From Rush’s own transcript of his show yesterday:
CALLER: I think it does. It’s just terrible that 26 people died in Sandy Hook and 20 of them were children. Terrible. Very sad, coming up to Christmas. Hopes and dreams the young children had, their parents and weddings and congratulations that will never occur. However, on any given day in America, more than 3,000 children are killed from abortion, and we have no problems with that. We’re okay with that; it’s not an issue.
You can’t spend 40 years telling people and telling children that if I make a mistake — if something comes up and this child that I don’t want is in the way of my future and the way of me graduating high school, is in the way of me going to college, is the way of me being happy, is in the way of whatever I want out of life — then it’s okay for me to kill the baby. But later on when I become a disgruntled employee, when I become an unhappy student at school because children are bullying me, then I want to eliminate them to get them out of the way? It’s the same concept.
RUSH: Well, it’s a good point. You know how to stop abortion? Require that each one occur with a gun.
I really don’t have much to say. What kind of person makes a statement like this, a hate filled statement that implicitly encourages and incites deranged people to shoot women contemplating an abortion? Certainly not an entertainer. There’s nothing entertaining about this rancid remark whatsoever. Frankly, there’s really only one word that fits: Evil.
True.
Regarding conservative media in general, I think Rachel nailed it:
Personally, I don’t think they’re going to get the ending they’re looking for, but hey, I’m just weird that way…
I loved Rachel’s bit last night. I’ve been making the argument that the gun lobby is trolling for a while:
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2012/12/22/95456/687#14
I think she left out an important point, though: sometimes, the purpose of trolling is to obstruct a conversation. The NRA is standing by the side of the road, biting the heads off chickens, so that we’ll talk about how horrible they are and have a fight about that, instead of continuing the conversation about Sandy Hook and the appropriate policy responses.
Gosh, their principled defense of constitutional rights has absolutely nothing to do with indulging in and profiting from murderous patriarchal fantasies.
Hey Rush, you might want to review your euphemism book, your naked and barbaric misogyny is hanging out.
Not enough coffee in the world to flush out that little visual this morning.
Maybe my searing loathing for the man will wash it away!
::
Or we could shoot fat people who are addicted to painkillers.
I wonder what exactly he will need to say to get thrown off.
Imus never was as inflammatory, made a comment about the RU women’s basketball team, made sincere and repeated apologies but was exciled to the Farm Channel anyway. He lost millions and most of his audience and been forced to sucking up at FNC with cellar ratings.
So what does Rush need to say? Is it just me or has Rush gotten noticeably worse since the November elections? He seems to be pushing it to get attention and maintain relevance… If you want to call him relevant.
That’s how Rush’s statement comes off to those of us in the reality-based universe, but that wasn’t at all his communication to his wingnut followers. I point this out only because what he was communicating to them was, if anything, more rancid, and completely in line with the various rape-related controversies last year.
Rush was simply making a joke about how to make liberals stop killing “babies” – that we hate guns so much that we’d never use one, even to kill the “humans” (aka fetuses) we otherwise so love to kill. He was not making a joke about killing women, and his followers wouldn’t hear it that way, because in Wingnuttistan, the pregnant woman does not exist. It’s only the “baby” that matters – the baby’s receptacle is of no more concern than the wheelbarrow Limbaugh keeps his pain pills in.
In Rush World, you can’t kill pregnant women because they (and women in general) are not living, sentient beings in the first place. That’s actually a lot worse than joking about killing a few. And it influences a lot more daily Dittohead behavior than the occasional lunatic who wants to shoot at anyone with less than three degrees of separation with a potential abortion.
Or perhaps an implicit threat: If Liberals want to kill babies, make ’em kill the mother who doesn’t want her baby for every baby they want to kill. That’ll larn them. An eye for an eye; good old (testament) biblical principle. After all, a mother who wants an abortion is complicit in murder anyway and so deserves to die.