The political right is absolutely right. There is no evidence that this Jared Loughner kid listened to right-wing radio, watched Fox News, or any of that dyed-in-the-wool Republican crap. They are so right on this point. However...

...to hear the crazy shit that comes out of these folks mouths, you don't have to go to those sources. It's so outlandish sometimes, that real media outlets are forced to report on it. So, he could have heard that shit anywhere. CNN, MSNBC, Comedy Central, TLC, magazines, newspapers, and literally millions of places on the internet. Let's not act like you have to actually watch Glenn Beck to hear how crazy he is.

The political right is also correct in saying that they are not the only ones who use violent imagery. Everyone goes a little bit over the line sometimes, no matter what the reason may be. However...

...the sheer number of instances that come out of the mouths of right-wingers, be the Tea Partiers, Libertarians, or just run-of-the-mill Republicans is just overwhelming. These people are forever talking about gun rights, rising up against imagined tyranny, the streets running with blood; the right just spend the last two years promoting revolution...or did I imagine the preacher IN ARIZONA who openly prayed that President Obama would be killed?

Yeah, they've got that quote of the President saying "if they bring a knife, you bring a gun," or something like that, but for every ONE quote from the left that uses gun imagery or suggests violent uprising against elected officials, I'm sure I could easily find you thirty. The left just isn't that quick to talk about killing people. Let's be honest; they're generally pussies. Even when George W. Bush STOLE a Presidential election and forced us into a war that no one wanted but him, the left didn't get violent. In fact, Cynthia McKinney got voted out of office for being too upset about it. President Obama won one fair and square and the man instantly faced more death threats than any President in history.

So it's not like people are making things up. The right likes to talk about guns. The right likes to buy guns. And a lot of people on the right are looking for a reason to use one.

That's not to say that no one on the left gets crazy. It's just that no one else is known for it like the right is. And the legitimate media can't even get blamed for this one. The right's own media outlets promote this stuff. It's what their viewers and listeners want to hear. They want to hear Glenn Beck link the Obama Administration to Nazi Germany and scare them into thinking that they'll need to defend themselves. They want to hear Rush Limbaugh say something crass and tasteless against someone who isn't a WASP. They want Sarah Palin to get out there and say, "don't retreat; reload." If they didn't do it, it would be like watching the first four shows of American Idol and walking away with respect for the participants. No, you watch because you want to see someone's dignity destroyed in front of your eyes.

So, instead of defending yourself and just take it on the chin. I never thought I'd say it, but follow the Olbermann example: Just apologize, even if you don't feel you did anything wrong. The gesture alone would say a lot and it isn't gonna hurt Rush Limbaugh's ratings to do that. Only children say, "Well, what about him?" Grown-ups who know that they were also wrong would just accept it, make a statement, and move on.

Then again, Rush Limbaugh has never been known for his maturity.

Rush Limbaugh vs. Midnight Basketball

I don't know how anyone measures the results of programs like midnight basketball, but if the expectation for it was to COMPLETELY ERADICATE THE SCOURGE OF CRIME, then yeah, it's failing on every level.

I guess that's exactly what Rush Limbaugh was expecting, because he throws it back in everyone's face as proof that "liberalism doesn't work." I guess in Rush's mind, basketball was supposed to break through the stone walls around our hearts and unlock the love within, because if Rush knows nothing else, it's how to love his fellow man. Also in Rush's mind, right next to the Oxycontin addiction and catycornered to the racism, is the idea that midnight basketball is the only thing that "liberals" can come up with to fight crime.

So, since crime still exists in our post-midnight basketball world, does that mean we should scrap it and programs like it? No, idiot, because programs like these are giving teenagers something to do. Midnight basketball isn't a Disney flick, where there's a stern but loving coach who inspires his charges to completely turn around their lives, but if kids are in a gym playing basketball, you know what they're not doing? They're not fucking committing crimes. I know kids today amaze people with how quickly they develop, but even they have yet to evolve into beings who can be in two places at once.

I know the logic is hard to follow, because it makes so much sense, but that's the benefit of not being Rush Limbaugh. In his world (and those who have no idea what the world outside of gated communities is like), the solution is to lock down high crime communities and put everyone in jail. After all, if people act like criminals, they should be treated like criminals. It's very black-and-white to him, mostly because he's white and all the criminals are black.

I know it's hard to tell, based on the positive images put out by pop culture and the news, but all black people aren't criminals. All black people don't live in crime-ridden neighborhoods. Racial profiling doesn't work. Jailing drug abusers doesn't work. But all Rush sees is that black people are safely away in jail, not realizing that security wasn't gonna let us in his neighborhood, anyway.

He also doesn't see (or maybe he does) that prison has become big business. There's no benefit for prisons to rehabilitate ANYONE, because that's less people coming back to jail. And programs that help keep people from becoming criminals don't benefit prisons, either. They also don't keep people who are afraid of criminals sleep better at night.

After all, trying to help people better themselves is so "liberal." "Those people" can't be helped, because if they could, they wouldn't have gotten into trouble to begin with. They should have known better than to be influenced by their environments. If they were smart, they would have used school vouchers to get to a private school, so they can rob the white kids. Because it's in their nature to be criminals.

Ah, that wacky Rush. It's going to be interesting to see that exodus of black players once he fulfills his lifelong dream of actually owning a black person. What will your players be, Crips or Bloods?

Criticize the President? No, that NEVER happens...

Where did the idea come from that no one was allowed to criticize the President? If you're actually not allowed to do it, then I can't tell, because that's all I hear about the President these days. Fox News is a sworn enemy, right-wing radio hasn't let up, Texas is trying to secede and there is an actual pastor praying to God that the President will die. But no, the White House is trying to take away freedom of speech.

It's not like it's 2002, when any criticism of "President" Bush got you labeled as "unpatriotic." I haven't seen the Obama Administration do any tarring and feathering like that. But why let a legitimate question ("Wait, what did Iraq do again?") stand in the way of maintaining favorable poll numbers?

But we'll just go ahead and say that criticism of the President wasn't allowed. But what is allowed is completely fabricating stuff and passing it off as fact. You can't go wrong there, because the average person doesn't worry about how credible a person is, which is why Wendy Williams has a television show.

We live in the internet age, where millions of people have blogs, just like this one, where we can tell people anything at all; from the "unsubstantiated reports that President Obama is actually Michael Jackson in disguise, and that's why Michael had to fake his own death," to "Swine flu is spreading AIDS, and that's why we need border control." And people will believe it, because we used a professional looking font. "I wasn't too sure about it, until I noticed that Times New Roman. Looks just like Cronkite."

So no one cares about truth. If they did, more people might question Rush Limbaugh when he says something like this:

“If homosexuality being inborn is what makes it acceptable, why does racism being inborn not make racism acceptable?” the talk show host asked. “I’m sorry — I mean, this is the way my mind works. But apparently now we don’t choose racism, we just are racists. We are born that way. We don’t choose it. So shouldn’t it be acceptable, excuse — this is according to the way the left thinks about things.”

If people cared about truth and fact, or even coherence, someone would have asked Rush Limbaugh what the fuck he was talking about. Thanks to my own research, I discovered that 100% of people he just made up were the only ones saying that racism was inborn, and this "left" that he's talking about never listens to them. Everyone knows that the "left" is always reading "liberal books" from those "gay elitist doctors," and all of them said long ago that racism was a learned experience.

Something that ridiculous could only come from someone who never finished high school, because it sounds like some shit that two guys drinking in the alley would make up. Then, they'd stumble into the barber shop and swear that "Clem said he saw it happen." Just like that, it's a fact, and none of those pesky "facts" were involved in the process.

What set Limbaugh off on that tangent about nothing was the hidden agenda that President Obama is making black people attack white people, because mind control is one of his Secret Socialist powers, genetically engineered by Muslims in Kenya to bring down America. Note to Fox News: If you're going to pass that paragraph off as news, make sure you give credit to ME, as the person who made the whole thing up.

Anyway, there's a video circulating of a black kid beating up a white kid on a school bus and the black kids are standing around cheering, which is something that has never happened outside of a boxing ring in America. Witnesses, or "people who were there," say that the fight came out of a disagreement about seating and was not racially motivated. Rush Limbaugh, who at the time of the fight, was anywhere else but at the fight, said this:

“I think the guy’s wrong. I think not only it was racism, it was justifiable racism. I mean, that’s the lesson we’re being taught here today. Kid shouldn’t have been on the bus anyway. We need segregated buses — it was invading space and stuff. This is Obama’s America.”

"You put your kids on a school bus you expect safety but in Obama’s America the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering ‘yeah, right on, right on, right on.’ Of course, everybody said the white kid deserved it he was born a racist, he’s white."

And this guy is in no danger of getting his show cancelled. Yeah, no one's allowed to criticize the President. Not only are eyewitness accounts not good enough for this guy, but somehow, he brought up someone that no one was even talking about. How bitter do you have to be to tie everything that goes wrong into racism AND the President?

This shit never happened to Bush. People who didn't like Bush were very clear about why they didn't like him: He was the dumbest President in history and managed to steal an election. Not only was he wrong, but being outwitted by a complete idiot really stings.

But President Obama? Not only is he cleaning up Bush's messes (of which there are many), not only does he have Glenn Beck saying he's racist against white people (like his mother), or Michael Steele saying he's racist against BLACK people (what the fuck?), and a Socialist Revolution to get off the ground (whoops! I meant "free guns and Bibles!"), now the skyrocketing number of school bus fights in 2009 is his fault, too. Because Obama becoming the first black President is making black people feel good about themselves, so naturally, they're gonna start beating on white people. Of course. It couldn't have had anything to do with the chairs on the fucking bus.

Look, if you're going to claim that "no one can criticize the President," then maybe you shouldn't spend ALL four hours of your radio show not only criticizing him, but fabricating things about him. If no one's allowed to do it, then he must be really bad at enforcing it, because I don't recall hearing about his Gestapo taking anyone away for "protective custody." I mean, you're kind of killing your own argument. At least among people who have two brain cells to rub together.

Deconstructing Limbaugh's Fairy Tale Land

Rush Limbaugh wants President Obama to fail.

Rush Limbaugh also claims that it's okay to make insane statements like that, because all of the Bush-haters wanted Bush to fail in Iraq.

The fact that Rush wants Obama to fail means that he wants the country to become flat broke. He wants the worst for all Americans. He wants us all, all races, parties, creeds, colors, and waist sizes, to eat dirtbombs for dinner from the underside of the overpass. Because that's the only thing that can happen if this President does fail. If Obama fails, we're pretty much screwed.

Well, most of us are. The ones who aren't screwed will most likely will be screwed as soon as the ones who are screwed realize that they've still got lights and food. Then, the words "Eat the rich" will re-enter our collective mindscape.

Well, we probably won't attack (all of) the rich, but why does he want Obama to fail? What could his motivation be for wanting something like that? It's simple, really. He wants a Republican to save us. Forget everything that he has to say about his reasons. That's all it is, partisan politics. Except he's not an elected official and no one with any good sense listens to him, anyway.

But it's just sour grapes because a Democrat won the Presidency and a Black one, at that. Because what Rush is saying is not even the same thing as everyone else being against Bush. For one, Obama was democratically elected.

Stealing the election was forgotten after 9/11, though. George W. Bush had the world on his side, simply by being an inept President. His historic unwillingness to read memos allowed him to fall face first into the goodwill of the entire planet. Except for the country that we were about to attack, understandably. It would have been really stupid if Afghanistan was inviting the ass-kicking. Or incredibly perverted, but some people are into that.

But then, he pissed it all away by saying, "No, wait. Let's go to Iraq, instead. It's an open and shut case because Iraq and Afghanistan are both, well, you know...turn around again, and that's why we Iraq is the greater threat." We were so baffled by how this man hadn't drowned himself in the toilet that we forgot to stop this from going down.

The thing about Iraq was, it's not that we wanted to LOSE in Iraq, it's that we wanted to LEAVE Iraq. That might be a failure for Bush, but who cares about his ego when 40,000 of our soldiers are walking around America alive and in one piece (4,000 killed, 36,000 injured). Maybe Bush should have tried fighting the war that we were willing to fight. Sorry that all Americans weren't so easily distracted by the endless oil profits that we weren't going to get a dime of. How selfish of us for not wanting to sacrifice our limbs for Halliburton's stockholders. All we were able to see was the futility in throwing lives and dollars at an unwinnable war.

Obama's not waging an ill-advised and unpopular war; Obama's trying to fix the economy, and I'm pretty sure that at least 90% of Americans and the rest of the world want the damn thing fixed. Yeah, Rush, it's exactly the same thing...like Fox News and actual news are exactly the same thing.

If he succeeds, if everything works out like he wants, the economy has a shot at working again. People will have jobs and money; the streets will flow with milk, honey, and the tears of the Republican faithful. So by saying that you don't want that to happen, that means you, Rush Limbaugh, don't want me personally to have a job. You're not even offering alternative or viable solutions, because if tax cuts were the answer, they would have worked when Bush was still spectacularly failing at being President. You're just being a dick and not even for a good reason.

Fuck you, Rush Limbaugh. I want for your show to get cancelled and for you to get lost in Southwest Atlanta. Clearly, we all can't all get what we want in life.

But feel free to keep attacking Michael Steele and Arlen Specter.