Rush Limbaugh is about to be dropped from his idiot bid to own the St. Louis Rams, largely because he’s a patently offensive human being.
This, of course, has led to a virtual people’s revolt on the right, or it would have if they were good at this sort of thing:
It frustrates the heck out of me that the Commissioner of the NFL has no fear at all of offending conservatives by bashing Rush. The reason? Largely because they tend to have day jobs and think for themselves, conservatives are really lousy at boycotts/protests. If a similar situation happened to say, Al Franken, the left would immediately be in attack mode and the apology would be immediate.
The heck, he says! I mean, if Al Franken was denied partial ownership of a professional sports franchise because he wrote Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot, I think the overwhelming response would be, “That’s kind of shitty.” And then we would move on, because Michele Bachmann would be biting the head off a possum as a piece of performance art. Of course, there’s also a “We Are All Rush Limbaugh” movement, which already has 2.2 million followers on Facebook, but the page is down because of all the traffic.
(Doesn’t the “we’re terrible at protests” line kind of contradict the whole Tea Party/town hall populist revolt line? You can’t have two contradictory excuses for why the liberal hordes are holding you down, friend.)
The crux of the Limbaugh-defense is that he was accused of saying some racist things that he didn’t say, which ignores all the very racist things he did say. By creating a false quote and attributing it to Limbaugh, the line goes, his very conservatism is being turned into something illegal (and “illegal” means “disqualifying for a private sale of private property to a private individual by another private individual”, which is I guess how these things go now), and, ultimately, his freedom of speech is being abridged.
You could chalk this up to the normal conservative penchant for wholly inappropriate victimization that tends to betray every principle they claim to hold, but that’s the easy way out. Instead, it’s just largely based on balls-out racism. From Big Hollywood (again):
The transparent hypocrisy here could not have been more starkly displayed than on the pages of Wednesday’s USA Today. On the front page of their sports section the top headline was “Irsay, Goodell speak out against Limbaugh.” Directly under that article was a cover story on how the Miami Dolphins have incorporated numerous celebrities into their ownership team. Included among them are Marc Anthony, Gloria Estefan and the Williams’ sisters.
That’s right. Serena Williams, who recently threatened bodily harm to a lines woman on national television, is a part owner of the Dolphins. I must have missed the hand wringing from anyone associated with the NFL or the media about whether she was fit to be an NFL owner. Oh wait, I forgot. She is a black woman and is therefore beyond such scrutiny. After all, to even ask such questions would obviously be racist and, let’s face it, it’s no coincidence that the flock of celebrities picked to be Miami owners all happen to be members of strategically important minority groups.
OMG ANGRY NEGRESS OWNS A TEAM!
So, just to be clear: a man who has spent the better part of the past two decades systematically assaulting black culture, weaving an asinine fantasy of liberal persecution and promoting a paranoid, hateful form of politics should be allowed to own an NFL team because a prominent black professional athlete got angry after a bad call. I don’t know what the word is for when you equivocate drastically different behavior between two people of different races to excuse the behavior of the person who’s of your preferred race, but I hope someone can come up with it soon. It would be helpful.
Then, there’s…this.