Lies About Rush Limbaugh

There are two false quotes that have entered the talking-points of news when talking about Rush Limbaugh. His enemies love to smear him as a racist. Is he a racist? He says he's not and never has been. There are some quotes that might make people judge otherwise, but there are certain quotes that are horrible, that make him sound like a contemptible racist. Trouble is, he never said them.

The two worst quotes of his that are true are the bone-through-the-nose one and the Donovan McNabb one. There is no audio of it, but he once admitted in an interview his biggest regret was when he was a DJ in the early 1970's, he got short with a caller and told him to pull the bone out of his nose.

The other is one that isn't really racist, but the hard left loves to accuse the hard right of being racist no matter what. Rush once said on ESPN he thought the press was giving Donovan McNabb a free pass because they wanted to see a black quarterback do well. No one on the set called him on it, it was a non-issue until Media Matters called it to everyone's attention three days later.

The two ones that are false: there's a quote out there that Rush once said slavery had its merits. There's another where Rush praised MLK's killer. It looks like both stemmed from a Wikipedia entry by a contributor called Cobra. They were later removed, but like a virus, the falsehood entered the ether, and thousands just accepted it as true.

"Racist" is turning into "Nazi" for me, which is to say, one passionate political side uses it against the other so much, it doesn't really mean anything anymore. And there are situations where the word(s) should still matter.

Sean Hannity vs. Michael Moore = Civil Discussion

There is hope for our Republic after all.

I watched it last night. I thought Moore had the better argument about two-thirds of the time. If Moore did his movies with a tone more like this, he'd expand his fanbase. I still like Moore movies; I just know I have to watch with large grains of salt and then hit the fact-check sites afterwards.

I was surprised how rigidly to the talking points Hannity stuck, but there's a reason that of the right-wing talking-head radio-TV guys, he's one of my least favorite.

Sunday round-tables

I watched the first five minutes of Fox News's Hannity and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow the other day. Both had the same lead story, both had completely different takes on it. It was on Rep. Alan Grayson saying Republicans health care plan wants you to die quickly. Two parallel universes. Naturally Hannity called Grayson's statement "ridiculous, outrageous" while Maddow seemed to be okay with it, with a headline of "Pot, meet Kettle" that Republicans were calling on Grayson to apologize because they thought Rep. Joe Wilson apologizing once for his "You Lie!" outburst was enough. (Never mind the Democrats who thought Grayson's statement was fine but wanted to censure Wilson.)

Anyway, I realized why I hardly ever watch cable news but I like watching the Sunday news-show round-tables. Talking-heads with different opinions are forced to sit in the same room and be nice. In fact I'll rarely watch the people being interviewed on the Sunday shows; it's just spin. But the talking-heads spin has to bounce off each other. If Michelle Malkin goes on Hannity, she can be as abrasive as she wants, but when she goes on ABC's This Week and sits with George Stephanopoulos, George Will and Donna Brazile, she expresses herself in a more polite fashion. Janeane Garofalo may be allowed to talk about Republicans as sub-humans on Keith Olbermann, but if she sat with David Gregory, Joe Scarborough and Eugene Robinson on Meet the Press, she'd probably try to sound a little less like a Rwandan propaganda artist (which Bette Midler also accused Glenn Beck of being.)

My political opinions are always molding, evolving, some issues I care about, some I just don't. I'm Republican, I consider myself a rational conservative, a center-right guy in what's basically a center-right country. Hard-righties can compare Obama to Hitler, hard-lefties can compare Bush to Hitler; it really doesn't matter and it just exposes them.

Bush tried coining the phrase "compassionate conservative" which I guess means cut taxes, increase spending, grow government, and launch two wars without an end game. Obama said the time for change is come, which must mean to spend more than all previous administrations in history combined. All we can do is hope for high turnover in the House and Senate in 2010, and that reporters will act like reporters and not stenographers.