On his Monday program, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh reacted to President Barack Obama’s Friday Rose Garden announcement of a shift in immigration enforcement policy and the ill-timed question asked by The Daily Caller’s Neil Munro.
Limbaugh rebuked charges that the question was asked because of racism.
He said that to make a convincing allegation of racism, you would have to deem race as a factor in other interruptions of presidents over the years, including interactions between President Ronald Reagan with former ABC reporter Sam Donaldson, who has resisted comparisons to Munro.
“This never happened to a white president,” Limbaugh said. “Sam Donaldson — I guess I never knew Reagan was black until today because this kind of behavior, it wouldn’t happen to a white guy. How cheap. How clichéd. How simplistic. How predictable. How utterly ignorant of these supposed great minds to suggest that any of this has anything to do with Obama’s skin color because I’m going to tell you, it doesn’t.”
Limbaugh, who has himself been labeled racist for his attacks on Obama, said he was beyond Obama’s color before he took office.
“As far as I’m concerned, I got over his skin color before he was elected,” Limbaugh continued. “Is this historic in nature, yeah may be for a while, but after that all that matters to me is his ideas, pure and simple — ideas and policies. I couldn’t care less about this guy’s skin color. And for these guys to run around and make this kind of accusation — it is cheap, it is predictable, it is clichéd, it is ignorant and it is wrong.”
Limbaugh reminded listeners of the 2008 incident when an Iraqi journalist hurled his shoes at former President George W. Bush.
“These are the same people laughing when Bush had a shoe thrown at him over in Iraq, remember that?” Limbaugh said. “You imagine if Neil Munro had thrown a shoe at Obama? They laughed. They were upset that the guy who tossed the shoe missed. Besides, everybody knows that Munro was heckling Obama’s white half, folks. Everybody knows that.”