CALLER: As a Tea Party member, which -- there are millions of us -- I wonder -- well, I've been watching MSNBC, which you shouldn't do, but I do, just to understand what the other side is saying. What would happen, or what would have happened, if a Tea Party member actually had been the shooter?

LIMBAUGH: What do you think?

CALLER [laughing]: Well, I think they'd probably try to throw you off the air and probably throw the Tea Party members into re-education camps.

LIMBAUGH: Well, it would be an ugly scene. You would not be able to get away from it, on the media. And whoever they thought was influencing Tea Partiers the most would be identified as the leader of this cultlike influence. That would of course be Sarah Palin, or me. Let me ask you, since you're doing hypotheticals, what is to stop them --

CALLER: From doing it.

LIMBAUGH: -- from doing it.

CALLER: Yup.

LIMBAUGH: You know, getting hold of a guy, paying him to go do something like this, and then when it's all over, claim that he's a Tea Partier. What's --

CALLER: Yeah.

LIMBAUGH: -- which is more believable to you: that a -- you know Tea Party people. Which is more believable? That a Tea Party person, in light of all that's happened here, is actually going to commit an atrocity like this, or that the Democrats or the left would pay somebody to go do something like this and claim to be a Tea Partier. Which is more likely of those two?

CALLER: Well, I would go with the conspiracy of, they did it.

LIMBAUGH: Yeah. Obviously, obviously.

CALLER: We sit here and they say names hurt. Well, you know every time they get up there and they call us teabaggers --

LIMBAUGH: Yeah.

CALLER: -- I get a little bit offended. I mean, I don't want to be the person to sit down with my elderly Tea Party ladies and explain to them what a teabagger is.

LIMBAUGH: Well, I think we should send Michelle Obama a letter asking her how we should answer that question when our children or other family members ask, what is a teabagger? What is the proper answer? I think only the answer from a source on high like that would suffice, don't you?

CALLER: Yeah, yeah. I sure don't want to be the one to do it. I didn't know what it was until I checked it out.

LIMBAUGH: Yeah.

CALLER: I am just horribly offended every time it happens.

LIMBAUGH: Right.

CALLER: I'm also offended by the arrogance of, well, primarily Speaker Pelosi -- or former Speaker Pelosi. When she gets up there and says, Bush did it. You know, when I --

LIMBAUGH: I was just gonna say that if you take a look at actual assassins, Lee Harvey Oswald -- leftist.

CALLER: Yeah.

LIMBAUGH: Democrats were behind the storming of the Branch Davidian complex.

CALLER: Mm-hmm.

LIMBAUGH: Bill Clinton and Janet Reno. We have any number of -- if you look at the '60s. Who was it who was blowing up bank buildings and kidnapping heiresses? It was a bunch of leftists. I mean, the people prone to violence, the anarchists or what have you, are all left-wingers.

CALLER: Certainly.

LIMBAUGH: You don't see this kind of stuff perpetrated by conservatives or right-wingers. I mean, even James Earl Ray. I mean, Martin Luther King's assassin. You could not say the guy is a Republican conservative. The people that were for segregation: Democrats. People that opposed the Civil Rights Act were Democrats. This just -- you know, it doesn't happen.

And I've -- frankly, ever since McVeigh, I have been waiting for one of these events to happen and for the perpetrator, him or herself to come out and say she's Tea Party and to say, “X influenced me to do this.” And I don't put it past somebody, somewhere, in the left in this country to do that. As they grow desperate, as they get so disill-- they keep hoping for this. What do you think Tucson was? They keep hoping for it.

Here. Listen to this sound bite. This is Wednesday night, NPR, All Things Considered. Daisy Hernandez, a report on the Tucson shooting and the reaction from the Latino community. Daisy Hernandez, co-editor of the essay anthology Colonize This! Young Women on Today's Feminism, said this about the alleged Tucson gunman.

HERNANDEZ [audio clip]: My eyes scanned the mobile papers. I held my breath. Finally, I saw it: Jared Loughner. Not a Ramirez, Gonzalez, or Garcia. It's safe to say there was a collective sigh of brown relief when the Tucson killer turned out to be a gringo. Had the shooter been Latino, media pundits wouldn't be discussing the impact of nasty politics on a young man this week. They'd be demanding an even more stringent anti-immigrant policy.

LIMBAUGH: Daisy, you don't know how wrong you are. If the shooter's last name had been Ramirez, Gonzalez, or Garcia, the Republicans would have been blamed for this for driving the poor person to do it because of illegal immigration. But, see, nevertheless, everybody's waiting on bated breath -- oh gosh -- because they know the media is going to blame somebody other than the perp.

We'll be back. Don't go away.