Why Is A Vile Creep Like Limbaugh Still On The Air?

 A Commentary by Doug Draper

In America, apparently it is okay to use the nation’s airwaves to call a female university student a “slut” and even to invite her to post sex videos of herself online, as long as you are Rush Limbaugh and you have the captains of the country’s Republican Party kissing your ring as if you are the party’s Godfather.

Neo-con radio talk show kingpin Rush Limbaugh

The relentless, rancid ranting of this vile, hate-mongering excuse for a radio talk show host – which unfortunately poisons the airwaves above communities on both sides of the Niagara River thanks to the WBEN station in Buffalo, New York which continues to carry the syndicated Rush Limbaugh Show – reached another low this past February 29, if that is even possible.

Limbaugh sank to the bottom like the largest turd in an ever expanding sludge pond full of extremist clowns fouling the airwaves today with an attack against a 30-year-old woman named Sandra Fluke, a law student at the Washington, D.C. campus of Georgetown University who was barred by a Republican majority in the final weeks of February from testifying before a Congressional committee about her support for publicly paid health insurance for contraception. Slamming any idea that he or any other taxpayer should have to pay for Fluke or any other woman’s access to contraception,  Limbaugh used a program that is privileged, through a federal license, to go out to an estimated 20 million listeners to say the following about Fluke; “What does that make her (if her contraception is being paid for)? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute.”

Unashamed by an outcry of complaints from member of the public and mostly Democratic Party politicians about the “slut” remark, Limbaugh went back on the air the following day with this message for Fluke; “If we’re going to pay for your contraceptives and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it,” he snorted. “We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.”

It wasn’t until a day or so later that a few leading Republicans finally made a timid appearance to call Limbaugh’s comments “inappropriate,” although none of them went so far as to use stronger words like “disgusting” or “reprehensible” One can only wonder what they would have said if the target of Limbaugh’s venom was their daughter or some other woman in their family. Sadly enough, Republican presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney, who Limbaugh has not spoken all that highly of because of his apparent “moderate” posturing as a former Massachusetts governor, but who is still trying to pander to the more right-wing Tea Party wing of the Republican Party that are the bedrock of Limbaugh’s audience, expressed no timely words of condemnation at all.

The target of Limbaugh's misogynistic bile, university student Sandra Fluke

Limbaugh swaggered on with his bluster into the late morning hours of Saturday, March 3, arguing that Flute and women who share her views have no reason to feel offended by anything he said because he has no “power …to regulate their behaviour (or) make health care decisions for them.” It wasn’t until the afternoon of the same day, when news surfaced that advertising were thinking of cancelling their sponsorship of his show, that he turned around and apologized to Fluke, through a statement and not face to face, for the names he called her, noting that his “choice of words was not the best, and in the attempt to be humorous, I created a national stir.”

This was an attempt to be humorous? That’s something like the captain of the Costa-Condordia, that giant cruise ship that sank off the coast of Italy this January, saying he was just attempting to help the passengers when he managed to be the first one on the ship to make it to shore.

There is only one real question worth asking here. Why is this repulsive clown, who has said so many despicable things before toward people of colour, toward women and toward others he takes issue with, including a President Barrack Obama whose very legitimacy as an American he has question, still on the air?

More than three years ago, when another popular American broadcaster Don Imus and his on-air male sidekicks used their syndicated morning radio show, which was also aired on MSNBC cable television, to make fun of black members of a Rutgers University, New Jersey women’s basketball team, calling them “nappy-headed hos,” sponsors fled and the networks pulled the plug on the show, even though Imus spent his last week on air apologizing repeatedly for the remarks and even taking a trip to the university to apologize to the women and the entire faculty and student population of the school personally. One of the main arguments for taking Imus off the air was that, as much as he had said objectionable things about people before, they were mostly politicians and other public figures whereas these young ladies hardly had access to the power he had to use a nation-wide broadcast system to defend themselves.

Yet Limbaugh was in the same position of power to trash Sandra Fluke, as he has so many others in the past, and stations like WBEN just let him go on and on, apparently because he has the most listened to radio talk show in the nation and the advertising revenue he brings in means more than ethics or airing programs that offer more redeeming value to the community and integrity.

One can’t place all the blame on the broadcasters however. Those of us out there who complain about the lack of civil discourse in our society today and about how divisive and dysfunctional our systems of government have become only have ourselves to believe if we turn on the radio or television and listen to or watch the likes of Limbaugh and his all-too-many imitators.

If we turned away from the stations that air this kind of sewage, the advertisers would leave and the show would go off the air.

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