News

Limbaugh resigns over McNabb comments
Thursday, October 2, 2003 Posted: 2:27 PM EDT (1827 GMT)

(CNN) – Amid a storm of controversy over his racially charged comments on a weekend TV show, conservative commentator and radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh announced on Thursday that he had resigned from his post at ESPN.

And then there were Rush’s comments on the sadistic torture at Abu Ghraib:

CALLER: It [the Abu Ghraib torture] was like a college fraternity prank that stacked up naked men –

LIMBAUGH: Exactly. Exactly my point! This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of need to blow some steam off?

Given that Limbaugh saw torture as fun-and-games, it wasn’t surprising when he made fun of Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s disease.

Possibly worse than making fun of someone’s disability is saying that it’s imaginary. That is not to mock someone’s body, but to challenge a person’s guts, integrity, sanity.

To Rush Limbaugh on Monday, Michael J. Fox looked like a faker. The actor, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease, has done a series of political ads supporting candidates who favor stem cell research, including Maryland Democrat Ben Cardin, who is running against Republican Michael Steele for the Senate seat being vacated by Paul Sarbanes.

“He is exaggerating the effects of the disease,” Limbaugh told listeners. “He’s moving all around and shaking and it’s purely an act. … This is really shameless of Michael J. Fox. Either he didn’t take his medication or he’s acting.”

Seeing Limbaugh’s mockery is even more disgusting than his words, if that’s possible.

Limbaugh claimed Michael J. Fox “didn’t take his medication.” Rush, on the other hand, took his even when it was not prescribed:

If you believe a woman named Wilma Cline, the nationally syndicated radio personality Rush Limbaugh would drive three miles from his $23 million Palm Beach, Fla., estate to a Denny’s parking lot so that she could hand over a cigar box concealing dozens of tiny prescription painkillers. The loquacious Limbaugh, his housekeeper says, was often high on “hillbilly heroin.”

Busted, Limbaugh finally confessed:

Limbaugh admits addiction to pain medication
Friday, October 10, 2003 Posted: 10:52 PM EDT (0252 GMT)

(CNN) – Rush Limbaugh announced on his radio program Friday that he is addicted to pain medication and that he is checking himself into a treatment center immediately.

“You know I have always tried to be honest with you and open about my life,” the conservative commentator said in a statement on his nationally syndicated radio show.

“I need to tell you today that part of what you have heard and read is correct. I am addicted to prescription pain medication.”

Law enforcement sources said last week that Limbaugh’s name had come up during an investigation into a black market drug ring in Palm Beach County, Florida. The sources said that authorities were looking into the illegal sale of the prescription drugs OxyContin and hydrocodone. [italics added]

Why would Landmark Legal Foundation make a fool of itself and a mockery of the Nobel Peace Prize by nominating Rush Limbaugh? Perhaps the answer can be found in the nomination’s announcement carried by James Dobson’s CitizenLink newsletter:

“Earlier this week, former Vice President Al Gore was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Now Rush Limbaugh is up for the honor.”

Al Gore was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize because of his work to inform people and hopefully ward off not only the greatest threat to global peace, but to life on planet Earth. Mocking and dismissing the reality of climate change and global warming have been mainstays of ultraconservatives and some religious fanatics like James Dobson and Lou Sheldon who prefer to keep their heads neatly tuck in their own political rectums, a place well known to the Bush administration that, among other collusions, is infamous for suppressing and changing scientific studies to suit its political needs: “The Democratic chairman of a House panel examining the government’s response to climate change said Tuesday there is evidence that senior Bush administration officials sought repeatedly ‘to mislead the public by injecting doubt into the science of global warming.’”

The consensus and recent report of international scientists and climatologists are compelling to say the least. As a February 4, 2007 New York Times editorial put it,

A distillation of the best peer-reviewed science, the report expresses more than 90 percent certainty that man-made emissions from the burning of fossil fuels have caused the steady rise in atmospheric temperatures, with the destruction of tropical rain forests playing a lesser but important role. …

This is not a report compiled by a bunch of activists or alarmists. It is a consensus document, the inherently conservative product of three years of study and debate among mainstream scientists from 150 countries with often competing agendas. And in its modesty, it is alarming enough.

It also shines a bright light on the blatant lies and cover-ups perpetrated by the Bush administration:

Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us

Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters.

A secret report, suppressed by US defense chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.

‘Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,’ concludes the Pentagon analysis. ‘Once again, warfare would define human life.’

The findings will prove humiliating to the Bush administration, which has repeatedly denied that climate change even exists. Experts said that they will also make unsettling reading for a President who has insisted national defense is a priority.

Rush Limbaugh was, of course, among those self-serving, name-calling perpetrators of deception as far back as 1994:

 

“Limbaugh calls concern about the ozone layer ‘balderdash. Poppycock.’ The only people who worry about it are ‘environmental wackos,’ ‘dunderheaded alarmists and prophets of doom.’”

No doubt the Nobel Institute will give the nomination of Rush Limbaugh all the “consideration” it deserves and will view any future nominations from Landmark Legal “appropriately.”