Rush to Judgment

I listen to Rush Limbaugh on the radio quite often ... although lately he has been more grating than usual.  Although he feigns impartiality, he is totally in the tank for Rick Santorum to be the next Republican nominee for President.  This is based upon his postulate that only true conservatives win for the Republicans ... and Romney is a McCain/Dole/Ford country-club clone who will be clobbered this fall in the debates and at the voting booths.  He says that he will rally behind whomever the nominee is ... but I kind of doubt it.  After all, if Mitt Romney gets the nod and loses, won't this just prove Rush's conservative-purist thesis?

Now Rush is in another pickle.  Apparently, he called that female Georgetown law student (who went viral with her demand that the government ... via this Catholic university ... should pay for her contraceptives) a "prostitute" and a "slut."  Although I didn't hear him say these exact things, I did hear him say that this student was having so much sex that she couldn't afford her own "protection" and so she wanted others to pay for her libido extravagances ... equivalent, I suppose, to these one-word slurs.  As a result Rush has lost, at latest count, seven sponsors, and he was forced to apologize nationally to this woman over the weekend.  (You have to understand, this is something that Rush never does, so this was tantamount to his eating crow in a cow-pie sandwich.)

I am somewhat ambivalent about these developments due to my distaste for Rush's current manic and easily-read antipathy toward Romney.  So as Joel Grey sang in Cabaret, "money makes the world go around ...", and Rush's lifestyle is such that I think he would find it difficult to start to economize.  And I do hope this incident brings a smidgen of humility to his often brilliant political commentary.  Perhaps now we can get a few advertisers also to pull away from Bill Maher (called Sarah Palin a "twat"), Rachel Maddow (called Teaparty members, "teabaggers" ... a sexual act between gay men), Ed Schultz (called Laura Ingraham, a "right-wing slut")  and Chris Matthews (said "Newt Gingrich looks like a car bomber") ... among many other slurs eminating from the Left?  KBI