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.
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