Left's Rush Blitz a Cheap Shot

Left's Rush Blitz a Cheap Shot
Diana West
Friday, October 16, 2009

Before I get to the chilling implications for free conservative speech underscored by the vicious, public campaign to blackball Rush Limbaugh as a potential owner of an NFL team, I want to provide a little context about the pre-existing NFL comfort zone of expression.

I will start with two words: Keith Olbermann. In addition to his nightly gig on MSNBC -- a numbing blend of Leftist politics and something approaching Tourette's syndrome -- Olbermann is a co-host of NBC's "Football Night in America," the pre-game show that leads into "Sunday Night Football." Naturally, that would be Sunday night NFL football.

This job, now into its third season, makes Olbermann not a team owner, of course, but certainly a public face of the NFL. And a public face of the NFL with many filthy things coming out of it. These include, just sampling from recent days, his pronouncement that Limbaugh claiming his own success paved the way for Glenn Beck is "is like congratulating yourself for spreading syphilis." We could slap a headline on that -- "NFL talker compares star radio and TV conservatives with venereal disease" -- except that trash talk against conservatives doesn't generate mainstream media outrage.

Take Olbermann's noxious attack this week on Michelle Malkin for what he characterized as her "total mindless, morally bankrupt, knee-jerk, fascistic hatred without which Michelle Malkin would just be a big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it."

Get that? Olbermann calls an accomplished and best-selling conservative author, commentator, blogger, wife and mother (who also happens to be beautiful) a "big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick," but such dehumanizing venom doesn't count as controversial, or even lightly strain his NBC-NFL connection. Why, at this rate, he could end up on a box of Wheaties. His comments certainly don't rate as "divisive" or "inappropriate" - two of the coded charges leveled at Rush Limbaugh's "public remarks" by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay that got Limbaugh's blackball rolling in the first place.

It was all over so fast. Barely a day passed between the news that Limbaugh was bidding with Dave Checketts for the St Louis Rams and the news that Checketts was dropping Limbaugh as a partner.

But what a day. It goes down in the annals as the day the demonization of conservatism achieved not consensus, but normalcy, and the day the marginalization of conservatives became not a public sport but a civic duty. Think about it. What happened Limbaugh didn't happen to a "dead white male" on a college campus; nor did it happen to a live white male in a government-mandated "sensitivity course." What happened to Limbaugh took place in a uniquely exclusive slice of the private sector frequented by the super-mega-rich and ostentatious, the kind of people with the kind of money that buys protection from the pressures of what is thought of as public opinion. But what happened to Rush Limbaugh - call it "Rush-baiting" -- reveals that what conservative blogger Lawrence Auster calls the "dictatorship enforced by the charge of racism" has absolutely no boundaries.

Limbaugh's critics were so desperate to make a racism charge stick, to tag Limbaugh as untouchably "controversial," that they resorted to demonstrable lies -- statements Limbaugh never made -- and purposely indemonstrable innuendo. Not that this mattered. As in all dictatorships, the charge itself suffices. It didn't even matter that the dictatorship's emissaries, the eternal charlatans Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, who actively lobbied the NFL to oppose Limbaugh, are themselves serially discredited race hustlers. Again, the charge is all it takes to demonize and ostracize the opposition. And Rush Limbaugh -- as the leading voice against the radicalism of the Obama administration, one of the most forceful opponents of the totalitarian social engineering we know as "affirmative action," as one of the great communicators of basic conservative principles -- definitely counts as the opposition.

But with the successful transformation of Limbaugh the potential team owner into Limbaugh the expendable "distraction," his brand of opposition -- a plain-speaking adherence to a conservatism best described as Reaganesque -- has been judged unfit, unworthy even, for the sports-loving mainstream and sentenced to the margins. And that is what is most disturbing about this story. Conservatism in our time has been publicly defined as extremism. Which means, for conservatives, it's time for some intensive historical revisionism of our own.


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And On The Same Subject - A Word From Rush' Brother...

This Isn't About Rush
David Limbaugh
Friday, October 16, 2009

There will be no voluntary mea culpas from Rush's race slanderers despite the irrefutable fact that they spread poisonous and damaging lies with actual malice. To the left, Rush is the most prominent face of conservatism and the most influential opponent of President Barack Obama's destructive agenda and so must be stopped -- irrespective of the despicable means employed.

The left systematically destroyed President George W. Bush with the most egregious lies, repeated to the point that people who knew better even began to believe them. The formerly respected CBS News anchor Dan Rather was so convinced by his liberal bias that Bush was evil that he refused to apologize for slandering him with a story later proved to be manufactured -- and that's giving Rather the benefit of the doubt that he was unaware the story was fabricated from the get-go. To Rather, it didn't matter because he was convinced Bush possessed the character of someone who would have engaged in the acts of which he was falsely accused.

And what was it about Bush that led Rather to the conclusion that he possessed such low character? In Rather's eyes -- though many conservatives would strongly dispute this -- he was a conservative and conservatives are evil.

The parallel with Rush's leftist slanderers is striking. It's one of the first things that occurred to me as I heard their sniveling responses, one by one refusing to utter a syllable of apology and instead using the occasion of being caught red-handed in malicious lies as a further opportunity to reiterate their libel.

"How dare you suggest that we have done anything wrong in attributing statements to Rush he never uttered? Even if he didn't say those words, you know he was thinking them or something much worse."

On what basis do they make such preposterous statements? Purely and simply for the reason that Rush is an unabashed conservative and unabashed conservatives are presumptively racist.

There isn't an ounce of fairness in these deliberate bearers of false witness or their supporters. If the supporters were just slightly honorable, at the very least they would condemn the slanderers for their indefensible tortuous utterances. They wouldn't even have to say one word in defense of the super patriot they loathe; just call to the carpet the brutish verbal thuggery of their ideological soul mates.

Many outraged Rush fans are directing their ire at Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, but I would argue that this is an inefficient allocation of their righteous indignation.

These two household name-level, race-hustling opportunists have no credibility, including with the mainstream media and other liberal prostitutes who continue to aid and abet their shenanigans, such as this one. It's a pact of mutual convenience. The liberals know full well that few on the right have the moral courage to oppose their mischief for fear of being labeled racists themselves. So they shamelessly prop them up to enable them to agitate racial disharmony and deliver race-oriented votes to the Democratic Party.

So please direct your angst not at these direct agents of racial toxicity, but at their leftist enablers in the media, the Democratic Party and the government -- those who not only empower these hate-spewing mouthpieces but also participate in the poison by issuing such destructive lies as "a vote for a Republican is a vote for another church to burn" and "President Bush left poor blacks on the rooftops in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina because Republicans don't care about blacks."

While you're at it, please reserve just a smidgeon of your outrage or disgust for those lukewarm conservatives who contribute to the destruction of race relations and to the advancement of liberal causes by pandering to false characterizations of authentic conservatives, such as Rush, who aren't afraid to stand up for the truth, even when it will subject them to virulently fraudulent charges of racism or other slanders.

If any of you are sufficiently naive to believe this NFL incident is merely about Rush, you have a rude awakening in store. The left is on the march -- the march to isolate, stigmatize, demonize, discredit and ultimately silence those who stand in their way. If you haven't read up on the plans of Obama's Federal Communications Commission czar to shut down talk radio or if you aren't following the tyrannical workings of the administration in trying to cram down unpopular legislation without a shred of transparency, then you'll eventually witness the lengths to which these people will go -- as illustrated here.

At the risk of sounding trite, we are at a crossroads in this country, and the left is proving each day how ruthlessly unprincipled it will be in advancing its goal of fundamentally changing this nation.

I pray and honestly trust that conservatives will be emboldened, not cowered, by this nasty, sordid turn of events.