Racism Watch: Chris Matthews Calls Rush Limbaugh Black

Comparing him to Yaphet Kotto, the villain in the Bond flick Live and Let Die, and opining that he'd like to see Rush Limbaugh die in a similar fashion.

This from a guy who just a few weeks ago was ranting about the undercurrents of incitement to political violence on the right wing, just the same way the right wing was talking up violence in 1963. (He forgot to mention that while there was indeed dark talk of violence by the right in '63, Kennedy was in fact killed by Marxist/Soviet-emigrant Lee Harvey Oswald. Must have slipped his mind.)

But talking about the murder of Rush Limbaugh? Just good, insightful political commentary.

Incidentally, that whole "racist" thing in the headline? Yeah. Not the dumbest racism charge of the day. Seems Tammy Bruce wanted a funny picture to illustrate a post about Obama getting the Nobel Prize, so she put up one of a raccoon digging in a Cracker Jack box.

Raccoon. Raccoon. Don't you see? Don't you see the racism?

Well the brain trust at Sadly, No! did. (Above link is to Patterico, goofing on them.)

Thanks to DrewM.

Oh: Rush's "Slavery" Comment. The left has been claiming that Rush once said (years ago) that slavery had its benefits -- including that it was "safe to walk the streets at night," or something along those lines.

When I read that, I figured that that was Rush doing that irony thing -- taking his opponents' claims to their logical conclusion, to show the stupidity of them; irony that liberal critics alway seem to fail to comprehend.

I didn't realize that there was another explanation -- that the "Limbaugh remarks" are simply invented out of whole cloth.

O'Reilly's research team can find no evidence of these remarks -- no audio, no contemporaneous reportage of them -- except the left's own unsourced claims about something they all claim happened twenty years ago. The only citation for this claim seems to be the left all quoting each other's assertions about it.

They seem to have simply made it up.

This possibility -- that the left is simply lying ad making stuff up -- rarely occurs to me. I usually assume that there's a kernel of truth here; they may be twisting it, but there's still some truth in their claims.

I don't know why I assume that. I guess I just assume that no one is malicious or stupid enough to simply invent libelous claims.

But the left never fails to disappoint.

Thanks to RobertE.

More: The Left actually has a pattern of inventing "Limbaugh quotes," inserting them into WikiQuote, and then citing their own made-up WikiQuote entries as evidence of Limbaugh's supposed racism.

This blog provides a case study of this behavior -- some guy simply making up a "Limbaugh quote" from 1998 -- in 2005 -- stating that MLKJr's assassin should have been awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor, and wishing him "Godspeed."

Um, in 1998, Rush Limbaugh was huge. If he had said this someone would have noticed. A quote praising MLK Jr's assassin would, I'm pretty sure, have made it into one of Al Franken's moronbooks.

But Wiki itself is so politicized that despite clear evidence this was entirely fabricated by some internet loser, they will only go so far as to say the quote is "DISPUTED."

Disputed. Absolutely zero evidence it was ever said, and lots of evidence it was simply fabricated, and the best we get out of Wiki is "DISPUTED."

MSNBC Peddles: MSNBC couldn't track down the quote, of course, it being made up out of whole cloth.

Did that stop them from running it? No, of course not -- they quoted linebacker James Farrior mentioning it, running the quote on screen, with the "citation" "Cited by James Farrior."

Cited. See, they're not saying Limbaugh said it -- they're saying someone else says he said it.

That's "journalism" now at MSNBC -- quote things you know for a fact aren't quotes at all and dodge your fact-checking by just noting a linebacker "cited" the claim.

That "cited by James Farrior" is evidence of MSNBC's guilty knowledge -- it's plain they attempted to find a citation for the claim. It's also clear that they came up empty.

So rather than debunking the claim, or just not reporting it all, they report that someone else claims it was said. And offer the word "cited" in the supposed attribution to give the quote some kind of superficial authority.

But you know, FoxNews is biased and stuff, and used to run the outrageous shorthand quote of Al Gore's -- "I invented the internet" -- when he said nothing of the kind.

He merely said "During my time in Congress, I took the initiative in creating the internet." Completely different, you see.

posted by Ace at 03:05 PM

| Access Comments