That's the less than charitable interpretation of Limbaugh's butchering yesterday of that 2001 Obama interview:
Obama, ladies and gentlemen, calls himself a constitutional professor or a constitutional scholar. In truth, Barack Obama was an anti-constitutional professor. He studied the Constitution, and he flatly rejected it. He doesn't like the Constitution, he thinks it is flawed, and now I understand why he was so reluctant to wear the American flag lapel pin. Why would he? He says "and, to that extent, as radical as, I think, people try to characterize the Warren court, it wasn't that radical. It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as it's been interpreted.
Of course, what Obama was actually saying was that the Supreme Court has no standing to deal with economic redistribution, and that it shouldn't have. Moreover, Obama was referring to redistribution the sense of things like public education, not say, state ownership of the private sector. But if you're wondering what "flaw" Limbaugh says Obama sees in the Constitution, it's ... the document's failure to extend freedom to American slaves:
The original Constitution, as well as -- as well as the Civil War amendments, but I think it is an imperfect document, and I think it is a document that reflects some deep flaws in American culture -- the colonial culture nascent at that time. African-Americans were not -- first of all, they weren't African-Americans. The Africans at the time were not considered as part of the polity that was of concern to the framers.
One can only conclude that if Limbaugh sees nothing "flawed" about a document that proclaimed freedom for some and slavery for others, that Limbaugh finds slavery perfectly acceptable. More likely he was just distorting Obama's comments beyond recognition for the purpose of accusing him of saying something he didn't say. Media Matters has a list of prominent government figures, including Chief Justice John Roberts, who acknowledge this very basic tragic flaw in the original Constitution, one that allowed for millions of Americans to be denied basic freedom and humanity and eventually led to a bloody war between the states.
What makes Limbaugh's comments even more absurd is the fact that the Founding Fathers themselves understood the Constitution was imperfect, or might need to be changed, which is precisely why they included a process by which it could be amended, which it eventually was in a manner that extended constitutional freedoms to former slaves. The founding principles behind the Constitution were an empty promise that nevertheless paved the way for that promise to eventually be fulfilled, which is precisely why Obama, later in the interview, described it as a "remarkable political document that paved the way for where we are now." But by Limbaugh's measure, the Founding Fathers, like Obama, were simply America-hating communists. To be honest, this was something I always suspected.
--A. Serwer
