An award that will live in infamy
Editing to add: see Skeletor’s comment. Some of these are unsourced. I have to run so can’t Google them right now.
Editing to add 2, next morning. Skeletor is right. A passage from John K. Wilson’s book on Limbaugh has details – someone going by the name “Cobra” put the James Earl Ray one on Wikiquotes and it spread via Rachel Maddow and others. And now by me.
The Surly Southern Liberal has a collection of some of Limbaugh’s more poisonous assertions.
Top 10 Racist Rush Limbaugh Quotes
1. “I mean, let’s face it, we didn’t have slavery in this country for over 100 years because it was a bad thing. Quite the opposite: slavery built the South. I’m not saying we should bring it back; I’m just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark.”
[Edit: it’s in dispute whether he said that or not.]
2. “You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray [the confessed assassin of Martin Luther King]. We miss you, James. Godspeed.”
Ok we’re only two in and already I’m reeling back in disbelief. Women lose jobs for saying men are not women, and this guy keeps his for saying we miss the guy who murdered Martin Luther King.
3. “Have you ever noticed how all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson?”
[I’m skipping 4. because I don’t understand what he was getting at.]
5. “Look, let me put it to you this way: the NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons. There, I said it.”
6. “The NAACP should have riot rehearsal. They should get a liquor store and practice robberies.”
7. “They’re 12 percent of the population. Who the hell cares?”
8. “Take that bone out of your nose and call me back (to an African American female caller).”
9. “I think the media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well. They’re interested in black coaches and black quarterbacks doing well. I think there’s a little hope invested in McNabb and he got a lot of credit for the performance of his team that he really didn’t deserve.”
And Melania “Be Best” Trump handed him that medal.
Next day update: Snopes confirms some and not others.
What’s true
Some of the statements included in the list are correctly attributed to Limbaug
What’s false
Some of the statements included in the list lack sufficient supporting evidence to confirm whether or not Limbaugh said them.
Snopes reviewed this list:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/rush-limbaugh-racist-quotes/
Most of the worst statements, including the first two, are unsourced.
Rush’s biggest mistake over the years, and one he has tirelessly and effectively promoted, is that people all fit neatly into their conservative or liberal pigeonholes. His legacy is the false dilemma.
Here are some actual clips of Limbaugh saying despicable things.
“top 10” = 9, even without the other problems
Not one of my better picks.
This guy felt much worse >>
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/481918-milwaukee-teacher-placed-on-leave-after-calling-rush-limbaughs
Placed on leave? His teaching credentials should be revoked, anyone spewing that kind of dehumanizing hate has no business teaching school kids anything.
Rush has said some vile, awful things over the years, but I don’t think that, in over 30 years of being on the air for 3 hours a day, every weekday, that any opinion he has expressed is enough to justify wishing death on him. Political opposition in the current climate is unnecessarily extreme in the US, on both sides, and bears no resemblance to civil discourse. Rush most certainly has played a part in promoting this extremism, but he’s not solely responsible for it. People still have the potential to think for themselves, or simply change the station. Gertz implies that he is brainwashing people, but I disagree, I think he is rather a well paid cheerleader for the right, and has no such power. Ignore him at your leisure, I know I did when he became self important and boring. He didn’t make me want to smoke cigars, vote for Trump, be “conservative”, or any other thing I didn’t want to do.
The responsibility for the award, deserved or not, clearly falls on Trump, and how he sees Rush, which is not identical with how anyone else sees him.
While I agree with the rest of your post, I cannot agree with this statement. I watched it happen. My family of ordinary, Ike-Eisenhower conservatives, became…rabid…after listening to Rush. My parents always had some peculiar ideas that tended conservative, but the hatred my dad spews now dates only from the 90s, when he started listening to Rush.
I think Rush is like a televangelist – or really, any charismatic preacher. It is documented that people can go in skeptical, and come out true believers, because the tricks used are so powerful. Yes, the person has to have some sort of mind set to accept that, but the power of a Rush Limbaugh should not be discounted. He can take half-formed or unformed ideas and magnify them into beliefs. He does this by painting the clearly privileged listener as a member of the underclass, shunned and ignored, in spite of their obvious superiority to the “other”. People like to hear that they are only failing because of a conspiracy against them.
Meanwhile, people like my father, who recognized his white male privilege (he just thought it was justified, because, well, everyone knows women are not good thinkers, and non-white people are lazy, right?), has now become someone who sits atop the pinnacle of a successful career and believes he was somehow kept down by black women, gays, non-Christians, and Democrats. He and I used to have long conversations in which we could talk reasonably about what we thought, never reaching agreement, but managing to respect each other as people. Rush comes along, and we rarely talk about politics now, and when we do, I am expected to keep my mouth shut except for the occasional, “oh, yes, sir, absolutely right, sir”.
My dad went from someone who could vote for David Boren (an Oklahoma Democrat) to someone who believes all non-Republicans, non-Christians should be drowned, and could go from someone who respected his educated daughter to someone who thinks all women are out there trying to take over from men and castrate all men and keep them from having their rightful place in the world.
Did Rush do that on his own? Possibly…but…there are also many others, and at the very least, Rush made them mainstream.
I see what you’re saying iknklast, and sorry to hear that about your family. I definitely think Rush is a polarizer and has the effect of making people more extreme who otherwise wouldn’t be. I think Fox news does this also, whether Rush is involved or not (he certainly didn’t make voluntary appearances on CNN). In my case, my dear old mother, very Ike-style conservative also, never listened to Rush that I know of. She in later years became born-again, started proselytizing to me and anyone who would listen (which didn’t go over well with me), and now gets a gigantic dose of Fox news every day. Even without her ever listening to Rush I find it impossible to have a political conversation with her, as anything I opine about that opposes the Fox ‘received wisdom’, results in an almost immediate anti Obama rant from her. I have entertained the thought that she was brainwashed from time to time, so I see the point there. I agree Rush is akin to a televangelist, but I don’t pay much attention to them either.
I’ll also add that my mother was not a housewife, she worked her way up to branch manager of of a bank, then did the same thing again with another bank, and later became a real estate broker, which in her 80’s, she still has her license for, and I always considered her very intelligent and always had a lot of respect for her, still do in fact, which is why I find it so bizarre that she went through this transformation in her 60’s (she’s in her 80’s now). I credit her, along with other working women I admired in my youth, with my pro-feminist attitude. It probably didn’t hurt that I also grew up during the second wave of feminism, which I always found agreeable and reasonable (though I never picketed). Why an otherwise intelligent woman would choose to succumb to the closed minded extreme religious right is beyond me, and no matter how I hear it explained it does not compute.