It’s hard to believe, I know. How can an entire mariachi band fit in a bell tower? But, hey, Obama knows people…people like the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, ever heard of him? I’d hope so because Wright is in a tight two-way race with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination.

It sounds funny, but this little fairy tale is close to the reports about Obama's fund raiser comments in the mainstream media. We are literally witnessing an unprecedented media distortion of words aided and abetted not only by the likely suspects: Limbaugh, et. al., but also by the New York Times and several highly visible "liberals."

At a now famous April 6th fund raiser in San Francisco, the fund raiser-heard-round-the-world, Obama told the audience that voters are fed up when politicians don’t follow through on their campaign promises. Instead of voting for candidates based on economic issues that they never address, voters choose to simply vote for candidates who SEEM to share their identity: gun-owners, Christians, Americans.

Here are the unadulterated words you know so well: "So it's not surprising then," Obama said, “that [people in small towns] get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

In a game of "telephone" that a couple of particular preisdential candidates began, amplified by nearly a dozen headlines in the Times in the last three short days, Obama’s comments were distorted and boxed in the “elitist” category.

“Mrs. Clinton,” the Times reported, “suggested that Mr. Obama saw religious commitment, hunting and concern about immigration as emotional responses to economic strain rather than as deeply embedded values.”

Mrs. Clinton also “activated her entire campaign apparatus” (I don’t want to know what that looks like) to portray Obama as elitist and out-of-touch. 

In essence, Clinton and the New York Times did the type of work that Matt Drudge and the drones at Fox News are famous for: making ripples about something insignificant that the mainstream media amplifies until the entire media world is reporting on a bogus story.

That opened the floodgates of hell: Rush Limbaugh was probably so excited by Sunday evening he was snorting pain killers just to ease his nerves.

On Monday morning, Limbaugh did not disappoint. "Obama," Limbaugh said, "is running around and calling all of these people in small towns basically racists and bigots."

Here’s another of Limbaugh’s greatest hits from yesterday: "Obama went after religion, he called millions of the Americans that he's courting ‘racist’ because they are against immigration.”

That’s just a flat out lie. Hey, but the distortions started with Clinton and the Times. Without them, Limbaugh MAY have simply tried to make the argument that Obama’s quotes were elitist. He may not have even picked up on the comments. But that need was over. Limbaugh could take the mature distortion and turn it into an absolute fabrication.

Limbaugh, at one point, played an audio sound bite of Hillary Clinton speaking at the Compassion Forum on Sunday at Messiah College. Clinton said, "Someone goes to a closed door fund-raiser in San Francisco and makes comments that do seem elitist, out of touch and, frankly, patronizing." Limbaugh spoke over the tape saying, "It’s true."

Even if Clinton’s objective with this whole blown attempt to brand Obama as an elitist, and she succeeded for a while by getting Rush Limbaugh to agree with her on something, the honeymoon didn’t last long. "You’ve done it, too," he directed at Clinton in reference to the "patronizing" quote. Later, he admonished Clinton not to go hunting with a six-shooter.

The point is that in many of the opinions published on this subject around the nation yesterday, liberals all tended to agree on one thing: this is not good for the Democratic Party. The right wing may agree with Clinton for a while, but even if, by some insane turn of events, she wins the primary, the right wing will abandon her in the end. It will abandon everyone in the end. And do we really want a situation where the Republican and Democrat running for president have the nod of Rush Limbaugh?

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