Couldn’t Have Happened To A Nicer Guy

The GOP is sure all this slut business will blow over by November

Headdesk, headdesk, headdesk...

Much as I normally hate to do a subject two weeks in a row, the swift financial retribution against Rush Limbaugh is worthy of an exception. Seems Rush has lost about 90% of his sponsors over the controversy caused by his deliberate slander of an innocent bystander, at least temporarily. As you will remember, Rush called Georgetown student Sandra Fluke a slut and a prostitute for the horrendous crime of wanting to testify to the all-male committee fulminating over contraception about her friend who was denied contraceptives when she needed them for hormone therapy. Rush leapt to judgment on the girl, in an ass-brained show of ignorance of how contraceptives work, saying she was having so much sex she needed government assistance to pay for her pills. The rightwing ditto heads have repeated these charges ad nauseam and no amount of facts can ever dissuade them from the opinions given them by the Pope of Clear Channel.

This is the way free speech works in the free market. Rush Limbaugh was, is and will be free to make any ass-brained statement he wants to make. The question is whether or not anyone has to pay to allow those statements to be broadcast to the nation and world at large. With sponsors, he can shout it loud and clear to the entire radio audience. Without sponsors, he’s still free to shout them–but unless he or Clear Channel pay for it themselves, his soapbox might be … a soapbox. Seems Clear Channel has had to run Public Service Announcements on many of the commercial spots during Rush’s show this week. Dum da dum dum!

Bill Maher has weighed in on the proceedings and has tried to argue that Rush ought not be censored by the free market. Piffle. Bill is still smarting because HIS former TV show Politically Incorrect got dumped when he expressed an unforgivable truth: that the perpetrators of the cowardly attack on the Pentagon and World Trade Center were not themselves cowards. This was in the middle of US war-drum fever. Come on Bill, Americans won’t be ready for that kind of nuance before 2102, the year AFTER the 9/11 centennial. We still have people who said the Japanese deserved the earthquake-tsunami-nuclear meltdown tragedy because of PEARL HARBOR! And besides, what you said was true, just unpopular. That’s a fair distance from maliciously maligning someone by misrepresenting what they’d said or done.

Free speech doesn’t mean we have to subsidize hate speech. As long as someone’s willing to pay for the plug in the socket, Rush will have a platform. But, if no one wants to pay to have a person with that much bile representing their company, screw it. Let him try to get a gig on NPR

And speaking of Japan, this weekend marked the anniversary of that horrible series of misfortunes. Compounding the tragedy was that although Japan is one of the most prepared nations against earthquakes, the government had let down its guard on tsunami preparedness and had dropped the ball on nuclear safety measures AND spent more time CYAing and following procedures instead of reacting swiftly enough to contain the nuclear danger. But the Japanese people have shown incredible resilience and courage in their recovery. Last year, I did a short video to Yoko Kanno’s song for the survivors and I’d like to post its URL here againhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=na60p1P22rg. Links are there for several organizations that were involved in the recovery effort at the time. I’m sure they will accept more donations.

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Rush to Judgment?

OMG ... MY EYES! MY EYES!

Ah, Rush, you did it this time! Not only did you demonstrate no knowledge of how contraceptive pills work (Did you really plug up your ears and go LALALALALALA when they talked about it in school? The sad thing is, I’ll bet your mother and your four wives were all smart enough not to try to tell you about it either!) but you also managed to accuse a private citizen of being a slut and a prostitute for needing so many birth control pills to cover an imagined outrageous sex life! And demanding that she film a porno to help defray the costs! Thanks Bill Maher and others for suggesting that Rush be forced to do the same to pay for his Viagra.

Of course, Sandra Fluke, the young lady in question (and I am reaching that age when almost everyone except the Pope and most American politicians can be described by me as “young” grrrrrrrrr!) was not going in front of Congress to testify about her sex life and how she needed contraception to deal with it. She was attempting to talk to Daniel Issa’s all male panel on contraception about a friend who needed hormonal therapy that could best be delivered via “The Pill” as it was once quaintly known. Did that stop you from, ahem, slander and defamation of character? Never let the facts get in the way of a good innuendo!

Now that sponsors have finally seen how poisonous you can be and started dumping your show, you have fallen on the bully’s defense and said you chose the wrong words in an attempt at levity. Ye olde “What’s the matter, don’t you have a sense of humor?” refrain. Well, tough bananas Rushbo. We ain’t buying it. It’s one thing when you make exaggerated claims against a public figure-it’s quite another thing to make totally unfounded accusations against a private citizen.

It wasn’t just that you used the wrong words, Rush. It was that you made up something out of whole cloth and broadcast it to all the world so that your listeners would think that Ms. Fluke was a slut and a prostitute.

Now the dittoheads are all making idiotic statements about “freedom of speech” without knowing what it is. Sure, Rush is free to LIBEL somebody. But if he does, then he is also free to accept the consequences of that. Like lawsuits. Like losing sponsors. Freedom of speech generally excludes little things like perjury or yelling FIRE in the middle of a crowded theatre when there is no fire present. It also takes a dim view of what are generally known as “fighting words.” And in the world that RUSH would like us to live in, calling a woman a prostitute who was not engaged in the profession would generally justify his being shot by a male relative or friend of the maligned. Or run through with two feet of steel.

Now, as everyone who’s seen The People vs. Larry Flynt know, the test of whether a satire is slanderous or not is whether any reasonable person would believe it to be true or not. So far, I haven’t seen one dittohead who did not write the various forums saying how outrageous it was to have to pay for this woman’s sex life. Just as you said she was doing. There you have it–proof that reasonable people would actually believe Rush’s twisted statements to be the literal truth. Or that none of Rush’s listeners are reasonable people. Take your choice

Unfortunately, the correct answer is BOTH OF THE ABOVE.

BTW check out this article, Rush, so you can slander your most vocal critic:

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Is this what it takes to get Christine O’Donnell to accept evolution?

A monkey is evolved into Rush Limbaugh by a magician, proving evolution to Christine O'Donnell.

Christine O'Donnell is finally convinced about the validity of evolution.

Still a little bit under the weather here, but definitely nowhere quite as bad as last weekend, so I’m gonna take it easy on the commentary this week. Anyway, it seems as if one of the many great quotes from Christine O’Donnell concerned evolution. “Evolution is a myth. Why aren’t monkeys still evolving into humans?” Why indeed, when devolution is so apparent, with people making monkeys out of themselves all the time?

I could blame the schools for not teaching an accurate summary of what evolution actually is. I could ask the evolution deniers “just what part of millions of years don’t you understand?” But that’s like shooting fish in a barrel. You can’t blame someone for not understanding millions of years in a culture that thinks “oldies” were top 40 six months ago.

Instead, I’m going to put the blame squarely where it belongs. On the science fiction TV shows of our youth. How many times on “The Twilight Zone” or “The Outer Limits” did we actually witness evolution taking place–RIGHT IN FRONT OF OUR EYES? “Oh, my god, he’s evolving–he has SIX FINGERS AND TWO THUMBS!” Not just evolution, but devolution with men turning into men in gorilla suits. “Oh, my god, he’s reversed evolution–if we don’t stop this right now, he’ll become an amoeba by the last commercial!”

In many ways, the “science” we were presented in movies and on TV was just magic with a different mumbo-jumbo. If so many people cannot accept the realities of science, is it because they’re expecting magic and they don’t get it? Millions of years? What good is that? If something’s evolving, I want to see it right NOW. Christine O’Donnell will not believe in evolution until she sees a monkey turn into a person right in front of her eyes.

Worse than that, in science there’s no one to bribe. “O Science, grant me this promotion and I’ll give up sinning for the rest of my life.” Nope, don’t work that way. Far better to have someone to entreat who might answer than to have no one to talk to at all. God is someone who will answer your prayers. Usually with a “no”. But “no” is an answer, isn’t it?

So maybe the scientists should practice pulling a few rabbits out of hats to get people to believe. After all, it worked with the loaves and the fishes. It all depends on whether you have the right basket.

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The Real Reason All Those Oil Companies Screwed Up

We'd have been better off if the Three Stooges had been in charge of drilling in the Gulf.

Moe Inc., Larry Inc., and Curly Inc. Woowoowoowoowoooooo!

Well, let’s see, you still need papers in Arizona–finish the danged fence, eh, John McCain? And Elena Kagan is now the darling of Laura Bush–who has started opening her mouth more and more since she doesn’t have to just nod her head and smile–although she does that quite a lot in her new book–the one with the mummy mask on the cover? So it looks like we’re back with the LaGulfa Tar Pit–formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico. Just think, boys and girls, in 50,000 years, people, or whatever intelligent species will be inhabiting this planet, will be able to excavate the Gulf of Mexico and find all sorts of creatures that used to live in the ocean!

We were treated to the spectacle of BP, Transocean and Halliburton all pointing fingers at each other, saying that it was some other guy’s fault that for nearly a month now, crude oil has been gushing into the sea, endangering wildlife, fishing, creating a dead zone far greater than the previous one, and in general, becoming OILMAGEDDON. Really, it looked like a Three Stooges movie. In fact, it probably would have been much more fun for all of us victims to see these three guys slapping each other and poking fingers into eyes!

True, this is probably unfair to Moe, Larry and Curly. They only created disasters on a purely local level. Like leveling a house. It takes an oil executive to create one on a global scale! See what a college education can do for YOU!

The “Drill, Baby, Drill” ideologues have in the meantime weighed in with their peculiar brand of irrationality. Sarah Palin says this is why we shouldn’t trust furriners like BRITISH Petroleum (never mind that TransOcean and Halliburton are American companies). Rush Limbaugh ideates that environmentalists did this to scotch any further offshore drilling–this is the cutting off your nose to spite your face strategy–or maybe Koreans. He’s not sure–he’ll know in another dose of oxycodone. And of course, the pro-drill crowd says this just PROVES we need to do more offshore drilling–look at all the oil we’re losing, we’ve got to make that up SOMEHOW and after all, practice makes perfect!

In the meantime, BP has tried to cap the well with the TOP HAT and the HOT TAP–amazing that the ONLY thing they’ve gotten to work so far is something that allows them to recover some of the spill into a tanker, but in the meantime, we still have the 10 mile long plumes of crude shooting out to sea. And it’s getting near the current that will take it to the Florida Keys. Ernest Hemingway couldn’t do it, hurricanes couldn’t do it, but it looks like good old capitalism will finally shut Sloppy Joe’s down!

And as we watch the death of one of the most important bodies of water in the world, let’s have a drink on that old fisherman and his soon-to-be-vanished marlin. One more for my baby and one more for the road–because it was the road that got us here.

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