Rush: I'm Not a Right-Wing Monster

Rush Limbaugh insists he’s not controversial. “I say nothing that’s shocking or surprising,” he said during a three-hour interview with MSNBC. That's a caricature by detractors who want to portray him as far-right fringe. What he is, he added, is entertaining: "I turn people on. I educate them. I inform them. Republican moderates bore them silly." He says liberals are the real haters: “They are the real racist, sexist, bigots, and homophobes. They are the ones that look at people and see skin color, gender, sex orientation, victim, group."

Limbaugh said the infamous statements that have enraged the left—“Barack the Magic Negro”  and “I hope he fails”—were merely screwing with the media. “I know how to yank their chain,” he boasted. “I know how to make them spend the next two days talking about me.” He said Obama’s election has “exacerbated” racial problems, because the “race industry” will label any form of criticism racist. “They make money off it. They have fame and fortune off of it.” Asked if he had anything positive to say about the president, he replied, he “reads a teleprompter like no one I’ve seen.” (More Rush Limbaugh stories.)