Timeline of Barrack and the Rev

Sunday (3/16/08): Obama went on several cable television shows and said that he did not personally witness any of the incindiary comments made by Jeremy Wright. He was careful the way that he said this. "Had I heard anything like that twice, I would have certainly left the church." (not an exact quote).

Tuesday (3/18/08): Obama gave the speech. He asked the question, "Did I hear any of these incindiary comments made by Reverend Wright; of course."

Wednesday (3/19/08): For much of today, I heard Obama explaining Wright's theology and his approach, and how we ought to understand it. Now, I do not know if this is from an additional speech which he made; if this is from a recent interview, or whether this is from his speech given on Tuesday. All I know is, Obama went from attending Wright's church for 20 years and being oblivious to Wright's radical racist leanings, to, a couple days later, being able to parse, explain, and even justify, to some degree, Wright's theology. Obama is an amazing man.

Why is This Important?

Barack Obama claims to have excellent judgment, and names, in speech after speech, after speech, his opposition to the Iraq War as testimony to his excellent judgment. He does not have anything else to recommend him in terms of judgment besides his opposition to the war in Iraq. Therefore, when we have an opportunity to examine Obama’s judgment, if we want to be honestly critical, we need to look at more than just his opposition to the war.

Obama sat in this congregation, which has a clearly anti-white, anti-USA, pro-Black viewpoint, one which has little to do with Jesus Christ, apart from making Him out to be a black man in a rich white man’s world. This viewpoint is clear by their website, by what is printed in their bulletins, by the associations of Rev. Jeremy Wright, by the actual words of Jeremy Wright, by the DVD’s which they disseminate. Wright’s hatred of

white US is palatable and unmistakable. Obama could not have missed this had he attended this church for a couple of months, let alone 20 years. This is an intentional, long-term association; Barack did not just wander into this church and then walk out, embarrassed to be there. He walked into the church and stayed for 20 years. This either reveals terrible judgment on his part or that Obama holds onto some irrational Black anger, despite his financial and political success. I do not think that he is a racist; but I do think that he has exhibited the worst judgment that a man can exhibit.

Obama multiplies this poor judgment by exposing his wife and his impressionable young girls to this hatred and anger. How could a parent do such a thing to his own children? Would you haul your own children to KKK meetings from their youngest years up? This is not much better than the Black version of the KKK. They preach anger, hatred and intentionally distort the Bible to support their evil ideas; and Obama for years has exposed his own daughters to such crap. For this, he ought to be ashamed!

Obama’s Religion Speech

First of all, this can be located here:

http://www.barackobama.com/2008/03/18/remarks_of_senator_barack_obam_53.php

There is the text and the audio of the speech. For those who are Obama-maniacs, this was the greatest speech every made since the Martin Luther King “I have a Dream” speech, and should be read and reread for many years to come.

For those of us who are objective, Obama said a few good things, but he really does not explain away just how he could go for decades to Wright’s church, nor does he explain why he lied on Sunday about not knowing what was taught at this church.

He ought to face a tough interviewer, like Tim Russet, Bill O’Reilly, Chris Wallace, John Stossel, Brit Hume, or someone who is going to ask him some tough questions. So far, he has made many promises to show up on FoxNews and has yet to do so.

Obama: I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton's Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I've gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world's poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners - an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

This is good. Acknowledging this great nation is an excellent way to start. I don’t know how long the Barack lived in one of the world’s poorest nations, but I am glad that he recognizes how good this nation has been to him.

Obama: Throughout the first year of this campaign, against all predictions to the contrary, we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity. Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a purely racial lens, we won commanding victories in states with some of the whitest populations in the country. In South Carolina, where the Confederate Flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans.

The Confederate flag represents a lot of things to a lot of people. Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson set their slaves free before entering into the Civil War, to make it clear that they were not fighting for slavery. The Confederate flag represents a lot of spilled blood. It represents southern men who left their farms and ranches in the hands of their Black slaves for safekeeping until they returned. And, quite obviously to some, it represents division and slavery.

Just like Obama touts the word change, he also bandies around the word unity. These are words which sound nice, but mean nothing. Obama is not looking to unite people of my conservative persuasion with liberals. He is not looking to unite those of us who want less government and less spending; he is looking to move us further and further toward a nanny state and toward a partially socialized government. Unlike McCain, who is closely associated with working both sides of the aisle, Obama’s name cannot be found on any important piece of legislation which can be seen as uniting the left and the right. His cry that he will bring unity rings hollow to me. At this point, it is questionable if he can even unite his own party if he wins the nomination.

Obama: This is not to say that race has not been an issue in the campaign. At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either "too black" or "not black enough."

Obama carefully ignores the fact that these charges came from liberals, not from conservatives. The idea of someone being too black or not black enough makes no sense to a conservative. Not one time has any conservative ever questioned the amount of Condi Rice’s blackness. Such ideas are seen as fundamentally stupid by most conservatives.

Obama: And yet, it has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn.

And Obama is correct; in my opinion, the Clinton campaign has been attempting to make this primary a question of race. Some would disagree here, but think about this: Obama is much more charming and likeable than Clinton; he seems to be equally intelligent; in the issues, these two disagree only slightly; so what is left for the Clinton campaign to attack? Black versus white. Again, this is a meaningless concept to conservatives.

I got an email a few month’s back from a gloating liberal informing me that I was going to soon have a woman or a Black president. I told him that he did not understand conservatism, not even slightly. I could care less about the race or gender of a candidate; I do care about their experience, leadership and proposed policies. When choosing a president, race and gender would never even enter into the equation for me, apart from it being a strategic political move. Let me explain, if Obama loses the Democratic nomination, it might be strategically important to put a Black Republican on the McCain ticket. If he is qualified and has his head on straight, this would be all that I would ask. But that is a part of strategic politics, like voting for Clinton in the Democratic primary in Texas.

Obama: On one end of the spectrum, we've heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it's based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we've heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.

Although I do not necessarily subscribe to Obama’s first half of that thought, the second half is right-on.

Obama: I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely - just as I'm sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.

And now Obama goes off in the wrong direction. What Rev. Wright teaches in his church is not simply opposition to our government’s foreign and domestic policy; he does not make an occasional controversial remark; he does not simply state a few dogmatic statements which we have some sort of disagreement with. If any pastor spouted the kinds of things that Rev. Wright does, whether for or against Blacks, the vast majority of Americans, Blacks or whites, would make a beeline for the exit doors and never come back. You cannot equivocate his hatred and anger and his anti-American sentiment with some remark from a pastor, priest or rabbi. Now, if Obama wanted to compare Wright’s statements with those made at a Klan meeting, or with those made by Adolf Hitler to arouse the anti-Semitism of his listeners or the dialed-up rhetoric if radical Islam, I could see a comparison here. But the equivocation which Obama does here is simply wrong and there is no such equivocation.

Obama: But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren't simply controversial. They weren't simply a religious leader's effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country - a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

As such, Reverend Wright's comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems - two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.

Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way

But the truth is, that isn't all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God's work here on Earth - by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

I included a long portion of Obama’s speech here, and he clearly condemns what Wright says, but also points out the good works which Wright’s church has done. Does this justify Hamas? If the KKK opened up a orphanage (all white, I hope), would this mitigate their hate-filled views?

And let me ask one more question of Obama: were there no other churches in the Chicago area which did good works? Were there no other socially-conscious churches? Could you not find a single church which did not teach hate and racism?

Obama: That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety - the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity's services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. 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 bias that make up the black experience in America.

That there are some congregants in predominantly Black churches who have bitterness and bias, I do not doubt. There is probably some of that in predominantly white churches. However, when this is preached from the pulpit, that is a whole other thing.

You want to teach forgiveness and healing and real unity among Christians, that is fine. If you want to teach hatred, racism, anger and disunity, I think I’ll find another church. Obama should have done the same.

Obama: And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, 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 fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

I think that those people who are on the fence, voting-wise, would much rather see you throw Wright under the bus instead of your own grandmother. There are Black people who are afraid of groups of young Black men. Does this make them racist?

His grandmother uttered an occasional racial stereotype in private? Oh, my! Let me see if I can explain to Obama how this is different from his pastor: (1) she is not teaching hate and racism from the pulpit; (2) given her reasonable fear of Black men under some circumstances on the street, maybe some of the things which she uttered weren’t really that bad; (3) she expressed herself in private. If Wright kept his racism to himself, it would be a lot easier to overlook who he is. Again, there is no moral equivalency here.

Obama: But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America - to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.

This is an issue we could ignore, as a matter of fact. Listen, Obama, you are a Black man and you could have been president of the United States, the most powerful person in the world. To me, that is ample evidence that race is not that big of a deal today. Letting this issue go is not some how equivalent making the mistake of your crazy old pastor.

Obama: Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven't fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today's black and white students.

You know what would make our schools work? Not more taxes not more government; more competition. Competition makes stuff better. More government tends to make things worse. Racism is not the issue here.

Obama: Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments - meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today's urban and rural communities.

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one's family, contributed to the erosion of black families - a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods - parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement - all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

If a Black man shows up to a loan company with good credit and a decent business plan, he is going to get a loan. If a Black man has good credit and wants to get an FHA loan, he is going to get it.

Let me make is absolutely clear, Senator Obama: Black men do not become successful business men by expecting the government to somehow give them a handout. If someone can come across the border from Mexico—without even speaking the language—work hard, and, within a couple decades, will own a house and have children in college. This to the land of opportunity. That opportunity comes from hard work and determination, not from going to the government with your hand out.

Obama: But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn't make it - those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations - those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future.

People fail for a number of different reasons, many of them unfair. So what? You get off the ground, dust yourself off, and go at it again. Does a professional basketball player get elbowed and then sit out the rest of the game crying on the sidelines?

Obama: Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table.

Holding onto memories of humiliation, doubt and fear, and continuing to feel anger and bitterness will never help a person lead a successful life. If anything a pastor should help his congregation to get past these self-defeating attitudes.

Obama: At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician's own failings.

This is true. If you read Obama’s book, it is pretty clear that Obama’s primary reason for going to this church is political; he was able to gin up some racial votes from going to this church; and he did so without any regard for his own daughters and their spiritual growth. Do you know why he does not repudiate this church and this pastor? He will lose the radical Black vote.

Obama: And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright's sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning.

Apparently, Obama is speaking from the experience of attending one very racist church for the past 20 years. If he expanded his vision and attending something other than a racist church, he may find out that churches have been integrated in the north and in the south for a long, long time.

Obama: Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

I am able, during my day, to listen to a lot of talk radio. I have not even a slight clue as to what Obama is talking about here. It sounds like a bogus claim to me.

However, I have no problem with a politician who will be tough on crime. Many typical Black folk feel exactly the same way.

Obama: The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country - a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen - is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope - the audacity to hope - for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

The profound mistake of Wright’s sermons is that they are filled with hatred and anger, and not even a tinge of forgiveness.

You’re profound mistake, Senator, is that you have, with this speech, made yourself a candidate of race, ignoring the very fact of the wonderful life that you and your wife have, ignoring the fact that you could have been president. Your story is one that, anyone in American who works hard, regardless of race, can get ahead, can live the American dream. In fact, sometimes, such a one could even become the President of the United States. I am sure you have faced some level of racism; every person I know has faced some unfairness in their life. The government is not going to fix all the unfairness in the world. If you think that someone has treated you unfairly, the best revenge is to work hard and buy a nicer car and a nicer house than they have. Endless whining about race and how bad your life is because of white racism is not going to advance you anywhere.

Another excellent commentary on this speech (by Charles Krauthammer):

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NDAxYTk0OTIyZWQzMzEyMmVhZjM2ZWUwODU2ODgxM2I=

The Iraq War Budget

I have heard a number of times that we need to bring our military back home from Iraq so that we can spend that money at home: on infrastructure, on the poor, and on the sick and hungry. The money used to fight the war in Iraq is mostly borrowed--not that I agree with that--but ending the war is not going to suddenly fill up the treasury coffers. I'm a numbers guy, so let me give you the numbers:

The Military Budget peaked in 1944 when we spent 37.8% of the Gross domestic product on the military. At the height of the Vietnam war, 9.4% of the GDP went toward the military. Today, 3.7% of our GDP goes toward the military (including fighting the War on Terror on two fronts).

This bellyaching about how much the war is costing is because, the surge is continuing to be successful and there are political gains being made, so, the only thing that can be attacked is the money being spent. We already had 60,000 troops in the area prior to Sadam; no telling how many more troops we would have added had we not removed Sadam; so the cost of the Iraq War, while extensive, is in itself not a true figure of cost, as we were spending money on troops there in the first place.

Here is a page with the graph of the military spending as a percentage of the GDP:

http://www.truthandpolitics.org/military-relative-size.php

This is a break down of the 2003 budget for the United States:

http://www.truthandpolitics.org/2003-outlays-summary.php

Iraq: What will your candidate do?

I have heard a number of commentaries on the Iraq War and what the two Democratic candidates will do if they take office. Several debates ago, Clinton, Obama, and Edwards all clearly stated that they would NOT remove all of the troops by the end of their first term of office. Since then, they have stepped up their anti-warm rhetoric, continually referring to this as Bush's war, despite the fact that a majority of Democratic Senators voted for the war.

The question put to a panel of political experts as to what Clinton and Obama would do if they take office as president is quite diverse. Charles Krautheimer says that they have painted themselves into a corner and that they must begin withdrawing troops upon taking office and continue a massive withdrawal of troops. Mara Liason, from public radio says that they have lfet themselves enough wiggle room to do whatever they want. She suggests, and I agree, that Clinton or Obama will withdraw a few hundred troops, make a big deal of it, and then quietly stop. If the press goes along with this (and they will, if it is Obama), then their withdrawal of broops will be much like Bush's withdrawal of troops, but they will be hailed as moving in the direction of a responsible peace...even if they leave most of the troops in Iraq to fight.

What is important to note is, with Obama or Clinton, NO ONE KNOWS what they will actually do. Will they wtihdraw a significant number of soldiers, will they withdraw a few and stop, will they do absolutely nothing; no one knows. Even though they have talked and talked and talked about what they are going to do, the smartest political minds have no clue as to what they will really do. Both Clinton and Obama have enough wiggle room to do whatever they want to do.

You recognize that the media almost does not cover the war in Afghanistan; if they do the same in Iraq, it will become less and less of an issue to the American people. We may have troops there for another 100 years under Clinton or Obama--we really do not know for certain. They might pull out most or all of our troops, despite the consquences (I doubt that this will happen, but who knows?).

If you happen to be against the war and believe that we should have pulled out no matter what, then you should have voted for Kucinich, Gravel or Ron Paul. I believe that these men stated unequivocal positions of immediate withdrawal. Even that Democrat from New Mexico (what was his name?), the only Democract with any lengthy executive experience, sounded as if he might withdraw all the troops immediately, no matter what.

What's the conclusion? With Obama or Clinton, it all depends...will the press hound them and continue to cover the war negatively? If the press does, they might. However, if the press then ignores Iraq, then we will probably leave troops there and quietly fight.

With John McCain, there is no confusion. We fight, we win, and we leave some troops there and bring some back (as we have done in virtually every other war which we have fought). You may not like this position, but at least McCain is clear and unequivocal. You know where he stands. In fact, on almost every issue, you know where McCain stands (which is why some of us conservatives do not like him; there are some issues where he takes a clear stand, and we disagree with him--like on his cap and trade position of global warming, which most conservatives see as nonsense). But, like him or not, McCain tells you what he thinks and he tells you in no uncertain terms what he plans to do.

This is also covered by the SF Chronicle:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2008/03/17/MN1EVK1MH.DTL

Global Warming Conference

"The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change" occurred in early March of this year...did you see any coverage of this conference, which was attended by hundreds of scientists? Probably not. You see, these are skeptics, and, supposedly, the global warming question is settled and there are no legitimate skeptics. Apparently, this is such a truism that Newspapers and television stations will not cover such a conference. Perhaps it was too cold and snowy for the news people to attend?

http://www.mediatransparency.org/story.php?storyID=230

Jeremiah Wright and your News Sources

Sean Hannity interviewed Reverend Jeremiah Wright a year ago, and questioned Obama’s involvement with this church back then. Why has it taken a year for any members of the press to further investigate this church?

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,256078,00.html

Rush Limbaugh

There was a lot of good stuff on Limbaugh’s show this week.

You would think that water rationing would result in less water usage and, therefore, lower costs for the consumer? Well, not always:

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/content/local_news/epaper/2008/03/16/m1a_water_loss_0316.html

We are told that devices like red light cameras (which caught me a couple weeks ago) are designed to save lives. Hmmm, that may not be the case:

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/DN-redlights_15met.ART.North.Edition1.468120d.html

Rush on Obama Speech

RUSH: In Florida, they said they're not going to redo the vote. Michigan says today they're probably not going to redo theirs. Then you got this Obama speech today, and this speech was typical Obama, in many ways. The reaction to it was, wow, how well he spoke. So Hillary is sitting in her hotel room or wherever she was watching this thing, and she's saying, "Oh, I'm melting! I'm melting!" The house is just about to fall on her here. I'm sure that's what she thinks. But here's the question. After watching this speech today -- and I've got many comments about it obviously, as many people do and will -- the Democrats have to ask themselves a question today. Do they really want the presidential campaign to be about race, because Barack Obama has made it now about race. He has essentially, in not disavowing and distancing himself from Jeremiah Wright, who, by the way, I think the correct way to understand Jeremiah Wright, and the way people are reacting to him is not in a racial manner. This is a man who hates the country.

Jeremiah Wright is a hatemonger. He hates America. It is patently obvious. Barack Obama sought to excuse that today in ways that I found a little bit troubling, blamed it on his generation. Well, he grew up in the fifties and sixties, and that's what America was then. Well, there were a lot of blacks who grew up in the fifties and sixties who have not become Jeremiah Wright. Just because you grew up in the fifties and sixties does not entitle you to hate the country and not try to move forward and build a ministry around it. It's essentially a political movement disguised as a ministry based on the hatred of America. When I watch tapes of Reverend Wright's speeches, I don't see the congregation upset about it. I see them applauding and doing all kind of things. Obama made it plain today, folks, that the future of America rests on one thing, and that's racial division being healed, and which would be great if it would happen. Those of us my age, my generation have been hoping and praying to get rid of race as a dividing issue and as an identity issue in politics and in our culture for as long as I've been an adult, thinking and caring about these things. But there's an entire race industry on the left that will not allow that to happen. You know the kind of people I'm talking about. It's become very profitable for them.

There's a lot of wealth to be generated in the race business. So the idea that America began as imperfect and now only Obama can make it perfect -- well, not only him, but his candidacy is about that. He said at the beginning of his speech, he said we need to perfect the union because it was left imperfect at the time of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and he said that we all want to move in the same direction. Well, we don't want to move in the same direction. You have to listen to this and read between the lines. Of course we want to move in the same direction of prosperity and health. The debate that liberals and conservatives have had over what kind of country we want to be has never changed, it's just how do we get there. Obama laid it out pretty well today how he wants to get there. He is an ultra-liberal. He sees soup line America in every group of people. At the same time he's talking about ending the racial divide, he still shows us how Democrats see people: The white woman who can't bust the glass ceiling, the black this, the Hispanic immigrant there. He sees everybody as members of groups, while decrying victimology, basically promoted it in his speech today.

In my estimation, at least the way I heard it, the real interesting part of the speech to me was how this relates to his character and judgment, particularly in dealing with Reverend Wright. I don't think he answered that question for a lot of people. Despite the speech being flowery and fabulous and well delivered and so forth, if you've watched any TV commentators since the speech ended, you've heard that they are all gushing about it, so it is what it is as far as that's concerned. The superdelegates in the Democrat Party are going to have to ask themselves, do they want this presidential campaign to be about race? Is that what they want the Democrat Party presidential campaign to be about? But what was interesting here was that we did get a little bit more insight into his views, which are pretty filled up with class envy and class warfare and a great misunderstanding of basic economics, which I've always noted about Obama's remarks. But this business we all want to move in the same direction. Yeah, we all want freedom, we all want liberty, although I don't hear Democrats talk about it too much.

We all want opportunity for our kids. We all want a growing, expanding economy. The argument we have is how do you get there? The argument is very simply put, or the distinguishing aspects of the argument are: Liberals want to use government based on a contempt and lack of understanding and confidence that average Americans can overcome things in life. Conservatives like us believe that if you just trust people, the inherent goodness and decency of people will come to the forefront if you don't tamper with their freedom, if you don't tamper with their liberty, if you understand what our Founding Fathers understood, that our freedom and liberty comes from our Maker, from our Creator. We are all endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. My view of the Democrat Party today is that those are under assault. We know that life is under assault. We know that liberty is under assault. Don't make me give you all the examples. This is something that's not even arguable. We're talking about banning certain kind of lightbulbs; talking about how you can use your property, all these examples -- liberty is under assault at the leadership level of the Democrat Party. Pursuit of happiness, they're not happy; they don't want anybody to be happy. They are miserable. They look out across America and they see misery and they enjoy it. These are people who are happily miserable. So all three of the basic tenets of our founding documents, the Declaration of Independence, are under assault by the American left today.

Now, how can they say we all want to move in the same direction when that is where they -- I don't care if it's Hillary, I don't care if it's Barack Obama, I don't care if it's John Edwards, I don't care who it is, Algore, they are all the same. Life is under attack; liberty is under attack, 'cause they don't trust people with liberty. They don't trust voters to do the right thing. They don't trust you to drive the right car. They don't trust you to have the right kind of anything. And of course the pursuit of happiness, there's an all-out assault on happiness. Nobody has a right to be happy in America today when there's so much misery elsewhere. We, on the other hand, believe that liberty is part of our creation, freedom, natural yearning to be free is part of our creation, is what has distinguished this country in 220 years, from all other populations of human beings in the history of this planet. Our DNA is no different than anybody else's on the planet, but how is it that we have come to be this awesome and for-good superpower? How has it happened? It has happened because of our founding documents; it has happened because of an inherent understanding that our freedom and ambition, who we are as human beings, is part of our creation.

Ben Stein has a new movie out. He brought it by my house Friday afternoon to screen it for me. It's called Expelled. It is powerful. It is fabulous. And here's the premise of his movie. The premise is that Darwinism has taken root, taken hold at every major intellectual institution around the world in Western Society, from Great Britain to the United States, you name it. Darwinism, of course, does not permit for the existence of a supreme being, a higher power, or a God. His interviews with some of the professors who espouse Darwinism are literally shocking. The condescension and the arrogance these people have, they will readily admit that Darwinism and evolution do not explain how life began. One of these professors said it might have been that a hyper-intelligence from another planet came here and started our race. This from some professor either in the UK, I forget where it was, but can't be God. These people are so threatened by the existence of God, they will not permit intelligent design to be discussed. Professors have been fired, blackballed, and prevented from working who have deigned to try to combine the whole concept of evolution with intelligent design.

Ben Stein's new movie is going to open to a thousand screens pretty soon, it's not out there yet. It's called Expelled. But the point of it is that these people on the left are just scared to death of God. It threatens everything. We, on the other hand, recognize that our greatness, who we are, our potential, our ambition, our desire, comes from God, and as part of our Creation, this natural yearning to be free and to practice liberty. That is how we think this country came to be great. It is how we think this country will continue to be great and to grow. That is not Barack Obama. He doesn't believe that. By evidence of this speech today, we are an imperfect country. And by definition, I guess we are. We're better than any damn thing else out there, by any measure. Our future and our prosperity and our opportunity, our life, liberty, pursuit of happiness is threatened by people who hold beliefs such as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and liberal Democrats, because they don't believe in the power of the individual. They have contempt for the power of the individual. They believe in the power of the state. They believe in the power of the state with them in control.

We all want the same things. We all want to move in the same direction. Well, we all want the same things, Barack, but we don't want to move in the same direction. I don't want to go in the direction you want to go to get where you want to get. I don't want you to get where you want to go, in a political sense. So up until today, Barack Obama had transcended race. Mr. Snerdley's point from yesterday. Up until today, Barack Obama was who he was, not because of race. Geraldine Ferraro got fired, canned, whatever, for saying so. He was able to transcend race, he was able to ascend to front-runner status not on the basis of race, but on other things. Now he is and has become the candidate of race. It was so unnecessary, because what everybody was concerned about with this preacher was not race, but hate, and hate for America, and Mr. Obama's refusal, in 20 years, to find it repugnant enough to distance himself from it. Meanwhile, we've had to sit around while this guy gets excused today, while we're asked to understand, based on 50 years, hundred years, 221 years, original sin. We are told that Trent Lott can't make a joke about Strom Thurmond and stay as the Senate majority leader -- he's gone. Need I give you all these examples of attacks that have been made on conservatives over the slightest little things that don't even get into the same ballpark where the Reverend Jeremiah Wright lives.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: One thing that Barack Obama has to recognize, ladies and gentlemen -- and the rest of us do, too -- is I'm sick and tired of guilt. I'm sick and tired of forced guilt brought on by the race business on the left. What we have to understand here and what we constantly quote, unquote, "preach" on this program; are the great strides we are making; the great progress we have made in all of this. Reverend Wright sees none of it because he doesn't want to see any of it, because to him it isn't about race. It is about hate! Reverend Wright may believe in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, but where on the left do we see anybody talking about "life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness," as distinctive human things that we are fortunate enough to have endowed in our founding documents? What Senator Obama must realize, is he is not the agent of racial healing. He is the product of it.

We have for the first time in American history, a black man who is the likely nominee of his party, to run for president of the United States. Somehow, this is going to be turned and convoluted and contorted into some sort of misrepresentation of what it really is. Senator Obama is not the agent of racial healing. He is the product of it. Too many people are going to look at him as the agent of it. I saw enough evidence on cable networks this morning following the speech to now know exactly what is meant by "white guilt." Shelby Steele has a great piece, by the way, in the Wall Street Journal about this. As you know, he's written a book called White Guilt, and I thought it was like one of the greatest books I've ever read and I interviewed him in the Limbaugh Letter about it, and he makes a great point in his piece today in the Wall Street Journal: "The Obama Bargain." Shelby Steele is a black man, ladies and gentlemen, and he's about Reverend Wright's age. Well, he may be. I think Shelby Steele -- 60. I'm guessing Reverend Wright, late sixties, but certainly close enough to say that they are not from two different generations.

Yet Reverend Wright is stuck forever in his hatred for America, and Shelby Steele is just the opposite. Obama would be better served to have role models such as Shelby Steele, than Reverend Wright. So, asks today Shelby Steele in the Wall Street Journal: "How to turn one's blackness to advantage? The answer is that one 'bargains.' Bargaining is a mask that blacks can wear in the American mainstream, one that enables them to put whites at their ease. This mask diffuses the anxiety that goes along with being white in a multiracial society. Bargainers make the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America's history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer's race against him. And whites love this bargain -- and feel affection for the bargainer -- because it gives them racial innocence in a society where whites live under constant threat of being stigmatized as racist. So the bargainer presents himself as an opportunity for whites to experience racial innocence."

He says that is the essence of Barack Obama, which, by the way, is now gone in this campaign. Barack Obama stripped away the mask today and made it plain that his candidacy is about race -- and let's not forget where he gave the speech. He gave it in Philadelphia. This is still presidential politics going on here. Some of you might think that this was a forerunner of an inauguration speech. I've even heard somebody say it was the most important racial speech since Martin Luther King. That's a bunch of bunk. This was a political speech in the state where the next primary is being held, where Barack Obama is running ads on radio stations urging Republicans to cross over and register to vote for him to counter our Operation Chaos, where we have asked Republicans to do the same thing: cross over and vote for Hillary. "[I]n the end, Barack Obama's candidacy is not qualitatively different from Al Sharpton's or Jesse Jackson's. ... [Those two] were not bargainers." They were confrontationalists, and when you confront, you lose. "Like these more irascible of his forebearers, Mr. Obama's run at the presidency is based more on the manipulation of white guilt than on substance." Amen. Shelby Steele, writing today in the Wall Street Journal. Barack Obama, his campaign for the presidency, is based more on the manipulation of white guilt than on any substance. That nails it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I want to go back to Shelby Steele just to show you the brilliance of this man. He says, "How to turn one's blackness to advantage? The answer is that one 'bargains.' Bargaining is a mask that blacks can wear in the American mainstream, one that enables them to put whites at their ease. This mask diffuses the anxiety that goes along with being white in a multiracial society. Bargainers make the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America's history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer's race against him. ... And yet, in the end, Barack Obama's candidacy is not qualitatively different from Al Sharpton's or Jesse Jackson's," meaning on issues, meaning on liberalism, meaning on their view of government and what they would do with power.

Qualitatively, there's hardly a difference between Jackson or Sharpton or Obama. For example, like both of them, "Mr. Obama's run at the presidency is based more on the manipulation of white guilt than on substance. Messrs. Sharpton and Jackson were 'challengers,' not bargainers. They intimidated whites and demanded, in the name of historical justice, that they be brought forward. Mr. Obama flatters whites, grants them racial innocence, and hopes to ascend on the back of their gratitude. Two sides of the same coin." Barack makes whites feel good; Jackson and Sharpton did not, but his association with Reverend Wright now threatens this. The association with Reverend Wright has de-masked Obama, and now the speech today has taken him away from this transcendent on race position to a candidate of race. Now, to show you that Shelby Steele knows what he is talking about, Judith Klinghoffer at PoliticalMavens.com went back and found a little passage from Barack Obama's book, autobiography. On pages 94-95, he describes an effective tactic to deal with white people: "It was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied; they were relieved -- such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn't seem angry all the time."

Two things about this passage. A, Shelby Steele, this is exactly what he's talking about, Obama is spelling out his own definition of bargaining. He also tells us exactly why he knows that people are not happy with Reverend Wright, because he's angry all the time. It has to be asked, Obama as the agent of unity and change, everybody around him seems so mad that they could spit. I mean, from his wife to his preacher, to any number of people. So, no sudden moves. That's how you get along, how you talk to white people, no sudden moves -- it's a tactic. It's a tactic! He describes it as a tactic, not a character trait, a tactic. If Obama's a cunning tactician in a race war of his imagination then the audacious tactic

he has chosen to move the battle lines is "hope." He has rejected rage as a tactic, and we think this is authentic. People are saying, "I've never heard a more authentic Barack Obama than today." Tactics, tactics. He's a liberal, folks, and they do tactics. I can imagine you're probably listening to commentators talk about this, and you're not hearing anything from me that even approximates what you heard from commentators earlier today who had watched the speech. I understand. I'm a week ahead of everybody on this stuff, and I'm not trying to be funny. I don't watch this stuff with emotion. I don't swoon. I don't put the hopes of the planet or the country in one man. I'm not sitting around waiting for a messiah in the form of a human being to become the next president. I'm not doing that. I never have. So I don't look at this with emotion. I don't swoon. I study it. What I see here is exactly what I'm sharing with you. He is not the agent of racial healing. He is the product of racial healing. Now, let's grab a couple sound bites just to get started here. Here's the lead off. This is basically in the beginning of the speech.

OBAMA: Farmers and scholars, statesmen and patriots who have traveled across the ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their Declaration of Independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787. The document they produced was eventually signed, but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation's original sin of slavery.

RUSH: So that set the tone for what was to come, and much of this, folks, was to establish a baseline whereby the hate-filled rantings of Reverend Wright could be understood. Not agreed to, not accepted, but understood. We must understand the rage. All my life I've been told we must understand the rage of this various liberal group that's upset about something on a particular day. "You have to understand their rage, Rush. You have to understand their rage." Why do I have to understand their rage when it's not justified? We're not living 200 years ago. We're not living 150 years ago, although there are people who want us to. He finally got to Reverend Wright, and he admits that he sat in the pews and heard the Reverend Wright's spewings.

OBAMA: I've already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy, and in some cases, pain. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy?

RUSH: Stop the tape. "Fierce critic," my sizable rear end. Yeah, it's a little larger than it was a year ago, I gotta work on it. But this was not fierce criticism. This was hatred. There's a big difference between criticism and hatred, and Reverend J. Wright was immersed in hatred. When I heard that, fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy, I said cut me some slack here.

OBAMA: Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in the church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely, just as I'm sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagree.

RUSH: No, no, no, no, no. No, Senator Obama. Here we go with the moral equivalence. Other pastors are not like this. Everybody's pastor is not like this. Everybody's pastor does not run around and make a career out of building an empire on a hatred of the country in which the empire is taking place. If there are preachers who anger their flock, guess what? Look at this clown, the Archbishop of Canterbury who is basically trying to say in the last couple weeks the resurrection couldn't have happened, the Star of David couldn't have -- people were outraged, and they said so. Some might have even left the flock. Guarantee you. Anybody in the audience, your preacher goes off on one of these wacko tangents, and you are not just going to sit there and chalk it up to fierce criticism of American domestic and foreign policy. You might engage the preacher, say, "What the hell are you doing? You can't be saying stuff like this," but to just use the moral equivalence argument. "All your preachers do this. Why are you singling out mine?" Now, here is the perfunctory denunciation of Reverend Wright. Listen to this.

OBAMA: The remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren't simply controversial. They weren't simply a religious leader's efforts to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country, a view that sees white racism as endemic and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America, a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

RUSH: Okay, so he chronicles there -- this is the perfunctory denunciation. In the previous bite he says he was there when he heard Wright say all these things. I know up 'til yesterday or today he said he didn't hear them. People will get to that later after they stop swooning on the emotion of all this. That's going to get to the character and honesty of all this. Let this stuff fall out and play out as it does. Okay, so here's the perfunctory denunciation of Reverend J. Wright, and then it was followed by this.

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. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother, a woman who helped raise me, 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 fear 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, and they are part of America, this country that I love.

RUSH: Now, I realize, to many people that penetrated, that got some people's hearts, right? You know what my big problem with this is? Once again, Barack Obama is saying, we have no choice in being who we are. Okay, so he has to trash his grandmother for being a racist, because that's part of who he is. No, it's not. Just because she's who she was does not mean he's who he is. This notion that we have very little choice in becoming who we are is a direct liberal technique to make as many people victims as possible. Don't you understand that when you have no choice about being who you are, Obama just told us he's the product of that racist, this racist, this hatred, that hatred, and he's trying to tell us he knows so much hatred and so much racial bias and so much segregation, that he's the guy to fix it, when he is not the agent of the healing, he's the product of healing that is already taking place without him. Rodney King could have given this speech, by the way. He did once, six words: "Can't we all get along?"

Now, I'm a fierce individualist, and some of you may be thinking, "Rush, can't you let some of this be perceived as good?" Yeah, I already conceded that the majority of people who watched this, it is going to be perceived as great, second only to Dr. King, but this business, can't disown Reverend Wright any more than he could disown the black community. Reverend Wright is not the black community. God help us. I happen to know Reverend Wright is not the black community, and Obama is not his grandmother. Don't you understand that all of us, especially those of us in our fifties, a little older, we start talking about our grandparents and great-grandparents, it's a ticket, it is a ruse to get us to admit that we are all racists because we can't do anything about whom we came from, genetically or otherwise. It's absurd, and it's dangerous and I'm urging you not to fall for this.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I'll tell you what I think is happening here, folks. Be on guard for this. I think Barack Obama is trying to put America on the defensive once again. He's trying to put America on defense. Original sin, it's back full-fledged. No progress has been made. None whatsoever! We have to start working on this! He's the guy to do it now. If anybody needs a lecture on race relations, it's not the people in this country. It is the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. If somebody needs a lecture on this country and on hate and its horrible effects on people, it's not the people of this country. It is the Reverend Jeremiah Wright who needs that lecture. Now, you gotta hear this. Barack Obama blamed Reaganism and me for racism in America today.

OBAMA: [A] similar anger exists within segments of the white community. ... Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren't always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism. (weak applause)

RUSH: And that was only the second time in the speech he got any applause. Reagan and Limbaugh. The Reagan administration resulted from racism, and who were the racists? Well, those Reagan Democrats! White Southerners who hated blacks and hated affirmative action, they voted for Reagan. By the way, Barack Obama did admit something. He very, very casually admitted it. Welfare policies have had a big role in destroying the black family, but I don't hear them wanting to change it. And then, of course, talk show hosts. "Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality..." This tells me that Senator Obama has never really listened to this program. The 20 years that he has been spending listening to Reverend Wright could have better been spent listening to this program. Because you know what this program has been about for 20 years? Not separatism, not segregation, not racism, not bigotry. This program is about greatness! This program is about greatness of the country. This program is about the greatness of the people who make this country work. This program is about effort. This program is about achievement. This program is about how everybody has obstacles placed in front of them has human beings living with other human beings, and has to overcome them. Some do it without whining; some do it without becoming victims. Those are the people who listen to this program. This program has sought to inspire and to motivate. This program has seen all the faults and problems of this country, and we've done our best to fix them within the confines of individual behavior leading to a better society.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here's something for you people to think about. We're going to go to the phones real soon in the next hour, okay. People have been waiting, and I know they want to weigh in. Did Barack help himself today with the nomination, or did he hurt himself today with the Democrat Party? And remember, now, the Democrat Party's got a lot of white, racist, plantation-type guys in it. Just remember that.

Wright quotes from Rush’s Page

WRIGHT: The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. The government lied! The government lied about Pearl Harbor. (cheering) They knew the Japanese were going to attack. Government's lied. We've got a paranoid group of patriots in power that now, in the interests of homeland stupidity (cheers) -- I mean homeland security. The government lied about the Tuskegee experiment. They purposely infected African-American men with syphilis! [snip] "Fighting for peace," is like raping for virginity. [snip] What's going on in white America, US of KKKA, black men turning on black men. That is fighting the wrong enemy. You both are the primary targets in an oppressive society, that sees both of you as a dangerous threat. [snip] We cannot see how what we are doing is the same thing Al-Qaeda is doing under a different color flag (cheers and applause), and guess what else? If they don't find them some weapons of mass destruction, they gonna do that like the LAPD (wild cheering) and plant some weapons of mass destruction.

How Did Obama Feel about Imus Hate Speech?

RUSH: Folks, I really was hoping today, aside from news like I just gave you, I was really hoping to move on from the Barack Obama, Reverend Jeremiah Wright story. It's been the story for four or five days. I looked at my website last night, after we updated it, I said, "It doesn't look any different than it did last Thursday," overall. This Obama thing and Reverend Wright has been the story. And of course we, highly trained broadcast specialists, want to move on to other things. There are other things in the news here, but I'm sorry, we're going to have to give this one more day because things just keep popping up here that are relevant, that are newsworthy, and I predicted that if he went out and made this speech, he was the candidate who had transcended race, he is not a black candidate, now he is, and that changes the entire dynamic of the campaign and of the election. You know, today's the fifth anniversary of going to war in Iraq, and I'm listening to Barack Obama and I'm listening to Hillary and all the other Democrats trash President Bush, and I got to thinking, I wish that Senator Obama were as tolerant of our president as he is his pastor.

Do you realize the things that Obama and Hillary and all these Democrats have said about George W. Bush the last five years? There has been no tolerance, and there has been no attempt to understand, and there has been no attempt at unity. In all this talk about Obama being the unifying candidate, go find one instance where he's reached across the aisle as a Senator in a bipartisan way to promote unity. It's all a smoke screen, and it's a mask. But wouldn't it be great, from the candidate talking unity and talking tolerance, if he were as tolerant of George Bush as he is of his minister. By the way, a lot of people, a lot of commentators across the aisle are amazed at how casually and how easily Obama threw his own grandmother under the bus yesterday in his speech in Philadelphia. He had worse things to say about her than he did about Reverend Jeremiah Wright. I don't know, this raised some questions here about who he is and what his character really is, and like I've been saying, he's two people. The one that we know has been on the scene for, what, a couple years. The earlier Obama, we're finding more and more about, and we said, "Well, which one's the real one?" Despite all these talks and points made yesterday about his authenticity, he's got more problems today than he had yesterday, before he gave the speech. For example, people are going back, digging into the archives. April 11th, 2007 on DNCTV. David Gregory interviewed Obama about Imus. David Gregory said, "Senator Obama, I want to start by asking you about Don Imus. You've condemned his remarks about the women's basketball team at Rutgers. Let me ask you pointedly, do you think he should be fired?"

OBAMA: I don't think MSNBC should be carrying the kinds of hateful remarks that Imus uttered the other day. You know, he has a track record of making those kinds of remarks. Look, I've got two daughters who are African-American, gorgeous, tall, and I hope at some point are interested enough in sports that they get athletic scholarships.

GREGORY: So he should be off the air, off of MSNBC and off CBS, off the air completely, in your judgment?

OBAMA: Ultimately, you guys are going to have to make that view. He would not be working for me.

RUSH: So Don Imus would not be working for Barack Obama, but the Reverend Jeremiah Wright would be working for Obama, until people found out about Jeremiah Wright, and then Jeremiah Wright got thrown overboard. But why now? See, he's opened this can of worms, and this stuff is going to keep trickling out. There's more like this in the Stack of Stuff today and audio sound bites. Gregory then said, "Senator Obama, final point on this. You've been a guest on the Imus program to promote your books. Will you or would you be a guest on his show in the future?"

OBAMA: No, I would not. I was on there once, actually, after the Democrat National Convention, spoke about my book briefly. That's been my only experience on the show, and he was fine when I was on that show. But I don't want to be an enabler or be encouraging in any way of the kind of programming that results in the unbelievably offensive statements that were made.

RUSH: See, the problem he's got here is that his kids did go and listen to Reverend Wright, and he wasn't concerned about the impact of Reverend Wright on his kids, but he is taking the occasion here of the Don Imus situation and pandering to an obviously Democrat base and offering street cred her for his blackness, which a lot of people are speculating, by the way, is why he moved to Chicago in the first place, because Chicago has a history of launching black politicos that do well. So it all boils down to the people are now looking at it authenticity of Obama. After this speech, remember the original -- I told you this yesterday. The flash reviews, right after it, this was better than Martin Luther King's, why, they just went beside themselves to praise this thing, and of course the take on this program, totally different from anything you heard anywhere else, because I'm a week ahead on this kind of stuff. I don't watch this stuff with emotion. I don't sit here and swoon over the theatrics or any of that. I listen to what is stated without any emotional attachment here, and he's got problems. The polling data shows that he's got problems, and they are going to continue.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Let's go to the audio sound bites. We'll start on CNN, Anderson Cooper 180. The fill-in host last night was Campbell Brown. She spoke with radio host Roland Martin. They had this exchange.

BROWN: Rush Limbaugh, though, said that Obama is now "the candidate of race." How politically risky was his speech?

MARTIN: Frankly, I don't think Rush Limbaugh is really an expert when it comes to the issue of race in America, so we should not be shocked that he would make those kinds of claims. ... It amazes me when I hear Christians on the right, and I hear some Christians on the left say, "Well, you should disown your pastor, disown your church." Those are not words that frankly I as a Christian would use.

RUSH: I didn't say it. I'm not on that bandwagon. I don't think that's what this is about. I think this is about hate, Roland. As I said yesterday, "This is about hate," and what this is really about -- and this is why I'm a week ahead of people. What we heard yesterday, folks -- and I summarized it for you very quickly -- was that we have all of these problems of division in America because we don't have nationalized health care. We have all these problems of disunity and division in America because we don't have national this. We don't have national that. We don't have a big enough government, we're not spending enough money. Obama is a purely liberal socialist, and that is being obscured by all this other stuff involving Reverend Wright. Now, Roland, I'm going to give you a chance to learn something here. Prior to this speech yesterday, Obama had succeeded in making his candidacy not about race.

He was the one, the messiah. By the way, this was the one-year anniversary, I think, March 19th is when the Los Angeles Times published the column by David Ehrenstein, "Obama the 'Magic Negro.'" This is the one-year anniversary of that column. I think we need to play it. I think we need to dig it out of the archives because it was the liberals who started all of that. He was the candidate, who first was not black enough, because he wasn't down for the struggle; then he was too black -- and then he transcended it. He was a candidate who had nothing to do with race. That was the beauty of it all! It is the one-year anniversary of "Obama the 'Magic Negro'" in the Los Angeles Times. So he had transcended it. He was a black candidate who was getting where he was getting because he wasn't black. Now all of a sudden, Roland -- all, I'm saying is -- with that speech yesterday, he has made himself the candidate of race, whereas he hadn't done that before. Moving on to DNCTV, Norah O'Donnell had this exchange with Republican strategerist Phil Musser.