Rush, Race, And The Chain

For the .01 percent of those who care how I feel about the Rush/Rams drama, I can tell you this: for a person who admits he likes to "yank the media's chain," he seems to have an awfully hard time when people yank back.

He has a legitimate beef with those who falsely claim he once supported slavery and Martin Luther King's assassin. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

But in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, he makes this curious claim:

The sports media elicited comments from a handful of players, none of whom I can recall ever meeting. Among other things, at least one said he would never play for a team I was involved in given my racial views. My racial views? You mean, my belief in a colorblind society where every individual is treated as a precious human being without regard to his race? Where football players should earn as much as they can and keep as much as they can, regardless of race? Those controversial racial views?

I say "curious," because he talks a lot about politics and race for his professed color-blindness. Like here, when Rush takes a swipe at both the media and the Obama presidency:



And here: "[I]n Obama's America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering.."



And here: Obama "wants us to have the same health care and plan that he had in Kenya" and "wants to be the black FDR"



A Huffington Post article asserts many more racist comments, but I'm not sure whether they're racist or just more of Limbaugh's chain-yanking.

But he can't get away from -- nor did he try to discredit -- his statement that the "NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons."

Limbaugh once said during the Clinton administration, "You live by the soundbite; you die by the soundbite." His bid to be part-owner of the St. Louis Rams just died by the soundbite and he says it's not fair. Feeling that chain yet, Rush?

UPDATE: I neglected to mention that the Rev. Al Sharpton is threatening to sue Limbaugh for asserting in the WSJ piece that Sharpton "played a leading role in the 1991 Crown Heights riot (he called neighborhood Jews "diamond merchants") and 1995 Freddie's Fashion Mart riot." Limbaugh offers nothing to back up those claims -- just as Limbaugh's critics can't find anything to back up the slavery statement. If you're going to launch a counter-attack, you better go into battle with some ammunition, not blanks.

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