wait a minute.
She's the first lady of the United States.
She can go anywhere she wants with a phone call.
And she will be welcomed wherever she wants to go.
People will grovel, they will pave away, they will get, they will bow down.
She's the first lady.
That's a tremendous overcoming.
She's done it.
She and her husband have overcome it.
She and her husband have escaped whatever.
Shackles their word that link them to their past.
They've overcome it.
They've shown it can be done.
Why is that not an inspiration?
Why is why is there no desire to inspire?
Why what purpose is served?
This is now people who disagree with me thinking a great purpose is served by continuing to acknowledge the sin.
But I don't get the apparent supporting the notion that you can't escape it, that it forever defines you, and that you might want it to.
Richard Cohen, and by the way, people tell me not to discuss this because no matter what you say, you could you could make more sense on this than anything, and it's going to be distorted on the in fact.
The more right you are, the bigger threat you're going to be, and the more they're going to distort and lie about what you've said.
So be it, folks.
I'm sorry, I just I can't choose not to discuss things because of that.
I do this program for you.
You in this audience know the truth of what happens here and who I am and what I'm not.
You know what kind of lies and distortions are written about me and other conservatives as well in the drive-by media.
But here is Richard Cohen in the Washington Post.
Michelle Obama criticized for the sin of being black.
Sorry, but that's not what I did.
Didn't criticize her for I haven't criticized anybody for ever being black.
Haven't criticized anybody for being anything they're born.
He began, sometimes I think that Rush Limbaugh's the dumbest man in America.
This happens whenever I take him at face value and forget that he's basically an entertainer with contempt for his audience.
No greater misunderstanding could Cohen write than that sentence.
If there's one thing you people in this audience know, is that I hold you on a pedestal.
I put you On a pedestal.
I do not, I'm the one media person in this country that doesn't look down on his or her audience or hold them in contempt.
If you want to talk about holding people in contempt, that's how the Democrat Party looks at the vast majority of the American people in contempt as incompetent, incapable, unable to make daily decisions in life that are helpful and correct.
They need government.
They need a regulatory agency.
They need somebody looking out for it and protecting them because they can't do it on their own.
The Democrat Party is the home of the soft bigotry of low expectations.
I have high expectations and I know that you have them of me.
When I say that I come here every day hoping to meet and surpass audience expectations, it's damn well true, and it's because I know your expectations are high, because it's it's what you've come to expect here.
No way I hold you in contempt.
On days where I think I've not done a good show, I go home and worry about it for two hours.
Time you invested here, and maybe I didn't do it as good as I should, or as well.
I do.
I worry about it.
So the idea that I'm just an entertainer holding you in contempt is just another sign of the lack of understanding and the total ignorance Mr. Cohen has of me in the program.
Then he writes, he will he will tell them anything, meaning I will lie to you.
Doesn't mean I don't care enough, I'll lie to you no matter what.
Last week, as if to validate my opinion of him, he went after Michelle Obama for using or playing the race card at the dedication of a museum in New York City.
He described her as angry and complaining.
The word he should have used was right.
Eric Holder said that we don't have the courage to have a conversation.
Every time I attempt to join this conversation, this is what happens.
This defamatory, 180 degrees out of phase, totally incorrect analysis of what I've said appears in a major mainstream media publication or television network.
Cohen says, you know, I would even settle for interesting, if not right.
After all, when the first lady of the U.S. suggests that something's wrong when black and other minority children feel alienated from an institution like the Whitney Museum of American Art, maybe she has a reason for saying so.
In fact, she was talking out of experience.
Then he quotes her.
Guarantee you right now there are kids living less than a mile from here who would never in a million years dream they would be welcome in this museum.
And growing up on the South Side of Chicago, I was one of those kids myself.
So I I she grew up in a fairly middle class, upper middle class family in Chicago, and I don't think that she was she wanted to go to museums.
She probably did, field trips or what have you.
This is my point here.
What I don't understand is here you are, you're the first lady.
It's not an abstract thing.
The first lady been invited to dedicate a museum, and your focal point is on who's not allowed to show up.
Who says they're not allowed?
Who who defines that they're not welcome?
How does anybody know they're not welcome?
I can take a break.
Up against it on time.
Stay with us, be right back.
Okay, so Richard Cohen in the Washington Post, after quoting me, talking about uh Michelle Obama, uh after after after I quoted her, uh complaining about how people like her looking like they're not welcome in these museums.
Cohen writes, Limbaugh was hearing none of it.
The way Limbaugh looks at it, Obama's not entitled to her experiences.
Certainly not to talk about it.
And he quotes me.
I mean, if you're a committed liberal, you don't want to hear this stuff all even if you're committed liberal, you don't want to hear this stuff all the time, Limbaugh said.
You're here at a museum dedication.
You want to hear an angry first lady stand up and start complaining about stuff like this?
Cohen says, yes, Rush, I do.
You do, Richard, you really that's what the museum dedication is to you.
And then he starts complaining about Sarah Palin.
This is hardly the first time Michelle Obama's come under attack from White critics who infer that she has no right being black.
What do you mean no right being black?
Who has ever gotten anywhere near this is how they shut down conversation that they desperately say they want to have?
They assigned words I've never uttered, probably Sarah Palin hasn't either.
Then they impude in meetings, meetings to meanings to various words that were not said.
And at the end of it, it all ends up.
Another racist has decided to attack Michelle Obama.
And he doesn't even mention the primary point I made.
Why not take the occasion to inspire?
Instead of complaining when I was brought up, my parents got sick and tired of me whining after a while and told me to shut up and get over it and move on.
Now I know Rush, you were never a slave.
Well, I don't think Michelle Obama ever was either.
But the point is we've there are people out there who need to be inspired and uplifted, told why they should want to go see what's in that museum.
What's great about it?
And if there's efforts to keep them out, undertake efforts to fix that rather than lament the way things are.
What's the purpose of you being first lady?
If there isn't going to be any improvement in this, why do you liberals want to sit around and constantly hear about how bad it was and how it hasn't gotten any better?
What purpose does that serve?
I look at any neighborhood in the country and I ask, how is it helping anybody?
Which is really what I'm interested in, is helping people.
What I don't get, what is the value?
What is the benefit in telling young African Americans they are destined to be part of the underclass all their lives?
What is the value in that?
Especially when you're sitting there as first lady in the White House proving it need not be.
Proving you don't need to be underclass.
Just because you're born if you think you're you don't, it's not your destiny.
Why is this not stated?
I can understand somebody who just got out of jail in false imprisonment telling people that the museum may not be the place where it's phony baloney plasma, whatever.
But not people who've reached the pinnacle of their professional lives, still being oriented toward telling audiences that they are destined to be second class the rest of their lives.
I just don't understand the value in that.
I don't, except I do politically, Democrat Party standpoint, I understand why you'd want to tell them that.
You'd want them hating your opposition.
You would want them not trusting your opposition.
You'd want them to be looking to you for salvation.
That's another thing that's dastardly about this as far as I'm concerned.
And Cohen writes it, you know, I I agree that sometimes Michelle Obama can come across as angry and anger is discomforting.
We venerate that empty word, closure, wanting to seal off the pain of the past and refusing it admittance to the chirpy present.
This, of course, is nonsense.
In her case, Limbaugh and others need only have waited till the end of the week to understand her better at Tuskegee University.
She told the graduates of that institution she wasn't always first lady.
Once she was just like them.
What do you mean just like them?
They've already escaped.
They're at Tuskegee.
They're already achieved.
That's the point of Tuskegee.
Tuskegee has a great story of emancipation.
This is my exact point.
I don't think what she did at Tuskegee.
If I were in the audience at Tuskegee, I'd have been a little confused about hearing what a hard path I've got after all I've just gotten through to get there and be graduating from that place.
One hell of an achievement.
Anyway, uh on CNN last night, Don Lemon discussed all of this with Mark Lamont Hill, who is the Moorehouse College professor of African American studies.
And it was about my comments about uh Michelle Obama in the museum.
By the way, I'm gonna tell you something.
Do you know anybody?
Um how many ask It this way.
How many white people have never been to Lincoln Center in New York because they think they'd be out of place in there?
Untold numbers of thousands of people feel intimidated to go to Lincoln Center, because what they think goes on in there is the opera and the ballet, and everything they read about it is tuxedo black tie, and it's some soprano singing something along with Beverly Silson.
That ain't my place.
And how many of them think that it's discrimination keeping them out of there?
Versus, I mean, how many how many white people never been to museum because they they're they think they'd be bored in there?
How many people never been to a museum just like they haven't been to the opera, just like they haven't been to the Philharmonic because it ain't Jay-Z?
How many fans of Jay-Z have never been to a museum?
Jay-Z's what hip in a museum?
Dinosaur bones, I don't care about any of that.
Get serious.
Well, how many fans of the museum of the opera have never been to Jay-Z?
It's a good question.
How many people show up at Lincoln Center for the season have ever been to a Jay-Z Beyonce concert?
Well, and if they've gone, have their noses been up in the air or not.
I mean, this is all just silly.
It's not helpful, is the is the point.
Um anyway, let's get to the way CNN dealt with it.
Uh Don Lemon talking with Mark Lamont Hill.
She was well received by the students at Tuskegee, but not everybody is happy about this.
I want to play this.
This is Rush Limbaugh.
Michelle Obama is on a roll.
She is playing the race card, she's doubling down on it.
Why is the right always get ticked off when the first lady or the president talks about race?
Why is it right?
Why do they always get that?
Well, a black person mentions race like one.
Just like black.
The race speech about Jeremiah Wright, which actually happened before he was president, Ferguson, the beer summit, and the Trayvon thing.
So that's three times in six years that he's mentioned race.
Somehow, when he talks about an issue that's clearly devoted to race or connected to race, somehow we want him to be raceless.
All right, I I didn't hear all that, so I've got to go back and read the transcript here, and I got confused over who was saying what.
Thank goodness I have a transcript.
Why did Lemon says, why does the right always get ticked off when either the first lady or the president talks about race?
We don't get talked uh ticked over just for that.
When do they not talk about it?
When does the left not talk about race in this country?
As though it's 200 years ago.
That's the problem here.
Lemon says, Be honest with me.
Lamont Hill, when a black person mentions race like one time, Lemon, be honest with me.
Why?
Mark Lamont Hill, because they're black.
The race speech about Jeremiah Wright, which actually happened before he was president Ferguson the Beer Summit, these okay.
I don't even know what these guys are talking about there.
Here's the next bite.
This is Don Lemon.
Uh after after uh after Hill says that people want Obama to be raceless, Don Lemon says.
The thing is that if you have a particular expertise, or if you have a, you know, something that you are, like, say we elected a general, talk about military issues.
If Hillary Clinton is elected, we'll talk about foreign affairs.
So they're black.
Why can't this be just a teachable moment?
Now, remember now, this is the guy who actually asked if that Malaysian airliner could have been vacuumed up in a black hole.
We did not make up this sound bite.
This is not Paul Shanklin intimate uh uh imitating Don Lemon.
The thing is, if you have a particular expertise, you have, you know, something that you are, like uh, let's say we elected a general, talk about military issues.
Hillary Clinton's elected, we talk about foreign affairs.
So they're black.
Why can't this just be a teachable moment?
Why can't be their expertise?
So race is an expertise.
See, that's if race is not an expertise, you're not elected black.
You're born black.
You're not if Hillary Clinton, I guarantee you, if Hillary Clinton's elected, we're not gonna be talking about foreign affairs, gonna be talking about feminism.
Again, from the liberal perspective.
The problem here is that that race is being, I think it's a cover.
I think it's being used as a cover As an excuse when it has so much more potential than that is my only complaint.
Why would they not seek to be inspiring?
And I don't mean by promising more government money and more government programs.
I'm talking about personally inspiring.
The simple act of telling people they can be better than they think they can.
The simple act of telling people, yeah, it's hard, but you can become what you want to become.
The problem is, a political party benefits if more and more people do not look at their lives that way.
If more and more people think they don't have a chance, that the deck is stacked against them for whatever reason, that political party thinks it's going to score big by creating dependency in those people.
And they're successful, and they're right.
That's that's that's what's so dehumanizing and dignity destroying about it.
Anyway, take a break here, folks.
It's time just racing by today.
Don't go away.
We'll be right back.
Let me let me cut to the chase here on something that I've been dancing around with William Cohen or uh uh not William Cohen.
What's it uh what?
Richard Cohen, Richard Cohen, and and even these guys on C and not so much them, but Cohen and people like him.
You know what I think bogs them down?
I really think they have a never-ending sympathy for black people based on slavery, and it leads to the what I call the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Um it's just a constant feeling sorry.
It's almost as though they acknowledge that it's impossible for African Americans to be first class, full class citizens because of slavery.
They feel so sorry for them about that, that we have to basically acknowledge whatever feelings or thoughts they have about it, because it's just so unfortunate what happened.
And I understand looking at things that way, but it's not helpful.
It doesn't help anybody to have low expectations of them.
It doesn't facilitate anything.
It it bothers me that in terms of the human dignity that's that's not being expanded or utilized or promoted, I don't even know what the correct word is.
But feeling sorry for somebody forever doesn't, yeah, for a while it's it's nice and helpful, but it's not a solution to anything.
Especially when it's used as a as a means of tolerance for whatever is said or done.
Well, you have to excuse it, Mr. Limbaugh.
Look at they've been for all 200 years so forth.
And I just, at some point, it's not helpful.
And I think the evidence is all around us that the left's way of dealing with all this is not helpful.
As Mike Obama said, you've been doing something for 50 years and it's not helping.
It may be time to change the way you're doing things.
That's what he said about Cuba.
It's what he said about our relations with Iran.
Well, how about the Democrat Party's relationship with African Americans?
Because it hasn't been working for 50 years.
Same complaints, same anger, same misery, same uh dismal future.
Need to do something different, don't we?
That's all I'm saying, folks.
Lee Steinberg may have had a point.
There has been uh a recent development in the Tom Brady case.
Ted Wells, the investigator, who has had his integrity attacked and impugned.
They've said, hey, you know, he works for the law firm that works for the NFL.
Of course he's biased.
Of course he's gonna be in favor of the NFL.
He is so ticked off at Brady's agent Don Yee, he just concluded a 30 minute conference call with sports drive-by reporters, and he just ripped into Don Yee.
And everybody else criticizing his report based on the fact that it might not be independent, based on it wouldn't be it wasn't fair.
In other words, the Brady Camp is doing to Ted Wells what the Clintons did to Ken Starr.
And in this case, Ken Starr is not sitting there and taking it.
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