Beaman: Rushing Limbaugh from the NFL
Never Satirize liberals, never Question the approved aggrieved
Over the past few weeks it emerged that Rush Limbaugh was to be part of a group of investors in the St. Louis Rams. The firestorm was as intense as it was predictable.
Weighing in were the Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. It always amusing to see those two in action. They’re to politics what Nehru Jackets are to fashion. Bell bottoms and platform shoes may come back. Neither Jackson nor Sharpton can get over that their days have passed.
Al Sharpton called Limbaugh divisive. This is a man who gave us that Tawana Brawley hoax and never apologized for it. He’s put himself at the center of just about every possible event that could even be remotely considered racial.
Tawana Brawley was the teenager in Wappingers Falls, New York who claimed that she was kidnaped, raped and sodomized by a group of white men, among them a part-time cop who would commit suicide. Investigators found that, at the time of the claimed event, he was in the company of Assistant DA Steven Pagones and State Trooper Scott Patterson. Sharpton then accused Pagones of being one of the participants and that Pagones had murdered cop to silence him and that the report of a suicide was part of a big cover up. Nothing is ever below Al Sharpton.
The case caused a media sensation and the usual suspects lined up to exploit it; Phil Donahue, Louis Farrakhan and Bill Cosby. Despite occasional lapses into reason, Cosby usually resides in the fever swamps of the lunatic left. Sharpton was eventually sued, successfully, by Pagones but he resisted paying anything until he was bailed out but some heavy duty black millionaires.
Two JAMF's
Jesse is another case. Jesse is a part-time minister, part-time politician and full time publicity seeker. Knowing that Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination would leave a leadership void, he embellished his role at that terrible event. Afterwards, I read several accounts that disputed his version, he somehow never got called on it. Nor does Jesse ever get called on anything.
Particularly appalling were the events after the suicidal death of Raynard Johnson, a black teenager in Kokomo, Mississippi in June, 2000. The local and state police ruled it a suicide. The autopsy showed no signs of a struggle that would be expected from a lynching. The despondent parents turned to Jesse for help and he, of course, agreed to go to Mississippi to fund the truth.
It was a majority white town and it turned out that he had been dating a white girl who had just broken up with him hours before he was found hanged with a braided belt that his parents said he didn’t own. A video from a convenience store showed that he was wearing a belt similar to the one he was hanged with.
Jesse arrived to great fanfare and many cameras (I apologize for stating the obvious. Jesse always arrives to great fanfare and many cameras) and announced he’d find who were responsible for the evil deed. Jesse said the boy’s throat had been cut. It wasn’t. Jesse must have left the state in the middle of the night because he has never been heard from again regarding the unfortunate matter.
I rarely listen to Rush Limbaugh although I have in the past. I used to find him interesting and funny but have come to find him annoying. I rarely listen to him anymore. But these were two of the people lined up to oppose Limbaugh. Sterling credentials, the two of them, don’t you think.
Many liberals have called him racist, bigoted & sexist, saying that he ridicules blacks, minorities and women. I have never found that. He satirizes liberals and that is what has made him such a pariah to the Left.
Bill Raspberry was always one of my favorite columnists. Black and liberal, he was never one to dismiss conservatives as bigots etc. He would always listen.
One time, he referred to Limbaugh as a racist or some such. Someone challenged him and asked if he’d ever listened to Rush Limbaugh. He admitted he hadn’t and then tuned him in for a while. His conclusion, Rush Limbaugh was not a racist.
He wrote that Limbaugh didn’t ridicule blacks, women and minorities. He ridiculed liberals. Raspberry went on to say that it was a reversal of the usual, where liberals would satirize all things conservative but that suddenly, when the shoe was on the other foot, the liberals showed that they could give it but couldn’t take it.
Quite so. I have found that all of my adult life. The most intolerant people I have ever met have been liberals. The most judgmental people I have ever met have been liberals. Further, the most racist and bigoted people I have ever met have been liberals.
When I went to college at New York University, the assumption was that if you even went to college, you had to be liberal. As William Buckley once observed, liberals feel that it is impossible to be simultaneously intelligent and conservative. He also once observed, liberal intolerance was exhibited by the astonishment that there even was another opinion.
Judgmentalism was another matter. If you told a liberal you admired either Barry Goldwater or William Buckley, they just about handed you a set of sheets and a swastika armband to wear.
Bigotry may be the most surprising to readers but it was there among liberals, far more than among conservatives. The very same people who were waving the flag for the various civil rights bills of the 1960s were the most upset when blacks moved into their comfy upper middle class enclaves of Great Neck and Manhattanville.
The misrepresentations of Limbaugh’s statements have been equally appalling. O’Reilly has stated, repeatedly, that his researchers have been unable to find any record that Limbaugh ever said that slavery wasn’t all bad. Yet that persists.
I can assure every reader, that I have seen personally, how things get distorted, in and by the media and by viewers and readers. I have been present when stories were planted and have been quoted with things I never said. (Even though the latter incident was in a college newspaper, it nevertheless is illustrative. For dramatic illustration of the problem, see the excellent first 30 minutes of the otherwise mediocre Paul Newman/Sally Field movie, ‘Absence of Malice’.)
Rush Limbaugh has been a football afficionado for years. His problems really emerged from his remark as a football analyst about the Philadelphia Eagles and Donovan McNabb. He said that it was the defense that had been carrying the team and he wondered whether the accolades that were being heaped on Donovan McNabb were due to the media’s wanting an outstanding black quarterback.
As it’s turning out, McNabb is a very good quarterback. It was a valid question but in these days of political ultra-correctness, such discussions aren’t permitted. Thus, we have now a black president and former President Jimmy Carter and others state that criticism of him arises from the innate racism at the heart of America. (Oh yes, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, Jimmy. In my heart, I know I’m a racist.) And no one is permitted to wonder whether some promotions of minorities are due to their being minorities and that maybe society should examine all of these programs. Somehow, it seems the answer is no.
The Obama Administration is now waxing apoplectic over executive salaries of companies that took TARP money. Why can’t we raise the same questions about Affirmative Action?
Can anyone of us entirely eliminate from ourselves racial awareness? I strongly doubt it. At this late date in my life, the first thing I notice when I meet a black person, is that he is black and it remains an issue throughout any exchange. I hate that about myself. Do blacks have the same problem? I don’t know but think so.
But if we can’t view hold all politicians, sports figures and beneficiaries of public policies up to the light of critical examination, we are the losers.
~ About the Author ~
Dr. Roderick T. Beaman is a board certified family osteopathic physician who practices in Jacksonville, Florida. He is a published poet, has composed a blues song and is trying to have his first novel published. It deals with the dangers of big government. He offers anyone who wishes to dignify the trash he writes with a comment, to do so.
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