Rush Limbaugh Is Racist Garbage Who Doesn’t Deserve the Medal of Freedom But Shouldn’t Die of Cancer

Tommy ChristopherFeb 5th, 2020, 2:46 pm
 

Mandel Ngan/Getty Images

Rush Limbaugh fans got a cancer diagnosis and a Medal of Freedom to celebrate this week, neither of which this piece of racist garbage deserves.

Since learning that Limbaugh has been diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, I’ve wrestled with my conscience about how to handle this news. Like most decent people, I wouldn’t celebrate anyone’s impending suffering, but I also wouldn’t participate in the performative well-wishing that infected folks following the announcement.

I contented myself, initially, to satirizing that impulse to take the “high” road with some tweets to remind people of what’s really important about Rush Limbaugh: He’s a racist piece of garbage who should live long enough to repent, or to not repent, but to always be identified as a racist piece of garbage, and other assorted dunks:


Then, Donald Trump announced he’d be giving Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the State of the Union, which he then had First Lady Melania Trump do for him, and somebody pitched me a column about how Rush Limbaugh didn’t deserve the honor.

My immediate response was that it wouldn’t be worth the effort, that it’s too obvious a point that would require too much collecting of all of Limbaugh’s racist bile — I’m something of an obsessive when it comes to archiving racist bile, like that of former President and Overt Racist Ronald Reagan — and would get drowned out by everyone else saying the exact same thing.

It’s also debatable, in my mind, whether it’s accurate to say Limbaugh didn’t “deserve” the medal, because while he obviously doesn’t merit honors of any kind, does that calculus change if it’s given by another racist piece of garbage? Philosophers weep at the conundrum.

I changed my mind when my editors greenlit this awesome headline, which I came up with after I saw an article by Casey Gane-McCalla of NewsOne entitled “Rush Limbaugh’s Most Racist Quotes: A Timeline Of Destructive Commentary.”

Appearances aside, I didn’t change my mind just because the NewsOne article aggregated all of Limbaugh’s racism in one place, mitigating the need for me to do so.

That’s a handy fringe benefit, though, freeing me up to select a few representative examples and invite the reader to go read the rest. (Limbaugh has denied a very few of the quotes that aren’t available on video or audio and confirmed others, but since his radio career stretches back long before online archives, there’s no reason even to eliminate those stragglers.)

Instead, I’ll include a couple that didn’t make Gane-McCalla’s cut. For example, he lists the song “Barack the Magic Negro” as a parody — it was played regularly on the show for years — that was sung by Limbaugh associate Paul Shanklin, but Limbaugh sang a few bars himself in 2007:

And there was also the time Limbaugh adopted the Megyn Kelly-esque mantra that James Bond “was white and Scottish, period,” and acknowledged “I know it’s racist to probably even point this out.”

James Bond was, in fact, first portrayed onscreen as an American by actor Barry Nelson, wasn’t assigned Scottish ancestry by author Ian Fleming until several years into Sean Connery’s portrayal, and has been played by Australian, Irish, and English actors since then. I know this is a lesser example, but Gane-McCalla was very thorough.

But I digress. It was not laziness that changed my mind, it was the things I was hearing about the award, coupled with Limbaugh’s cancer buzz, that moved me to waste precious virtual ink on this topic.

And I’m not just talking about Fox News, where the move was universally praised, and CNN’s Jim Acosta was lambasted for daring to mention Limbaugh’s long history of racism. In fact, I was a bit bothered that Acosta only felt comfortable characterizing Limbaugh as having “a history of making derogatory comments about African-Americans” rather than using the dreaded “r”-word.

That’s not a knock on Acosta, that’s the world we live in, where CNN and MSNBC pose Limbaugh’s award as a “political” move — one CNN reporter even called it an “epic troll by the president of Democrats.” (It was John Harwood).

And when I thought about it, as disgusting as it is, they’re a little bit correct, I think there are probably a lot of Democrats and others who view Rush Limbaugh and his racism primarily in terms of how they can be used to (deservedly) tar conservatives. Many of them are probably sincere in their distaste for racism, because racism is bad.

What you don’t hear enough — or anything, where the mainstream media is concerned — about is the harm that people like Trump and Limbaugh cause with their racism and other forms of bigotry.

Those harms can be difficult to quantify — except on the rare occasions when they are spelled out — but we know what they are. Racism and bigotry don’t just harm people through the hatred that exists in people like the El Paso or Charleston mass murderers, but through the indifference they breed in a population that will tolerate violence and oppression against people they’re pretty sure deserve it.

So who is the greater villain? If Rush Limbaugh is a racist turd, surely the toilet water of racists he floats on top of and the greater society that refuses to flush him are equally to blame. All we can do is keep jiggling the handle, and keep the plunger handy.

I don’t pray for Rush Limbaugh to die of cancer, but I’ll be honest, I don’t pray he doesn’t. I don’t have a prayer for Rush Limbaugh. My prayers will be for the people he has harmed.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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