In which the left has cranked up Rush hysteria up to 11
I am perplexed and amused by the current hysteria sweeping the lefty blogosphere concerning Limbaugh’s NFL bid. Almost immediately after the bid was announced, an old and fabricated Limbaugh “quote” was reported by a number of major news networks. The “slavery had its merits” quote has been around lefty blogs for a while and debunked plenty of times. Said alleged quote is at the center of this controversy, and yet Soup decided to leave it out of his nifty little Limbaugh quotes list. It’s simple, the quote is a complete fabrication.
Out of the seven quotes he offers, four have to do with race so let’s go ahead and dismiss the other three since the main charge here is that Limbaugh is a racist. Out of the four racial quotes, only two are properly sourced and have some sort of video or audio transcript as proof that he said them. Soup even uses snopes.com to back up one of the quotes. I’m still wondering if he meant this as a joke, but I digress. So I’ll dismiss the improperly sourced ones. We’re left with the McNabb quote and the Bloods/Crips quote. Anyone who thinks the McNabb quote is racist has the sensitivity of a 5 year old. No, it is not racist, get over yourselves.
OK, so now we’re left with the Bloods/Crips quote which I find the most troubling. Does a poorly thought out racial remark make an individual a racist? Maybe, maybe not. Was Limbaugh trying to express that a certain football game was brutally violent and hence looked like a gang shootout, or did he mean to say all Black people are in gangs? I tend to think it was the former. It takes a little more information about a person to reach the ‘racist’ conclusion. And in Limbaugh’s case we do have more information. We know that Limbaugh is a huge fan of prominent Black conservative writer Thomas Sowell and regularly mentions his work on-air, exposing him to a massive audience; we know that Black libertarian columnist and GMU economics professor Walter Williams is a regular fill-in host on Limbaugh’s show; we know that Limbaugh used his platform to sharply defend Alberto Gonzales and other prominent minority conservative voices; and we know, from the many times he’s said it, that race is simply not an issue for him. It is irrelevant. Limbaugh sees the world through conservative/liberal lenses, not racial ones. As long as you’re on his side of the ideological spectrum, regardless of your race, you’ll be a-OK with him. Calling Limbaugh an ideologue would be more accurate.
I don’t want to give the impression that I’m giving the “he has Black friends so he can’t be racist” excuse, but at the lack of anything more substantial, I find the racist accusation on Limbaugh to be complete hogwash. Where’s the proof? There is none.
The problem is: because of Limbaugh’s prominence and the boogeyman that leftists have built around him, whenever he mentions race in any way, shape or form, he is automatically branded a racist. And that atmosphere of racial tension — where everything is seen through a highly racialized lens, where the ‘racist’ charge is casually thrown around to score cheap political points, and opposition to a President who happens to be Black is deemed racist — is one the left can thank itself for creating.
