Upon further review...
I blogged a few days ago that all Rush Limbaugh did was to question whether Michael J. Fox- who himself writes of testifying before a Senate committee unmedicated in order to produce a sympathetic effect- might have done the same thing in his Claire ("George Bush Deliberately Murdered Black People") McCaskill ad.
That isn't strictly true. First, though he promptly withdrew and apologized for the suggestion, he did raise the possibility that Fox might have been consciously faking his symptoms. And (although his radio audience didn't know that- a point Limbaugh's critics somehow seem not to have realize) he did jerk and twitch around while describing the ad in a manner which can only be described as mocking Fox's symptoms.
Both were repulsive and insensitive, and while I believe Limbaugh was perfectly within bounds to ask a natural question about whether or not Fox was medicated, I in no way mean to defend them.
That isn't strictly true. First, though he promptly withdrew and apologized for the suggestion, he did raise the possibility that Fox might have been consciously faking his symptoms. And (although his radio audience didn't know that- a point Limbaugh's critics somehow seem not to have realize) he did jerk and twitch around while describing the ad in a manner which can only be described as mocking Fox's symptoms.
Both were repulsive and insensitive, and while I believe Limbaugh was perfectly within bounds to ask a natural question about whether or not Fox was medicated, I in no way mean to defend them.
Comments
I appreciate his honesty on so many matters, but sometimes he mistakes craven-ness for brazen-ness. I've heard him many times over the years say things a polite person simply should not say, and then try to weasel out of them. He next to never apologizes or backs off such statements, and that's a shame. Sometimes, he deserves the reputation he has.
Last week especially, he seemed obsessed with either proving he never said such things and that he had no malicious intent--that he only pointed out Fox's hypocrisy and ignorance (which apparently do exist, by the way, in the matter of embryonic stem cell research)--or that, if he did say/do such things, he was within his rights, because Fox was being hypocritical or dishonest. Seemed he wanted it both ways.
I found it disappointing and most unhelpful to the cause.
I just wish he knew how to either say 'I'm sorry', or how to put a lid on it before it spews out of his control.
Then he started to talk about Chelsea- at the time, in her early teens, one of the most vulnerable and insecure times of life. Alarm bells started going off in my head, but apparently not in Rush's- until he'd painted himself into a verbal corner, and was literally at the point of saying that Socks was the White House cat, and Chelsea was the White House dog.
Just listening to his voice, I could almost smell the smoke from the mental breaks that suddenly came on when he realized what he was about to say- and how mean-spirited and generally reprehensible it was. I could nearly see the stunned, deer-in-the-headlights look on his face when he realized that his mouth had brought him literally to the brink of disaster.
He immediately started to sputter and backpedal. He never actually said the words- but there was never any doubt what he was about to say. When he was called on it, he insisted- and technically, he was right- that he'd never actually called Chelsea a dog. It was all very similar to his behavior in the Fox affair, except that there wasn't the kernel of legitimacy the question of Fox's previous manipulative behavior raised.
Actually, I think Chelsea turned out to be a rather attractive young woman. But Rush always held on to the technicality that he stopped himself before he actually spoke the words, and never did come clean with having, to all intents and purposes, called a girl at the most vulnerable stage of her life a dog on national radio.
I have long since stopped listening to Rush for precisely the reason you mention. But it does get my dander up when the Left- which has a great many more Rush Limbaughs and Ann Coulters than the Right does- is quite as hypocritical as is when something like this happens. More than one blog I've come across refers to Limbaugh as "that junkie-" ignoring the fact that his drug problem was the result of legitimate medical treatment for chronic pain.
Such comments about Rush are every bit as mean and vicious and insensitive and generally disgusting as Rush's Michael J. Fox imitation- on the radio, where nobody could see him.
Posts on this whole flap in the liberal blogsphere have tended to be quite blatant in their hypocrisy.
I certainly turn him off much more than I used to. Don't know if he really is bloviating more, or if I'm just tired of the bloviation after all these years.
Ditto, however, on the meanness of the other side. And they never. Ever. get called on it.
But it doesn't make Rush right.