Here’s Rush’s latest foot-in-mouth problem, via Swampland and The Page:
In fighting [the left] I became like them. Against my own instincts, against my own knowledge against everything I know to be right and wrong, I descended to their level when I used those two words to describe Sandra Fluke. That was my error…and I feel very badly about that.
Later in the show, Limbaugh used the whole thing as a pivot to explain why he thinks Democrats should apologize to him. There’s a running transcript over at Business Insider.
That guy is a menace to democracy, just like his crazy counterpart Pat Robertson. They broadcast crazy and it gets incorporated into people’s belief systems. Then candidates compete to pander to it.
Now Rush, Rick, and the whole bunch are poor victims of a vast conspiracy of oppressive Democrats harshing their mellow. Sad
Laughable. As if conservatives NEVER use “bad language”, or are somehow “above” it.
My personal experience tells me otherwise. I used to live in the Midwest, and I worked in factories for several years to pay for college tuition. At nearly every facility I worked in, Rush Limbaugh was the default radio host preference for the employees. Nearly all of the employees were church-going to some degree or another. The vast majority of them were gun owners (and/or pickup truck/SUV owners). Nearly all of them self-identified as “conservative” and “patriotic”.
Interestingly enough, they were also the most foul-mouthed and bigoted and hateful people I’ve encountered in my life. Words like “nigger”, “spick”, “sand-nigger”, and “gook” were tossed around casually and frequently, so long as people those words could be applied to weren’t within earshot. Hearing a male co-worker describe a female as “cunt”, “slut”, “whore”, “bitch” and so on was a daily occurrence. Your typical four-letter profanities were present in virtually every sentence uttered.
Fast-forward some years, and I’m living in Portland and working at a library, a supposed “bastion” of liberal political ideals. Do I hear language like the above? Almost never. I can count on one hand the number of times, over three years of library work in Portland, I’d heard any of the above slurs – and, each of those times they were used, it was in an explanatory, not pejorative way. I still heard the occasional four-letter word, but with considerably less frequency.
My thoughts? Limbaugh is an outright liar and hypocrite. His listeners, and the particular brand of “conservatism” he caters to is composed of a cretinous, hateful, ignorant, knuckle-dragging lot who use language like the above on a regular basis.