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Rush Limbaugh accuses Obama of tearing his words out of their original parody context to stir up racial fears.

In this WSJ editorial:

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.

Read the whole thing.

The Obama campaign not only shamelessly misused Limbaugh's quotes but also connected McCain to Limbaugh over immigration, an issue over which the 2 men have continually disagreed.

Look how dishonestly the Mother Jones blog purports to recontextualize the quotes (especially the second one). It is nice to see that the first comment corrects what is an egregious deception.

Salon, which obviously hates Limbaugh, is decent enough -- or just forced -- to concede that the Obama campaign was deceitful:

Limbaugh is absolutely right about one thing. He makes a convincing case that the Obama campaign used his words in a fundamentally dishonest way. In both cases, the quotes were pulled from segments in which Limbaugh was clearly being facetious.

Salon doesn't want to concede that there was anything racial about Obama's tactics.

Ed Morrissey says:

The national media just got done clucking their tongues and wagging their fingers at McCain over an ad they claimed was a lie, when in fact it turned out to be true. Not once in this entire campaign have the media taken Obama to task for his strategy of lying to stoke racial tensions in this campaign. Only blogs at ABC and the Washington Post have even raised the question, while the AP or the Miami Herald busily buries the evidence of it through editing tricks. If Rush makes this a national story, perhaps the media will finally take stock in which campaign has run the dirtiest attacks ? a smear campaign worthy of Joe McCarthy.

And if you like post-modernist horsing around, check out Protein Wisdom:

As Obama learns poststructuralist iteration and differance, Rush Limbaugh fires back by invoking intentionalism. It is progressivism and its linguistic assumptions ? consensus interpretation and manufacted consent, deployed cynically to create new ?meanings? in new ?contexts? ? vs. a coherent linguistic system in which meaning, for purposes of interpretation (rather than, say, the kind ?re-imagining? the Obama campaign engages in here), must necessarily appeal to the creator of the signs: the author/utterer...

Obama is flatly and embarrassingly wrong on this, but I find it hard to picture him apologizing. I hope he is at least forced to talk about it, so we can pick apart the all-but-inevitable weaseling.

Full post as published by Althouse on September 19, 2008 (boomark / email).