This appeared on Rush Limbaugh's blog this week...
...after the following quote from his radio show.
This guy is an utter wrecking ball all by himself on the world stage to the point now of getting embarrassing. This presidency of Obama's, it doesn't take much to irritate the left. Try this: "Barack Obama's presidency is graffiti on the walls of American history." That's what his administration is. No more than graffiti on the walls of American history. We have a juvenile delinquent for a president who has ruined so much public and private property, not even his gang is making much of an effort here to protect him. It's an utter disaster.
If you support this horrible racist windbag, you're a racist yourself. No two ways about it. This isn't a policy discussion, this is race-baiting.
Reacting to an AOL News piece that says: "Record Number of US Kids Facing Summer of Hunger", Rush came up with a uniquely compassionate conservative response: hungry kids should learn to dumpster dive.
{T}here's always the neighborhood dumpster. Now, you might find competition with homeless people there, but there are videos that have been produced to show you how to healthfully dine and how to dumpster dive and survive until school kicks back up in August. Can you imagine the benefit we would provide people?
Nice. there's a warm spot in hell for you, you tubby drug-addict bastard.
We later learned that it was an electronic trading glitch and not Greece or wherever.
But okay -- let's take Limbaugh at his word and call this "Obama's Market" so when it continues to climb, we know who to credit and we know who coined the phrase. Remember "The Obama Bear Market" a year ago? Hannity and others dropped that one rather quickly.
You know, a couple of days after the health care bill had been signed into law Obama ran around all over the country saying, “Hey, you know, I’m looking around. The earth hadn’t opened up. There’s no Armageddon out there. The birds are still chirping.” I think the earth has opened up. God may have replied. ....Earth has opened up. I don’t know whether it’s a rebirth or Armageddon. Hopefully it’s a rebirth, God speaking.
"It's the same thing with preexisting conditions. No preexisting conditions? The liberals keep talking about automobile insurance companies. What happens to you if you have an automobile policy, you're driving around, and you have an accident and you do a lot of damage? Hey, guess what? You are a higher risk. Your auto insurance premium goes up, right? Why shouldn't that happen with health care? Why shouldn't it? (whining) "It's not fair? No, it's not fair!" Well, it won't now. It won't now."
Damn right it won't now. So should you ever find yourself without a job, your drug abuse, your impotence, your deafness, your obesity and, yes, your ass cyst will not prevent you from attaining affordable health insurance. You heartless, racist douchebag.
At yesterday's health care summit, Rep. Louise M. Slaughter (D-NY-28) related this story from one of her constituents:
I even have one constituent -- you will not believe this, and I know you won't, it's true. Her sister died, this poor woman had no dentures. She wore her dead sister's teeth, which of course were uncomfortable and did not fit. Do you believe that in America that that's where we would be? What was the reaction from leading members of the conservative media?
On Twitter, Michelle Malkin wrote: "We need trillion-$ Demcare cuz someone had to wear their sister's dentures! O: "Terrific conversation""
On his radio program, Glenn Beck stated, "I've read the Constitution ... I didn't see that you had a right to teeth."
Author and radio host Laura Ingraham told Bill O'Reilly that Slaughter's tale was "ridiculous" and a "sob story."
Fox Nation, the website maintained by the Fox News Channel, labeled Slaughter's comments "Summit Insanity."
Tara Lynn Thompson, a commentator for the conservative website, Rightpundits.com, suggested that if Americans had fewer teeth, they would eat less, and hence would meet Michelle Obama's anti-obesity goals: "What Michelle Obama has overlooked, thus far, is the potential of poorly fitted teeth. Children, as well as adults, could benefit greatly by a few extra teeth pulled, fillings that fall out, or dentures from the dead."
Rush Limbaugh went out of his way to mock the story. "If you don't have any teeth, so what?" he said. "What's applesauce for?" Like Ingraham, he also referred to it as the "sob story of the day."
When criticized for such comments, media conservatives always claim they were joking and chastise their detractors for lacking a sense of humor. But they aren't kidding. Leading conservatives, especially those in the media, don't believe that the United States faces a health care crisis. And in one sense, they are right: their America doesn't.
Conservative media leaders have made fortunes peddling such blatant callousness. Consider the fact that Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck have all vehemently denied the urgent need for health care reform. Unsurprisingly, all three are inordinately rich and can afford the best health care money can buy.
And so, when Rush had a heart scare in Hawaii, he simply paid his emergency room bills out-of-pocket. As to the cost, he wasn't phased, describing it casually as less than half the "average SUV" of the "average American family."
He then shuts his eyes to the uninsured and under-insured Americans driven to bankruptcy by illness and injury. And he closes his ears to the estimated 45,000 Americans who die needlessly each year because they can't afford access to reliable care. After all, this is not the America that people like Limbaugh, Ingraham, Beck, and Fox News CEO Roger Ailes live in. Limbaugh makes an estimated $50 million per year. Beck made $23 million in 2009.
Politics aside, the real question is this: Why do ordinary Americans continue to listen to conservatives who don't even pretend to care about the senseless indignities and horrors experienced by countless citizens of this country?
Another question: why do ordinary Americans turn themselves off to the suffering of others, and yet expect the government to swoop in and save THEM? It's always whining, until it's YOU that's in need. Then it's an emergency.
It's been more than six years since Rush Limbaugh, in his capacity as a commentator for ESPN, referred to Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb as "overrated" because "the media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well."
But those comments still crop up from time to time in the NFL.
During the 2009 season, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell was grilled about Limbaugh while testifying before Congress. And on his show Friday, Limbaugh himself brought up his comments from the 2003 season in pointing out that ESPN's Erik Kuselias had also referred to McNabb as "overrated."
Kuselias was guest hosting ESPN Radio's Mike and Mike in the Morning on Friday when he said of McNabb, "He's had a public fight with Rush Limbaugh, I don't mean the two of them, it was a polarizing issue. He's a had a public fight with T.O. He's been sort of underrated in his own city and maybe overrated nationally at the same time, it's been crazy!"
Limbaugh broadcast those comments on his own show and then added, "What was that? Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa hold it a minute. Is he still working there? Erik Kuselias has just said Donovan McNabb has been overrated nationally. Erik Kuselias just said that McNabb's been overrated nationally. Erik, if they zap you outta there, call me. I got some ideas."
Jon Bois of SBNation.com flagged the comments from Friday's show and pointed out that what Kuselias said isn't the same thing as what Limbaugh said in 2003. But it's clear that more than six years after Limbaugh resigned from ESPN, those comments about McNabb won't soon be forgotten.
What Limbaugh either doesn't or won't recognize is that it's not the "overrated" part that caused the problem. It's what followed that... the idea that the media were engaging in the sports equivalent of social engineering by raising up an unqualified black man.
An overrated black man with 6 Pro-Bowls, 8 playoff berths in 10 years, 5 division titles, 5 NFC Championship Games and 1 Super Bowl appearance.
He was wrong then and he's wrong now. Six years later, Limbaugh cannot let it go.
I asked the other day why it is that only comedians seem to be asking the probing questions. It turns out I was wrong. We also have method overactors from the final frontier doing the job of the 4th estate.
On an upcoming episode of William Shatner's "Raw Nerve" Shatner grills guest Rush Limbaugh on health care. The conversation is heated, and the setting -- the two men sit on an S shaped love-seat in front of a lit fireplace -- is downright surreal.
"Here's my premise and you agree with it or not," Shatner posited. "If you have money, you are going to get health care. If you don't have money, it's more difficult."
Rush skirted the issue and chose to talk about real estate instead. "If you have money you're gonna get a house on the beach. If you don't have money you're gonna live in a bungalow somewhere."
"Right," Shatner responded, "but we're talking about health care."
"What's the difference?"
Shatner pressed on. "The difference is we're talking about health care, not a house or a bungalow."
Fox handed over 30 minutes of their Sunday news shows to a softball interview with Rush Limbaugh by Chris Wallace. Wallace let Limbaugh rant on, largely uninterrupted, about the evils of the Obama administration.
for a network trying to refute charges of being the media wing of the Republican Party, this wasn't much of a counter-argument. I wonder when they'll give Rachel Maddow her 30 minutes?
Rush Limbaugh, fresh off his loss to the free market system that he usually such a fan of in his bid to buy the St. Louis Rams, is flailing to find an excuse. Well, an excuse that doesn't place the blame where it belongs: on his years of demagoguery.
In the Sunday Wall Street Journal (and on his radio show), Limbaugh insists that there is no concrete proof that he uttered two quotes about race - one trumpeting Martin Luther King's assassin, another trumpeting the virtues of slavery - that a book attributed to him and that the media then echoed.
However, Limbaugh is now using this misattribution as supposed proof that he is not a racist, that he is, in fact, being unduly persecuted for his conservative beliefs and that actually, he is one of America's leading voices espousing a "belief in a colorblind society where every individual is treated as a precious human being without regard to his race." You can't make this shit up.
This is part of the broader conservative grievance ideology - no matter how much power conservatives have, they will constantly insist they are the ones under attack and under persecution, particularly by black people who supposedly mislabel all conservatives as "racist."
Limbaugh, of course, is within his First Amendment rights to have made these comments. However, as Digby notes, the First Amendment guarantees one only the right to free speech - it doesn't grant anyone the right to evade the consequences of one's speech. In this case, the consequences are a private corporation - the NFL - saying it wants nothing to do with Limbaugh.
Certainly, you can certainly disagree with that business decision for various reasons, some of which have nothing to do with political ideology or Rush worship at all (one argument I've heard is that if the NFL is going to let Michael Vick play, they should also let Limbaugh invest). However, the decision has nothing to do with the First Amendment or political persecution and everything to do with a private corporation wanting to steer clear of branding itself to an overt racist - a billing that even the dittoheads shouldn't be able to deny.
And now, we have Rush lashing out. When all else fails and he's trapped by years worth of tapes of his own racist comments, this is what we get:
CNN reporter Carol Costello ran a segment yesterday analyzing talk radio and its listeners. This analysis included shows and monologues from the king of conservative radio, Rush Limbaugh, and he was not pleased with the conclusions drawn by either Costello or the psychiatrist she consulted, which was that Limbaugh is a "bully." Limbaugh called Costello his "stalker" before suggesting she "go sit on a fire hydrant and improve your day."
I do want to point out that for years Limbaugh has been saying that the free market doesn't want liberal talk radio. Well, there's a lot of conservative owners that would never even try progressive talk radio or liberal talk radio.
Rush, how's that free market working for you tonight, buddy? It's about ownership. I'm glad you found it out.
They are the ones with prejudice and bigotry coursing through their vanes [sic], through their hearts, and through their souls. They are consumed with jealousy and rage. They are all liberals--and make no mistake: That's what this is about. It is about ideology. It isn't about race. It's about their being jealous and attempting to discredit me, and they've now sunk to the low of repeating fabricated quotes that they cannot source.... These people are scum.
What we all did was carry a quote from Limbaugh that he absolutely insists he did not say. The quote is:
We didn't have slavery in this country for over 100 years because it was a bad thing. Quite the opposite: slavery built the South. I'm not saying we should bring it back; I'm just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark.
As Jason Whitlock, with whom I have had every manner of political disagreement over the years, writes:
Limbaugh claimed on his radio show Monday that his staff could not find any proof that he ever joked about slavery. I'm sorry. Limbaugh doesn't get the benefit of the doubt on racial matters.... You can argue the comments are presented out of context and were meant as jokes. Then I'd argue that Limbaugh needs to get on the comedy-club circuit and out of the business of attempting to influence presidential politics. Limbaugh wants to be taken seriously.
But let's take Limbaugh at his word, for now, that he didn't say it. We should also look at the myriad of quotes on record he makes no effort to dispute. We can only assume that he is proud to have said, "The NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons."
The NAACP should have riot rehearsal. They should get a liquor store and practice robberies.Have you ever noticed how all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson?
To an African-American caller:
Take that bone out of your nose and call me back.
Upon hearing that Spike Lee said that black schoolchildren should take off from school to see the movie Malcolm X:
Spike, if you're going to do that, let's complete the education experience. You should tell them that they should loot the theater and then blow it up on their way out.
In Obama's America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, "Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on".... We need segregated buses--it was invading space and stuff. This is Obama's America.
The real reason Rush is doing a slow-burn on his show and setting loose his army of Internet flame throwers is that his dream of owning an NFL franchise is going up in smoke. After seven players and the union went public and stood up to Rush getting his mitts around the most powerful cultural and athletic brand in America, commissioner Roger Goodell finally spoke out. Goodell said on Tuesday that Limbaugh's "divisive comments" had no place in the NFL. "I have said many times before, we're all held to a higher standard here," Goodell said to reporters. "I would not want to see those kinds of comments coming from people who are in a responsible position in the NFL. No. Absolutely not."
Goodell's statement was complemented by Colts owner Jim Irsay, who told ESPN, "I, myself, couldn't even think of voting for him.... I'm very sensitive to know there are scars out there. I think as a nation we need to stop it. Our words do damage, and it's something that we don't need. We need to get to a higher level of humanity, and we have." Other owners issued decidedly lukewarm comments about the possibility of sharing space with Rush.
Some are surprised that ownership isn't welcoming Limbaugh with a passionate embrace because most owners are to the right of Attila the Hun. They are billionaires who have feasted at the public trough of corporate welfare while basking in tax breaks for the rich. In other words, they constitute Limbaugh's base. But his membership in this exclusive fraternity of billionaires would violate the first rule of ownership: protect the bottom line.
The inconvenient truth is that no matter how much he rants and raves, no matter how often he calls columnists like Burwell, Sharp and me "state-run-media scum," it's the commissioner and the owners who believe that his history of ugly vitriol would be just too harmful to the NFL brand. You reap what you sow, and Rush Limbaugh has reaped a whirlwind.
"Certainly from our standpoint, this gives us a sense of momentum -- when the United States has accolades tossed its way, rather than shoes." Assistant Secretary PJ Crowley, a spokesman for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize
We do know that we were facing a spiral of conflict that, unchecked, could have taken the world to the abyss. I see this prize as an endorsement of his extraordinary reorientation of world politics, and as an encouragement to see it through. In the midst of our domestic battles, and their ill-temper (from which I have not been immune lately), this is an attempt to tell us: look up for a moment, see how far we've come in pivoting away from global conflict, and give this man a break for his efforts and the massive burden he now bears.
And, in the darkness that still threatens, know hope. Andrew Sullivan
If only the establishment press and cable news doofs were as critical about the pretext for the invasion of Iraq as they are about the current president winning THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE! there would be 40,000 American soldiers and countless Iraqi civilians who'd be living their lives in relative peace right now.
I'm seriously wondering if any level of success this president achieves will actually be described as such. The President of the United States just won the Nobel Peace Prize -- only the third sitting president to ever achieve this -- and it's being treated like a freaking gaffe. Seriously, based on what I've read and overheard, you could easily replace the words "Nobel Peace Prize" with "clinging to their guns and religion."
Simply put: This is only a good thing for America. Nothing less. Bob Cesca
Meanwhile Limbaugh proclaims he stands with the Taliban, Beck suggests the award should go to Teabaggers and Michael Steele turns into Kanye.
I think that everybody is laughing. Our president is a worldwide joke. Folks, do you realize something has happened here that we all agree with the Taliban and Iran about and that is he doesn't deserve the award. Now that's hilarious, that I'm on the same side of something with the Taliban, and that we all are on the same side as the Taliban. Rush Limbaugh
These progressives are extraordinarily powerful. And this campaign of Barack Obama, this global campaign for Barack Obama, is done by global interests that have extraordinary power. They're very well connected.
The Nobel Peace Prize should be turned down by Barack Obama and given -- you ready for this? Oh, this one's gonna make headlines -- should be given to the Tea Party goers and the 9-12 Project. Glenn Beck
For the last 3 months, discussing wingnut politics with friends (some of whom are wingnuts), I've asked "Why don't they just come out and say it? Why don't they just call him a ni**er and get it over with? I know they want to."
All of this 'I want my America back' nonsense.... back from what? This obviously doesn't include everyone who disagrees with Obama. There is lots of room to disagree. But this paranoid, I'm-bringin'-a-gun, birther, Muslim, socialist, Nazi, Hitler crap - that's all code word.
It's because he's black.
So imagine how thrilled I was to hear a Southerner, raised under segregation to become President, echo my feelings.
"There is an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president"
“I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he is African-American," Carter told NBC’s Brian Williams in an interview Tuesday.
The Georgia Democrat said the outburst was a part of a disturbing trend directed at the president that has included demonstrators equating Obama to Nazi leaders. He repeated his sentiments at a town hall held later at his presidential center in Atlanta.
"Those kind of things are not just casual outcomes of a sincere debate on whether we should have a national program on health care," he said. "It's deeper than that."
You put your kids on a school bus you expect safety but in Obama's America the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering 'yeah, right on, right on, right on.' Of course everybody said the white kid deserved it - he was born a racist, he's white.
Can we really dismiss Carter out-of-hand?
Sure, Rush is an opportunist. He'll do anything for attention. But the people he caters to really believe this stuff. So when you hear the radical right dismiss this connection, pay attention to what they're consuming every day.
Media Matters For America, the non-profit research and monitoring group, compiled a video of comments fromthe right, accusing Judge Sotomayor of being a racist, along with other "racist" accusations.
This is hysterical. Notice the ones crying "racism" are all white folks afraid of the change already happening. "Save us from progress"
Congratualtions to Sen. John Cornyn for repudiating the comments of Limbaugh and Gingrich
One of the top Republicans in the Senate, John Cornyn, is repudiating recent comments by Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich which claimed that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is a racist.
Cornyn, the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told NPR's "All Things Considered":
"I think it's terrible... This is not the kind of tone any of us want to set when it comes to performing our constitutional responsibilities of advise and consent."
Cornyn dismissed Limbaugh and Gingrich, adding: "Neither one of these men are elected Republican officials. I just don't think it's appropriate. I certainly don't endorse it. I think it's wrong."
Media Matters has put together a clip on right-wing reactions to gay marriage.
Typical double-speak from the party of the teabaggers, who want the government out of their private lives but want the government IN the lives of those with whom they disagree.
You cannot have it both ways. If you want the government to be libertarian - out of our private lives - then it has to be that way across the board.
But this is the Republican party.... they're not interested in logic, or consistency. They're interested in dogma and domination. Watch.
Two days after Wanda Sykes appeared at the White House Correspondents' Dinner and joked that Rush Limbaugh was the 20th hijacker on 9/11 but missed the plane because he was so strung out on Oxycontin, all hell has broken loose with commentators and politicians alike chiming in on why they hated what Wanda said.
Stewart looked at the reactions to Sykes' performance last night and determined that "bad jokes and gay marriage are destroying this country, but torture can save it." John Oliver followed up with a similarly-themed segment, using the language of torture defenders to defend Sykes.
(Huff Post) Open Letter to the Republican Traitors (From a Former Republican)
You Republicans are the arsonists who burned down our national home. You combined the failed ideologies of the Religious Right, so-called free market deregulation and the Neoconservative love of war to light a fire that has consumed America. Now you have the nerve to criticize the "architect" America just hired -- President Obama -- to rebuild from the ashes. You do nothing constructive, just try to hinder the one person willing and able to fix the mess you created.
I used to be one of you.
How can anyone who loves our country support the Republicans now? Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan defined the modern conservatism that used to be what the Republican Party I belonged to was about. Today no actual conservative can be a Republican. Reagan would despise today's wholly negative Republican Party. And can you picture the gentlemanly and always polite Ronald Reagan, endorsing a radio hate-jock slob who crudely mocked a man with Parkinson's and who now says he wants an American president to fail?!
With people like Limbaugh as the loudmouth image of the Republican Party -- you need no enemies. But something far more serious has happened than an image problem: the Republican Party has become the party of obstruction at just the time when all Americans should be pulling together for the good of our country.
"The Republican base is now made up of religious and neoconservative idealogues, and the uneducated white underclass with a token person of color or two up front on TV to obscure the all-white, all-reactionary, all backward, there-is-no-global-warming rube reality. Actual conversatives, let alone the educated classes, have long sense fled." - Frank Schaffer
If the Republicans are ever to emerge from the long dark night they have created for themselves it will have to be without pandering to the right wing nuts that comprise Rush Limbaugh's radio audience. Didn't they learn anything in the last election?
All of which is to say the GOP is blowing it big time. They were handed a golden opportunity to redeem themselves with the election of Barack Obama -- a chance to line up and in unison condemn the evil their party put in the White House the previous eight years.
But instead of getting on board the change train and recognizing the incredible amount of damage their people had done to the country, Republicans go blithely along as though nothing has happened.
I hate to break it to them, but a lot has happened. And they're not going to like any of it.
The latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows the Republican Party's favorability rating at an all-time low. President Obama's is at an all-time high. The same poll shows that Republicans are getting most of the blame for the partisanship that hinders governmental progress. And perhaps most telling, when asked which party is best equipped to lead the country out of recession, the Republicans trail the Democrats by a stunning 30 points.
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