Is Olbermann not divisive?
Missouri native Rush Limbaugh joins a syndicate seeking to purchase the woeful St. Louis Rams pro football team and you'd think the Klan was burning a cross on the south lawn of the White House.
The usual racial arsonists are playing the well worn race card, dredging up - or manufacturing out of whole cloth - ancient quotations of questionable provenance.
Limbaugh is supposed to have said,
Slavery built the South. I'm not saying we should bring it back. I'm just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark.
Rush denies the quote. "You've got a few hours here to produce the citation, produce the source. Source this quote! Tell us where you got it. You prove to me that it was said, or else we will demand a retraction and an apology."
Then, of course, there was his comment about Philadelphia quarterback Donovan McNabb six years ago:
McNabb, he said, is "overrated ... what we have here is a little social concern in the NFL. The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback can do well-black coaches and black quarterbacks doing well."
The comment cost Limbaugh his short-lived job as a football commentator. The irony here is that one of the premier sports writers of our time, Allen Barra, agreed.
If Limbaugh were a more astute analyst, he would have been even harsher and said, "Donovan McNabb is barely a mediocre quarterback." But other than that, Limbaugh pretty much spoke the truth. Limbaugh lost his job for saying in public what many football fans and analysts have been saying privately for the past couple of seasons.
But here is the ultimate insult: Rush Limbaugh has to defend himself against Al Sharpton. Al Sharpton! The premier race baiter of our times, the scam artist who destroyed reputations by propagating the Tawana Brawley hoax, for which he has never apologized.
The reckless racist who, along with Jesse Jackson, scrambled down to Duke University to help the news media lynch the lacrosse players falsely accused of rape. (The district attorney who brought the false charges was eventually disbarred from the practice of law for his egregious unprofessionalism.)
This is the same "Reverend" Al who now sobs that sports is supposed to "bring us together?"
The imputation, of course, is that Rush Limbaugh is divisive. Well, of course he is! But so is Barack Obama. (The irony is that the Current Occupant is uniting Republicans but dividing Democrats.)
Imagine if the Right had tried to slam George Soros, bankroller of MoveOn.org (General Petraeus, don't betray us!) from buying a sports team. For speaking his mind! Freedom of speech!
Rather than honestly debating the great issues of our time, the Left takes the cheap shortcut to obfuscate the issue by disagreeing with the fact that we disagree! It is the same stunning arrogance that dismisses the Tea Parties as nothing more than Astroturf.
Mary Louise Symon was not divisive?
Now I read that Mary Louise Symon, RIP, who preceded my time on the County Board, "united disparate movements in Dane County politics in the 1970s, breaking ground as a persistent progressive …"
Can we hit the pause button and think about that a minute? How does one "unite disparate movements" and at the same time act as "a persistent progressive." (Read: Liberal.)
This is a willful rewriting of history. Mary Louise Symon helped usher in an era of liberal dominance in Madison and Dane County. She did so by beating the conservatives, just as Paul Soglin replaced Bill Dyke as mayor. County government before 1974 had been a profoundly conservative enterprise. Fair enough.
In 1992, conservatives won back the County Board. Led by the clever Mark Pocan, the Left complained about "divisiveness." On cue, The Capital Times ran with the charge. No discussion of the issue - for instance, ending general relief for able-bodied men - just complain about divisiveness. If only the voters would return the Left to power, the divisiveness would go away.
They tried to whitewash Lyman Anderson the same way after his death. Lyman was no campfire sing-along leader. He was a fierce and effective partisan and deserves to be remembered as such.
Keith Olbermann is not divisive?
Brother Charlie Sykes asks can only conservatives be "divisive"?
It is ironic that Keith Olbermann, who, unlike Rush, is actually a hatemonger, is a network commentator on NFL games. Apparently no one thinks Olbermann is too "divisive" to be associated with the league.
Which raises this thought: has any liberal ever been labeled "divisive"? I can't recall a single instance. President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are trying to dismantle our health care system, an effort to which most Americans object and about which many millions care deeply. So, why are they not divisive? If that isn't divisive, what is?
These thoughts are prompted by Olbermann's latest outrage: another attack on Michelle Malkin, in which he accused Michelle of being a "fascist" and described her as "a big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it." It is impossible to imagine a conservative with a network television contract using language like that about a liberal woman. Impossible. It is, to begin with, misogynistic; it's also aesthetically ridiculous. Agree with her or not, Michelle is a beautiful woman. One can only wonder what kind of twisted, sick psyche could produce this sort of venom. (Michelle writes about Olbermann's bizarre outburst here.)
Jimmy Carter is not divisive?
Asks Patrick McIlerhan of the Milwaukee daily news sheet:
People who at long last got involved in politics this summer, via tea parties, only to be called racists by no less than Jimmy Carter what did they do to deserve the utterly baseless hurling of the most potent accusation now available in American society?
What's happening, from Chris Matthews' lies to Jimmy Carter's, is simply the left trying to delegitimize conservatives wherever possible. Everything we say will be branded racist, somehow, and just holding the beliefs we do will be "divisive."
Divisive screws up your life. It separates you from polite society, which is the point: The left is eager for conservatism to be socially unacceptable. Unable to debate, it slanders. Unable to persuade, it tries to bring back shunning. And they dare call themselves "progressive." [Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: Hate speech brought to you by my profession]
The blame, dear Brutus...
Sharpton and his ilk are ably answered by one LZ Granderson, a columnist for ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com, and the 2009 Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation award winner. Granderson joins Bill Cosby and others in speaking out against playing the victimization game.
Limbaugh tried to become a minority owner of a professional football team and some of us behaved as if he was one of the young men caught on video beating Derrion Albert to death in the streets of Chicago.
Limbaugh may be a racist, but he is not the reason there are more black men in prison than in college. We are.
Our issues did not germinate in a vacuum, but I believe the best way to get out of our socio-economical malaise is to spend less time looking at what white people like Limbaugh are supposedly doing to us and more time looking at what we're definitely doing to ourselves. More time charting a new course based on personal responsibility, not victimhood and the retelling of stories, because let me tell you, some of those stories have been touched up so many times it's hard to know what's true anyway.
Quite a few of us … were more than willing to … manipulate racial tension to keep crumbs of power or money. (Yet) we still had black-on-black crime, gambling, theft, prostitution, murder. (CNN: Don't blame Limbaugh for our faults)
Conservative sustenance
A confession: I don't listen to Rush Limbaugh. Never have. Not that I disagree with him all that much, I just don't like his shtick. I take my conservative nourishment in print form from the Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal and, occasionally, The Atlantic magazine. On-line I visit:
Charlie Sykes, the main man in Wisconsin.
Michelle Malkin, no holds barred.
Shark and Shepherd, taught by the erudite Marquette Law prof Rick Esenberg.
Ann Althouse, a UW-Madison law prof who writes of love and food as well as politics.
Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, for which I occasionally write.
MacIver Institute, a new organization making a name for itself.
Americans for Prosperity, champion of the Tea Parties.
Not least is the courageous Miss Vicki, with whom your BlaskaBlogger occasionally shares the Up Front microphone.
