I heard Rush Limbaugh deliver this message yesterday after the community organizer in the White House made his amnesty-again speech. It is well worth your time to know and understand

It’s the Statue of Liberty, Not the Statue of Immigration
July 1, 2010

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BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, Obama did something else today in this speech that the left always does when they bring up the Statue of Liberty and Emma Lazarus. “Give me your tired, give me your poor, give me your huddled masses,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That has been interpreted over the years. First of all, most people think that that’s part of the design and construction of the Statue of Liberty, which it’s not. I will ‘splain in a moment. They also have told us that what Emma Lazarus meant was, “Give us your downtrodden, give us your disadvantaged, give us your poor, give us your wretches, and we will take them in and we will help them,” and that’s not what it was all about.

It was about the United States being a home to those fleeing oppression, not poverty per se. He even had the audacity to say that Emma Lazarus devoted her life to health care. Now, here’s the story about all this. The Emma Lazarus poem, “Give me your tired, your poor, your hungry, huddled masses,” blah, blah, blah, does not and never has appeared on the Statue of Liberty. It was a poem written in a contest to raise money to build the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty. It was not even put on display inside the exhibit, inside the pedestal until years later. The New Colossus is the title of it. It was written in 1883. In 1903, 20 years later, it was engraved on a bronze plaque and mounted inside the Statue of Liberty. You don’t go to the Statue of Liberty, wander around outside and see The New Colossus as part of the design on the outside of the Statue of Liberty.

“The poem was written as a donation to an auction of art and literary works conducted by the ‘Art Loan Fund Exhibition in Aid of the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund for the Statue of Liberty,’ the aim of which was to raise money for the pedestal’s construction. The contribution was solicited by fundraiser William Maxwell Evarts. Initially Lazarus refused, but Constance Cary Harrison convinced her that the statue would be of great significance to immigrants sailing into the harbor. The New Colossus was the only entry read at the exhibit’s opening, but was forgotten and played no role at the opening of the statue in 1886. In 1901, Lazarus’s friend Georgina Schuyler began an effort to memorialize Lazarus and her poem, which succeeded in 1903 when a plaque bearing the text of the poem was mounted on the inner wall of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.”

The Statue of Liberty was never meant to be a symbol of immigration. It was meant to be a symbol of liberty and freedom. The Statue of Liberty as designed and constructed had nothing to do with what Emma Lazarus wrote, and it’s another distortion of the left to suggest that this country was founded for the express purpose of taking anybody, anywhere, any planet, any country, who wanted to come into the country. Under the guise that they were poor, they were huddled, they were hungry, they were thirsty. It was not about immigration at all. It was about liberty. We don’t call it “the Statue of Immigration.” We call it the Statue of Liberty. It was dedicated October 28th, 1886.

It is a monument commemorating the centennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which Elena Kagan yesterday in her testimony said, (raspberry). “It’s irrelevant to me when I look at the law,” and yet here’s her president citing Emma Lazarus as though it’s part of the Statue of Immigration. It’s the Statue of Liberty. It has nothing to do with immigration. It commemorated the Declaration of Independence. The French did it. So profound did everyone in the world think the Declaration was, and in fact Abraham Lincoln often gave it more weight than the Constitution itself in terms of its deep meaning. Lady Liberty is stepping forward. She is meant to be carrying the torch of liberty from the United States TO the rest of the world.

The torch is not to light the way to the United States. It is to light the way to liberty to the rest of the world. Lady Liberty is carrying the light of liberty to the rest of the world. It is not a beacon for immigrants to get to this country because they’re tired, they’re poor, they’re huddled, hungry, or thirsty. The president of the United States has joined the chorus of those who have purposely misrepresented the Statue of Liberty — making it out to be the statute of immigration, misrepresenting Emma Lazarus — and it’s just an outrage how wantonly open the destruction and revision and redefinition of the great traditions and institutions that define this country is taking place now, at the hands of this regime…

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