Limbaugh: Obama the Supposed Uniter’s ‘Stoking Racial Antagonism’

In a companion piece to his hot radio talk on the matter, Rush Limbaugh has an op-ed in Friday’s Wall Street Journal titled "Obama is Stoking Racial Antagonism." In addition to providing a full explanation of the clips inaccurately manipulated by the Obama ad-making team, he lets Team Obama have it for their intentional distortions:

Mr. Obama's campaign is now trafficking in prejudice of its own making. And in doing so, it is playing with political dynamite. What kind of potential president would let his campaign knowingly extract two incomplete, out-of-context lines from two radio parodies and build a framework of hate around them in order to exploit racial tensions? The segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s were famous for such vile fear-mongering...

The malignant aspect of this is that Mr. Obama and his advisers know exactly what they are doing. They had to listen to both monologues or read the transcripts. They then had to pick the particular excerpts they used in order to create a commercial of distortions. Their hoped-for result is to inflame racial tensions. In doing this, Mr. Obama and his advisers have demonstrated a pernicious contempt for American society.

We've made much racial progress in this country. Any candidate who employs the tactics of the old segregationists is unworthy of the presidency.

On his show Friday, Limbaugh said he thought the Obama campaign was attempting to stigmatize him and reduce his influence in the last weeks of the election. But it’s also possible that Obama strategists were hoping to get McCain to denounce Limbaugh and distance himself from him, demoralizing the Palin-energized conservative base.