Brent Bozell: The Get-Rush Campaign Isn't About What He Said

March 5th, 2012 7:52 PM

Rush Limbaugh was broadsided last week for attacking a star witness for the Democrats who demanded government force insurers to subsidize contraceptives. He called 30-year-old Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute.”

Let’s all agree Limbaugh crossed a line. He agrees. He posted an apology to Fluke “for the insulting word choices.” The scandal-ette should be over.

So why are the Left and the media still pushing and publicizing a campaign for advertisers to dump the Limbaugh show and end his career? Because it has little to do with his words. This is all about disingenuous politics. Liberals want this government-mandate controversy to be not about religious liberty, which is devastating, but about contraceptives, which works in their favor.


That is intellectually dishonest.

They want to position conservatives as “anti-women.” That’s as ugly as it is untrue.

But Limbaugh’s words gave them the opening they needed – and they pounced.

Just how sensitive are liberals to the plight of women, anyway?

Let’s see how they react when one of their own savages women in ways Limbaugh would never dream of doing.

Everyone remembers Ed Schultz calling Laura Ingraham a “slut” on his radio show.

MSNBC suspended him for a week, but none of Schultz’s advertisers dropped his show under media pressure. There was no pressure. Some of the same sponsors now pulling out of Rush’s show still support Schultz.

What Schultz said is nothing compared to his colleagues.

Fellow talk show host Mike Malloy hoped Sarah Palin “drives herself into madness” and insisted Michele Bachmann is an “evil bitch from Hell” who would have gladly supervised the Holocaust.

Montel Williams rooted on Air America for Bachmann to slit her own wrist or throat.

Randi Rhodes insisted that teenage boys weren’t safe from Palin’s advances if they stayed over at her house. There’s no news coverage or “war on women” narrative when the mud-covered women are conservatives.

Maybe these hosts aren’t prominent enough?

Then consider the case study of Bill Maher, who’s welcomed all over TV news shows.

A year ago on his HBO show, he called Sarah Palin a “dumb twat.”

He followed up days later in a Dallas stand-up routine by calling Palin the C-word.

Last July on HBO, he said Palin was “a bully who sells patriotism like a pimp, and the leader of a strange family of inbred weirdos.”

Last September on his show, Maher said Palin would have sex with Rick Perry if he was black.

Maher bragged on his show Friday critics can’t touch him because “I don’t have sponsors.” But that doesn’t mean he should be coddled, either, and yet he’s regularly honored across the media as a special guest, be it news networks or entertainment shows.

Days after he called Palin the T-word, he appeared with then-CNN host Eliot Spitzer, where Spitzer concluded, “Your show is brilliant. I love watching it.”

On Sunday, Democratic Party chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz huffed on “Meet the Press” that "I don't know any woman in America that thinks that being called a slut is funny." But two months ago, she accepted an invitation to sit on the set with the man who called Palin a “c---.”

President Obama placed a tender phone call to Sandra Fluke Friday to express sympathy for Limbaugh’s harsh words. He never called Ingraham, or Palin. But his super PAC did cash that $1 million check from Maher.

Some outrage is so, so....targeted.

Limbaugh has been singled out and condemned across the national media – ABC, CBS, NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, NPR, PBS, Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and USA Today.

How many of these outlets have condemned Bill Maher with equal vigor for his attacks on Palin?

How many of these outlets condemned him at all?

A couple of years ago, “comedian” Louis CK “joked” on the Opie and Anthony radio show about Palin coming to the Republican convention “holding a baby that just came out of her f-ing, disgusting [C-word], her f-ing retard-making [C-word]. I hate her more than anybody,” he said.

On Twitter, this “comedian” attacked Palin in 2011 as a “f—ing jackoff [C-word]-face jazzy wondergirl” who “has a family of Chinese poor people living in her [C-word] hole.”

Guess which event this same fellow is headlining in June? -- The Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner.

“We’re very excited about having Louis C.K. at the dinner,” said Jay McMichael of CNN, who chairs the Radio and Television Correspondents Association’s executive committee. “This is an evening you’ll want to experience. We’re shaking things up, showcasing the unexpected, and delivering lots of laughs.”

The Left honors their own pundits as “brilliant” for verbally assaulting women, then circulates petitions calling for advertisers to drop the Limbaugh show because his “anti-woman tirades are appalling.”

To the Left, this is simply an opportunity to put their attacks on religious liberty in a feminist frame, and an opportunity to try and shut down Limbaugh. It is all about censorship and hypocrisy.

Cross-posted at FoxNews.com

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