Rush then went on to point out that the same could be said of Obama. (And it's true. Take Obama's race away from him, and what other qualifications did he have to be president?)
But when the "mainstream media" as Rush calls them, talked about Rush's quote, they ignored the first part of the quote - what Cynthia Tucker had said, and to what Rush was responding to, and only gave the last bit of it, which is where Rush says that if Obama hadn't been black, he'd be running a popcorn stand now.
Here's the quote from his program -- today, in which he points out what the media had done.
RUSH: This was on CNN's Reliable Sources yesterday morning.
KURTZ: Now, Rush Limbaugh also loves to stir controversy, by design. And this week, he talked about the president and made a bit of news. Let's take a listen.
RUSH ARCHIVE: ....That's exactly the same thing you could say about Obama. He wouldn't have been voted president if he weren't black. Somebody asked me over the weekend why does somebody earn a lot of money, have a lot of money? I said because he's black. If Obama weren't black, he'd be a tour guide in Honolulu or he'd be teaching Saul Alinsky constitutional law or lecturing on it in Chicago.
RUSH: Now, those of you who were listening last week who heard that know full well that that's the second half of something I said. You hear how this started. "That's exactly the same thing you could say about Obama." Who am I talking about there? As you'll hear in a moment I was talking about Cynthia Tucker as she was making racist comments about Michael Steele. Let's keep going with the audio. Howard Kurtz then talks to political columnist Roger Simon about me and my remark about Obama.
KURTZ: And of course here we are talking about Rush, but did you find those comments to be more than just the usual Limbaugh rhetoric?
SIMON: Meaning did I find them to be racist and repugnant? Yeah, I found them to be racist and repugnant.
RUSH: And then Howard Kurtz finally says, "Roger, let's keep going. Why do you think they were racist?"
KURTZ: Why racist? Can a case be made just on part of this that if Obama was a white freshman senator he wouldn't have beaten Hillary for the nomination?
SIMON: I think anyone who beat Hillary for the nomination had something going for him besides race. Let's be fair, his race was not going for him. We only said that after he won. He had to win in states where there was almost no black population. If he had lost in Iowa, the first Democratic contest, he would have been through. There are no black people in Iowa. He convinced white people that he really was an agent of change.
RUSH: This is not altogether true, Mr. Simon. We're now learning from Gina Gaston who is a Democrat activist -- this was on Fox News Sunday yesterday morning -- she started out putting a documentary together to prove there wasn't any voter fraud in the Democrat primaries of 2008 and she found out there was all kinds of Democrat voter fraud on the part of the Obama campaign, and specifically, Mr. Simon, in Iowa. Ms. Gaston documents that the Obama people locked the Hillary people out of the cauci locations. They simply locked the doors. Everybody was, "How the hell did Obama pull off this Iowa caucus thing?" Because that's the launch and Mr. Simon here mentions it, and Ms. Gaston, who says she can't get coverage of her documentary anywhere but on, of all places, Fox News. She recounts all kinds of voter fraud on the part of the Obama campaign aimed at Mrs. Clinton. And Iowa was one of those places.
So Kurtz says, "Why racist? Can't a case be made just on part of this that if Obama was a white freshman senator, he wouldn't have beaten Hillary for the nomination?" Now, what spawned all of this? This is where I'm actually kind of surprised at Howard Kurtz because whenever the media has joined these out of context, erroneous, made-up narratives on how I'm a racist, Kurtz has never done that. Now all of a sudden he airs a piece, but what did he leave out? Let's go back, cut 11 here that I played, it starts with me saying, "That's exactly the same thing you could say about Obama." So obviously I'm responding to something, but Kurtz either knew it and ignored it or didn't know it and got befuddled by one of the CNN producers. Here is the entire sound bite from last Tuesday, and you will hear that a full 65% of this sound bite was not aired by Howard Kurtz.
RUSH: Cynthia Tucker, ABC's This Week Sunday roundtable, they discussed Michael Steele. And, by the way, this woman is the editorial director of the Atlanta Urinal and Constipation, and she has been for a long, long time. Cynthia, you once called Michael Steele an affirmative action hire gone bad. What is your take -- by the way, she can say this because she's African-American. Here's what she said.
TUCKER: Michael Steele is a self-aggrandizing, gaffe-prone incompetent who would have been fired a long time ago were he not black. Of course the irony is that he never would have been voted in as chairman of the Republican Party were he not black.
RUSH ARCHIVE: Same with Obama.
TUCKER: It is very ironic --
RUSH ARCHIVE: Stop the tape just a second. That's exactly the same thing you could say about Obama. He wouldn't have been voted president if he weren't black. Somebody asked me over the weekend why does somebody earn a lot money, have a lot money, I said because she's black. It was Oprah. No, it can't be. Yes, it is. There's a lot of guilt out there, let's show we're not racists, we'll make this person wealthy and big and famous and so forth.
RUSH: So a full 65% of that sound bite didn't air on CNN. And you know they had it because they had to edit it. Same with Obama. Same with Obama. You heard Cynthia Tucker, Michael Steele wouldn't be where he is if he weren't black. So I simply said, "Yeah, you could say the same thing about Obama." But they at CNN present this as though I originated the thought.
Cynthia Tucker
From Wikipedia:
Cynthia Tucker (born 1955 in Monroeville, Alabama) is a progressive American syndicated columnist. She was recognized with a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2007 "for her courageous, clear-headed columns that evince a strong sense of morality and persuasive knowledge of the community". She was a Pulitzer-nominated finalist in 2004 and 2006.
Biography
Tucker was born in 1955 in Monroeville, Alabama in the age of segregation; she did not attend an integrated school until she was a junior in high school. She then attended Auburn University where she majored in English and journalism and wrote for the student newspaper, The Plainsman. After graduation in 1976, she applied for a job at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) where she was hired as a reporter. In 1980, she left Atlanta and the AJC for a job at the The Philadelphia Inquirer. Shortly thereafter, Tucker decided that she wanted to be a foreign correspondent in Africa, but the Inquirer considered her too inexperienced for the assignment. Tucker set out on her own, traveling around Africa and freelancing for six months. She then returned to Atlanta, where she was rehired as a columnist by the AJC.
Tucker was selected as Nieman Fellow by Harvard University in 1988. She was promoted to her current position as editorial page editor of the AJC in 1990. In 1993, the National Women’s Political Caucus awarded Tucker their Exceptional Merit Media Award. In 2005, Tucker received the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award as well as an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Colby College.
Tucker currently blogs regularly and writes two columns each week. They appear on Wednesdays and Sundays. Her columns are further syndicated to over 40 U.S. newspapers and appear on the AJC's website. Those columns earned her nominations for the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2004 and 2006 before her eventual win in 2007.
In July 2009, Tucker moved to Washington, D.C. as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's political columnist.
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