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April 24, 2007

Rush Reveals His Immaturity

Have you ever noticed when you catch your kids saying something really awful that ought to embarrass them, to save face they'll say they were just joking when they said it? It's very typical for an immature person to not own up to their own ugliness. Which is why Rush Limbaugh has just revealed himself to be very immature indeed. Last Thursday he said on his radio program that Seung-hui Cho (the possibly autistic and definitely psychotic man who was somehow able to buy weapons and shoot 32 college students in Virginia) was a liberal (a lot of other conservative talk show hosts also blamed liberals). But in order to avoid taking responsibility for what he said, he's saying his repulsive comments were just a joke on the liberals.

According to Rush:

If this Virginia Tech shooter had an ideology, what do you think it was? This guy had to be a liberal. You start railing against the rich and all this other -- this guy's a liberal. He was turned into a liberal somewhere along the line. So it's a liberal that committed this act. Now, the drive-bys will read on a website that I'm attacking liberalism by comparing this guy to them. That's exactly what they do every day, ladies and gentlemen. I'm just pointing out a fact. I am making no extrapolation; I'm just pointing it out.

Newt Gingrich got in on the act, too, blaming "liberal" video games and even campaign finance reform:

Newt Gingrich declared that 40 years of liberalism has caused society to get mean and nasty. Liberalism is responsible for young people losing their souls by playing violent video games. "We don't have any discussion about what's happened to our culture because while we're restricting political free speech under McCain-Feingold,(The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 that regulates campaign financing) we say it's impossible to restrict vulgar and vicious and anti-human speech," proclaimed Gingrich.

Of course, Gingrich also blamed Susan Smith's drowning of her three children on liberals, as well as the school shootings at Columbine. Getting back to Rush, he also said that future school shootings could be prevented if we banned political correctness (nobody helped Cho because, he said, they were afraid of being called "racist") and stopped spending so much time thinking about global warming that we didn't notice the "real threat."

Michael Savage also blamed "liberal scum" because they have "for 30 years handcuffed the police," and Neal Boortz blamed the victims for "standing meekly waiting for this guy to execute them. Waiting for what? The government to come save them" – a description any conservative listener would readily link with a blaming of liberals. And in case they didn't quite catch his intent, he said this was due to the "wussification of America." It's so easy to stray from Rush Limbaugh to other conservatives here, it's disturbing - in fact, there's at least one blog collecting quotes from various people laying blame for the shooting. One particularly egregious example, in my opinion, is the American Family Association blaming the incident on a lack of prayer in schools, lack of spanking, the teaching of evolution, abortion, condoms, etc. (this in a video they are selling for $5).

But let's get back to Rush and what exactly he said that reveals his immaturity. While all the other conservative talk show hosts dumped their horrible comments about liberals onto the public airwaves and simply moved on, not caring that they had offended people, Rush wanted to say those awful things without having to bear the moral responsibility for them. So yesterday on his show he took it all back and claimed his repulsive comments were all just a big joke on liberals.

On the April 23 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, host Rush Limbaugh claimed "I was making a joke" when he said on his April 19 broadcast that Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui "had to be a liberal, " and "it's a liberal that committed this act" before adding on April 23, "I do believe that it was liberalism that got a hold of this guy and made him hate things, professors and this sort of thing." Limbaugh also lashed out at Media Matters for America, claiming that he had made the comments about Cho "as a means of illustrating on this show how the words of conservative talk show hosts are twisted and taken out of context," before adding, "And sure enough, Media Matters fell for it hook, line, and sinker. They had it up all over the place."

I've long thought the man was an immature jerk, but this just proves it to me.

Posted by Becky at April 24, 2007 10:37 AM