Transcript:

"....Sharpton and his gang are out there now supposedly targeting the rap industry. But let me ask you a question: When's the last time they picketed an urban radio station? When's the last time they picketed Viacom, which owns MTV? When's the last they picketed Hollywood for putting out movies with these kinds of characters and lyrics?

"Zero, zilch, nada, and you know why? Because they're minorities and they don't have "hate in their hearts." Only right-wingers, only conservatives have "hate in their hearts." They couldn't contain the Imus thing. Remember, what happened on Imus' show took two days to hit, much like what I said on ESPN. There was no outrage for two days after my ESPN comments until the Philadelphia print media, all five or six, had the same column on the Tuesday following the Sunday show. That's when people were supposedly outraged and offended. By the way, the same thing happened in that case. Well, worse things happened. What I said was totally distorted. I was making comments about the media, not Donovan McNabb, yet it got totally distorted. Michael J. Fox was the same scenario -- and there is this group. The only reason for last week, Sharpton, these guys are out there supposedly targeting rap music, but that's just to give themselves some street cred. Everybody's asking about that now. So if they go out and they target rap music and say they're going to try to clean it up and the urban radio stations that play it and all these corporate interests that broadcast it and produce it, they hope to have street cred for the next talk radio guy they go after.

"Which is, believe me, their aim. That's their desire. The only reason for last week is that it is an excuse to assault conservative talk radio, even though conservatives had nothing to do with what happened last week, even though talk radio is far cleaner than urban radio, far cleaner than television, far cleaner than movies and books. This is a politically directed attack by Democrats and their media outlets. Everybody is saying, "How come Sharpton and Jackson are the final arbiters here of what's good and just?" Sharpton and Jackson, folks, you have to understand, would be nothing were it not for the Democratic Party elevating them to these positions. They both have seats at the Democrat power table because they deliver votes and they're on the team. They're part of the Democrat machine. That's why they are with this power now. Everybody is asking me at the cigar dinner, "How come Sharpton...?"

" "Well, hey, I don't know if you're a Democrat or not, but if you are, you're partially responsible, because those guys never get criticized for anything they say or anything they do."

"The Democrat Party is the party that he has made them viable and has made them powerful, and now you could say that Sharpton runs CBS and NBC given the way everybody was cowering in their boots when he showed up. The ironic thing is Imus is no conservative. Most of his guests were liberal, but he was critical of Hillary, and so he had to go. This is an election year, Clinton, Inc., you get on their case, they're going to take you out. They're going to do what they can to marginalize you or do whatever. I've seen a couple stories I was reading over the weekend that the Clinton team saw their opportunity, and when I say "the Clinton team," I include Media Matters for America, this tax-exempt, supposed media watchdog group. It's just an arm of the Democrat Party. They have an agenda. They are tax exempt, and they're doing nothing but advancing a political agenda, and they are George Soros funded. This is clearly part of the Democrat party machine, and I had some people say, "Rush, you going to talk about this today or are you going to ignore it and let it go?" I said, "No," because the main point I want to make about this is that this is a Democrat operation.

"This Democrat operation ignores large swaths of entertainment and media. We didn't hear about Bill Clinton's abuse of women from people outraged by that. That was a personal matter! It was sex. It was none of our business. In fact, when the Clintons took out after those women as trailer trash, we all chuckled and laughed and we got treated to James Carville talking about what you get when you drag a dollar bill through the trailer park. Where was the outrage over that? Where were the media watchdogs? This was coming from the office of the president of the United States! There's somebody who has genuine power. Hillary was bad mouthing the Bill Clinton women, unleashing the war room against them. That was okay, too, because that showed her strength. That showed her devoted loyalty as a wife. That showed she's not going to stand by and let her man be impugned and so forth. So whatever they do, that's fine. They've got a built-in excuse. They can't hate. They don't hate! They're liberals! They have no evil intentions in their hearts. Only right-wingers are guilty of that. Of course, in the case of the Clinton women and the women he'd abused, it was right-wingers that were calling attention to it.

" "The right-wingers have hate in their hearts! So the right-wingers are just trying to take out our people. We're going to circle the wagon around our president. I don't care what he did, it's a bunch of right-wingers trying to take him out." This is nothing but politics. It's a pure political agenda, driven by the Democrat Party machine. You can bash Christians. You can compare the president and the military to Nazis. If you're Robert Byrd, you can use the N-word on Fox News Sunday -- and all of that is okay, because they're wiser, and they don't say their words with hateful intent. You have corporations making millions, tens of million dollars from rap. That's okay. You have liberal talk show hosts using some of the most demeaning hate speech in the world, not even worthy of recording or commenting about in the Big Media. All we get about liberal talk radio is the next chance they're going to try to be successful. They keep waiting and waiting and waiting for liberal talk radio to amount to something. It never will because liberals don't like to argue. There is no argument! There is no alternative point of view, in their mind, and they don't want to be public about what they really think because they know they're wrong anyway.

"So you have Hollywood. You have the rap industry. You have the record industry. It's all part of the Democrat machine, and they don't apply any standards to themselves. Those who propped Imus up all these years, pay no price. NBC gets away with, "We are so sad. We are so shocked by what happened. But we've done the best we can. We've thought long and hard, and we've made the change." They knew what was going on in that show for decades, and they're out there selling advertising to it, and they're loving and yukking up every minute of it! The same thing with NBC and MSNBC simulcasting the thing. They pay no price at all for this whatsoever, and they're the ones that provided the studio and the air that made all this possible -- and they get off scot-free. Who paid his salary? They're getting off scot-free as well, CBS and NBC. They act like they knew nothing of his past until they denounce it. "Oh, we're shocked! We can't believe it." It's pathetic. I'm going to tell you something, folks. There are literally tens of millions of us who are going to fight these people on the left every step of the way when they attempt to destroy the new media, and that includes talk radio. It includes the Internet. It includes Fox News. It includes conservative blogs.

"This is an election season. It's only going to intensify. The left knows they can't win in the arena of ideas, in debates, on this show or anywhere else, so it's time to take 'em out. They get a trial run here with this Imus thing and they're feeling their oats, I'm certain, and make no mistake, other people are in the crosshairs and are targets, and it's a Democrat Party machine operation that is getting this done. I look at this, and I say, "This is my country, too, and I'm not going to let the Democrat Party or the left or some lackey watchdog group or a couple of race hustlers dictate my speech." I'm just not going to let it happen. They don't get to use the power of government to silence conservatives, which is their real purpose. These are totalitarian tactics that they are employing here. It's the liberal constituency that repeatedly and daily demeans people -- black, white, in between, I don't care. We don't play rap music on this show. We're not demeaning people on this program in any way.

"We don't air South Park. We don't air MTV or Comedy Central on this show, and the rest of talk radio doesn't, either. Now, look at Sharpton and Jackson. You have two liberal Democrats who ran for president who are bowed to by the likes of Hillary and other Democrats despite their long history of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is a problem festering in the Democrat ranks, not in the Republican Party. These constantly, unrelenting, demeaning attacks on minorities come from liberal entertainment outlets. I watched a movie last night (I'm not going to tell you what the movie; it doesn't matter) and there are some black characters in it and they're made out to be criminals, drug dealers, pimps, whatever. We on talk radio do not do this! We do not perpetuate these stereotypes. We do not offer these roles to blacks to go out and play these kinds of demeaning characters. It's the entertainment industry that's done it, and that is doing it, and they're getting a free pass on this, and they are profiting from it at the same time -- and when somebody says, "Well, how can this be?" They don't have hate in their hearts because they're good liberals, you see? It's impossible for a liberal to hate.

"Look, folks, you know this. We all know this, but I'm gonna say this again. The Drive-By Media in this country are part of the Democrat machine now. As the rise of the new media has occurred and new media has gained more and more power, Bush has won two elections. Fox News is the most popular cable network. They have thrown much of the pretense to objectivity out the window. They still maintain that they're not liberal or this, but their agenda-driven aspects are just obvious. They've chosen sides. It's a partisan battle. The media is now in battle with everybody else. They're not trying to inform people. They're advancing an agenda, and they are part of the Democrat Party machine, and that's why they give a pass to their own constituencies and to their sponsors. That's why they target conservative talk radio in hopes of destroying it, and that's why liberals get away with virtually everything because the presumption is there's no hate or evil in their hearts so whatever they say is not trying to hurt. It's not trying to be bigoted or anything. No, no, no! They're allowed to do this because they are special. They're protected. They're elitists. They're a better class of people.

"You know, they fired Imus. Why not the journalists who repeatedly appeared on his show? Weren't they facilitators? Weren't they enablers? Didn't they sit there and laugh at this stuff? How is it they have any credibility left, either? They're supposedly the arbiters of taste and decency under the tenets of political correctness, yet they get a total pass here. Didn't they compromise their standards beyond repair by sitting there year after year after year after year laughing at it and begging to go back on that show? I look at this, and I marvel. The mainstream media, they're populated with Democrats who used to work for Democrat politicians, or come from prominent Democrat families, and the media make no apologies for it. You have the Kennedys and the Cuomos all over the media. You have Matthews who used to work for elected officials. Stephanopoulos worked for Clinton. Bill Moyers worked for LBJ. I'm not talking about the guests. I'm talking about so-called journalists. I'll tell you who's out there doing all this monitoring and then reporting things out of context, and that's our old buddies at Media Matters for America.

"If you want to know what the liberal media are going to report as news, ask them. Ninety percent, it seems, of what is said about me in the Drive-By Media does not come from them hearing me say it. It comes from where they read it on these watchdog websites. They don't listen to this program. The latest example of this was good old John Harris at The Politico who was told by people that I compared him and a buddy of his that left the Washington Post to the Indianapolis Colts! I never even talked about the Indianapolis Colts and the subject when it came up about the Edwards press conference and all of that. They don't listen to our shows! They go to these websites which are part of the Democrat Party machine, and that's where they hear what was said and they believe everything they see on these websites and everything they read. That's where they get their talking points, and they are taking direction (in essence, they are taking their talking points and their direction) from Democrat fundraisers: George Soros, Hillary, the DNC, because that's who it is that's telling the rest of the country who don't hear what's said on this show, what wasn't said on this show.

--Rush Limbaugh, April 16, 2007

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[Posted not because I wanted to elicit comments, but because I wanted to remember a shining moment of intellectual clarity...]