Today’s IOKIYAR: Asian Parody Edition

Hey I know we’re all accustomed to hearing Rush Limbaugh spew intolerant, racist, bigoted nonsense. It’s like, “Really? In other news, water is still wet.”

So I really didn’t give two thoughts to Rush’s mockery of Chinese President Hu Jintao or the Chinese language, which he did not once but twice and which went on and on and on and on for what felt like a painful eternity.

But something seemed awfully familiar about the whole thing, and then I remembered when Rosie O’Donnell was raked over the coals by conservatives for essentially the same thing. Michelle Malkin, I recall, took special umbrage at O’Donnell’s insensitivity, even calling her an “obnoxious hypocrite” in this video:



So I’m sure Malkin will be all over Rush Limbaugh, right? Ha ha, don’t be silly. That stuff is just for liberals! IOKIYAR.

Okay, big deal. Conservatives are always reaching for their Faux Umbrage Concern Kits when a liberal does something, then looking the other way when a conservative like Limbaugh does the exact same thing. But I'm really sick of this stuff. And it's not just the conservative media, either.

When Rosie O’Donnell does something like this, it’s front page news everywhere! It sparked a huge outcry from all quarters: the Asian American Journalists Assn., New York City Councilman John Liu, even hitting tabloids like People magazine. Liu even sent Barbara Walters this letter demanding that she hold O’Donnell accountable. It was a huge freaking deal and we didn’t hear the end of it for a week until O’Donnell had apologized three times.

Why is there no outrage about Limbaugh’s comments, save from the usual lefty quarters -- Media Matters and the like? Why no articles in People magazine or demands for accountability from the Asian American community? Are we just so accustomed to Limbaugh saying racially charged, offensive things that he gets a pass? Why? Why does he get a pass? Why the double standard?

Mind you, I’m not saying Rosie O’Donnell shouldn’t have faced criticism for her parody in the national media, but if that's the case then Limbaugh should too. It's always this way and it's pissing me off. Why is the Left always held to a higher standard than the guy who makes $40 million a year and has one of the highest rated radio and TV shows in the country and who is basically the de facto leader of the Republican Party because every time he says "jump" they say "how high?" Why is accountability always, always a one-way street in the national discourse? Why is the media always so quick to make an icon of the Left look bad, and so quick to ignore it when someone on the right does the same thing?

And here's another thing: if the right wingers are going to call for the fainting couches every time a liberal does something, but completely ignore it when one of their folks does the exact same thing, doesn't that signal an utter lack of credibility? Shouldn't we just ignore them the next time they call for the the Faux Umbrage Concern Kits? Why are right wing pundits never called to account for that?

I know, you may say I'm a dreamer. But I'm not the only one! I'm just tired of seeing this same play over and over again.

Why We Help

Rush Limbaugh is an ass. He doesn't seem to know that a helping hand is far more powerful, and far more enduring, than a shower of bombs.

He forgets we come on the age’s most uncertain hour, and sing an American tune....

Hate-y

So, let’s say your neighbor, the most impoverished person in the neighborhood, suffers a disaster. Let’s say their house catches on fire and burns to the ground. Is the first thing you do:

A) Help your neighbor in whatever way you can;

B) Tell the world that any financial assistance sent to your neighbor will just get stolen, and conclude your neighbor "needs discipline”;

C) Assert that the mayor of your town will just use the disaster to pander to certain voters;

D) Claim your neighbor is paying for a pact they made with the Devil years ago to oust their French landlord. "True story!"

If you are an American conservative with your own TV or radio show, guess which of these scenarios you did yesterday?

International aid organizations and religious organizations have offices in Haiti and staff on the ground coordinating relief efforts. For a more productive response, check out this list of legitimate groups responding to the Haiti disaster. They will not steal your money.

Because What America Really Needs Is Yet Another Teachable Moment About Race!

I was pretty busy yesterday so I just caught a snippet of the uproar over how Rush Limbaugh was denied his constitutional right to be a part owner of an NFL team. I think the only thing preventing this from being a bigger story was the Balloon Boy thing and for that, at least, the Heene family has my thanks.

In fact, it was in trying to escape Balloon Boy coverage that I channel-surfed my way to MSNBC, only to see Al Sharpton and Pat Buchanan arguing about it.

Oh, geez.

Well, that kind of tells us all we need to know about how Hardball’s producers saw this story: another chance to go 10 rounds on the race debate! Pass the popcorn or maybe we should all reach for our politically correct beers? It’s another “teachable moment,” America! Cripes.

Seriously, MSNBC: just how productive can another Sharpton v. Buchanan debate on race really be?

I just caught Sharpton saying

The people that thought he was an asset began to think he was a liability. He’s trying now to make this like this is some wounding of American conservatism, he was rejected by his own partners, ultimately.

at which point the conversation was handed to Pat Buchanan who sputtered something about how it was “shabby,” “vindictive,” “petty,” and “disgusting.” With Pat Buchanan fast running out of adjectives, I switched back to Balloon Boy.

Basically I was able to glean that conservatives think this was all liberals’ fault (Red State’s take was pure comedy gold.) Aside from rolling my eyes and thinking “we get blamed for everything!, what is there really to say to an allegation like that? What did we do? Did we create an environment where Limbaugh’s racist rants are deemed inappropriate? If we did, good for us. But I never thought that was a liberal thing; I thought that was a decent people thing.

My mistake.

Despite all of the “teachable moments” our news media gives us, I’m going to agree with Adam Serwer, who pointed out yesterday that a big chunk of the right seems awfully confused about what racism is.

Writes Serwer :

On the one hand, there's the general anxiety on the right that comes from the recognition that one can't actually treat black people this way and expect there not to be social consequences. On the other, there's actual bewilderment about the very concept of racism -- conservatives understand in the abstract that racism is bad, but they seem incapable of identifying actual racist behavior. Instead, because (a) racism is bad and (b) liberals are bad (c) racism is a quality possessed by liberals. By definition, conservatives cannot be racist, because they are good, unlike liberals, and therefore nothing Rush Limbaugh says is racist. Moreover, while liberals have sometimes intimated racial motivation for conservative criticism where there isn't any, conservatives have refused to recognize when attacks on the president become attacks on black people. Calling the president "an angry black guy" is one of those times.

I do think that’s it in a nutshell. The noisy fringe of the conservative base, which tends to view everything two-dimensionally, does seem unable to identify actual racism. Take Rush’s younger brother David Limbaugh, a conservative writer and columnist for Townhall.com as well as the ultra-right wing website Newsmax. He called Maureen Dowd and Jimmy Carter racists because, as he wrote back in September:

I ask you: Who is more likely racist, the person who sees race every time she turns around or the person who aspires toward colorblindness?

Whaa...? So you’re saying you’re not racist, you’re just stupid?

You know, the opposite of racism is not being colorblind, especially in this day and age when “colorblind” is a nonexistent, unattainable ideal. So while you may strive all you like, you won’t get there by using “colorblind” to excuse your own racism.

In fact, what David Limbaugh and his ilk display is what's called "colorblind racism”. And no, I'm not making this up. Stephen Colbert parodied it beautifully with the bit about how he thought he might have a black friend but couldn’t be sure because he doesn’t see race. However, if anyone called him racist he’d be sure to show them a picture of himself with his black friend.

Hilarious. Those who write about colorblind racism say the “colorblind” argument has been used as a cover for a more nefarious kind of racism, the kind that says one group of people is allowed to continue to oppress another group because they have decided racism is a “thing of the past.”

This is not about race so much as power; the group that has traditionally held it is unwilling to give it up, and they don’t care what race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc. that you may be. Progress! Sure, your kids can attend the same school as theirs, but let’s make sure everyone knows their roles, okay? You stay in your social and economic place with the limited opportunities parsed out to you and leave the rest of the pie for the folks who have traditionally gobbled it up.

For some reason we never seem to get to the “power” part of the race conversation. A big reason is because having Al Sharpton and Pat Buchanan offer “two sides” of the Limbaugh issue doesn’t educate anyone about anything except that our news media is dominated by a bunch of buffoons.

So, back to Rush Limbaugh. Like Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter and the rest of the right-wing gabbers, he’s spent his entire career chasing headlines by being controversial. The price for that is when you step outside your little bubble you run across business partners who don’t view controversy as a selling point. It might sell books, but controversy doesn’t sell football.

Rush just got smacked by the free hand of the market. His business partners didn’t want problems with sponsors, issues with the players and all the baggage that comes with having a controversial figure as a partner.

Sorry, dude. Don’t blame liberals, though. Maybe what Rush Limbaugh needs from this "teachable moment" is a little personal responsibility.

I Guess Rush Limbaugh Heads The Republican Party After All

Pass the popcorn. Hours after Rush Limbaugh ripped RNC chief Michael Steele a new one, Steele has issued an embarrassing apology.

Drum roll, please:

"My intent was not to go after Rush - I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh," Steele said in an interview. "I was maybe a little bit inarticulate. ... There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership.

"I went back at that tape and I realized words that I said weren't what I was thinking," Steele told Politico. "It was one of those things where I thinking I was saying one thing, and it came out differently. What I was trying to say was a lot of people ... want to make Rush the scapegoat, the bogeyman, and he's not."

Shorter Michael Steele: “Rush Limbaugh is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.”

Ouch. Some of us on the left had bets on how quickly this would happen. I figured Steele would at least wait 24 hours; he didn’t even wait four.

Any doubts about who is in charge of the Republican Party have just been erased. Hint: it’s not the black guy who just groveled before the bloated white bigot who once told an African American caller to “take that bone out of your nose.”

Big Fat Asshole Pills

I'm really not understanding why the media is all over this latest Rush Limbaugh nonsense. It's just more kabuki theater from our ridiculous excuse for a media that thinks the latest bloviatings from a right wing radio entertainer is somehow "news," while what's truly important to most American right now is not.

We need jobs. We need healthcare. The entire state of Kentucky still resembles a war zone, thanks to something called "winter weather." We need infrastructure. There's a real war going on, still, in Iraq. Three Sunni candidates were assassinated on Thursday. So much for that awesome Surge.

It's a little frustrating that this video, even though it's from 2006, is still apropriate today. Enjoy.

OMG We’re Dooooomed!!!

Rush Limbaugh isn’t happy with President Obama’s pick of Rahm Emanuel for Chief of Staff. He thinks it means we’re all gonna die.

Let’s play a round of the Limbaugh Logic Game, my friends:

There are a lot of Muslims around the world who believe that they finally got one of theirs in the White House, Barack Hussein Obama.  They think that they've got somebody. They know he's a radical leftist, and they think he's at least sympathetic, because they, too, are downtrodden (they think) like African-Americans in this country are downtrodden.

Okay, got that? President Obama, whom we all know was a secret Muslim anyway, was Islam’s pick for president, which explains Limbaugh’s earlier (false) assertion that Hamas endorsed Obama. Which of course would be really sucky and scary for Israel, according to Limbaugh.

Okay, got that? Moving on:

So they think they've got a sympathetic figure, at least, in the White House. Somebody who is not going to have it in for terrorism as much as George W. Bush did. Somebody who isn't going to be as prone to use force.  They think all of this.  Now all of a sudden he names as his consiglieri, as his enforcer, his capo di tutti: Rahm Emanuel.  Rahm Emanuel is all the other things I said, plus he's Jewish.  Now, this sends a signal to the Arab world that conflicts with what they believe.

(It also conflicts with what Limbaugh believes, that Muslim-y Obama will be friends with Islamic terrorists. But I digress...)

They probably are going to give it some time here, but my guess is, my theory -- and I could be wrong about this, but my theory -- is that we also know in the Muslim world that... I forget the word for it.  They have a word for Muslims who flee the faith and join some other religion.  

Of course, they put out fatwas on them like Salman Rushdie and this sort of thing. I think it's entirely possible that when all is said and done, these people in the Islamic, Muslim world who think they've got a simpatico in the White House end up hating his guts. They're going to end up hating his guts. They're going to think that he's a sellout. They're going to think that he abandoned them. They're going to think that he somehow has sold them out.  Not personally, but in their strict code of conduct with their religion and so forth.  If that is the case -- and it's a big "if" and it's just my theorem. But if it's a big case, if it's true, then the Arab world might get even angrier at us than they already are. (laughing) So we shall see, ladies and gentlemen. We shall see.

Ohmygodwe’reallgonnadie.

We’re all gonna die. Because President Obama, who is not a Muslim, but is someone Muslims supposedly liked, picked a Jew as his Chief of Staff.

Ohmygodwe’reallgonnadie.

So we were safe from attack from the Islamic world by electing Barack Obama, but now he’s gone and blown it all by picking Rahm Emanuel?

But John McCain, who sang a little ditty about bombing Iran, campaigned with Joe Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew! Lieberman was even considered for his vice president! So if we play the Limbaugh Logic Game, that doesn’t anger the Muslim world, but making a Jew your chief of staff does?

You know, this game makes my head hurt.

Hag-tastic

How did I miss this one?

Via Digby, apparently Rush Limbaugh said that Hillary Clinton is unfit to be president because women get all wrinkly and icky as they age:

We know that the presidency ages the occupants of that office rapidly... But men aging makes them look more authoritative, accomplished, distinguished.

Sadly, it's not that way for women, and they will tell you... Look at all of the evidence. I mean, I've just barely scratched the surface with some of the evidence, and so: Will Americans want to watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?

To which I submit as evidence the following:Yeah, you’re right Rush. I definitely don’t want to see that on my TV every day.

{/sarcasm}

They Said It Wouldn’t Last

Progressive talk radio is catching up. Yes, right-wing radio still dominates the talk airwaves, but liberal talkers are making big strides, according to the trade journal Talker’s Magazine. A survey in the current issue shows Ed Schultz receiving the same audience as Bill O’Reilly, and liberals like Randi Rhodes, Thom Hartmann, Lionel and Stephanie Miller with the same audience as G. Gordon Liddy and Hugh Hewitt.

This is a huge jump over last year for Schultz, according to Raw Story:

A new survey by Talkers Magazine listed Schultz's weekly audience at 3.25 million weekly listeners, the same number of listeners enjoyed by O'Reilly, host of the Fox News Channel's The O'Reilly Factor. [ ... ] The same survey in 2006 pegged the Fargo talker's unique weekly listeners at 2.25 million, sharing the number 10 slot among radio hosts nationwide.

[...]

Limbaugh, who had 14.5 million weekly listeners in 2005, has not recovered from his loss of audience reported in the 2006 survey. His audience has been holding steady at 13.5 million listeners since that report.

I’m a big fan of Ed Schultz; he’s not as strident or polarizing as Randy Rhodes (who I confess to also liking, especially on days when I’m really pissed off). Schultz actually lets people talk instead of cutting them off mid-sentence, and he’s based out of Fargo, which gives him that “flyover country” perspective. If you don’t get Schultz on regular or satellite radio, you can give him a listen online here.

In the meantime, Nielsen ratings show Keith Olbermann consistently beating conservatives like Glenn Beck and Tucker Carlson, and even giving Bill-O a run for his money in the key audience demographic.

It’s pretty amazing when you remember that conservative talk has an enormous advantage with its established infrastructure (Fox, ABC Talk Radio Network, etc.) built over the past few decades.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that people are turning off Rush and switching to Big Ed; rather, I think it shows there’s a growing market for progressive talk, whereas the market for conservative talk has probably maxed. What I don’t understand is why local talk radio stations like WLAC don’t offer both kinds of programming. Why cater to just a portion of the market in a city like Nashville, which skews liberal? I’ve been told that local station management has been approached about airing shows like Thom Hartmann and Ed Schultz (or even the awesome local show Liberadio) but they’ve refused, reasoning that liberals listen to big stars like Rush Limbaugh too. All that kind of thinking has done is drive me to satellite radio, where I now enjoy advertiser-free music programming, too.

The dearth of stations willing to program someone like Ed Schultz is a shame but it may be changing soon: on today’s show, Schultz announced he has investors looking to buy stations in some key markets. Think Nashville will be one of them?

Takes One To Know One

It’s bad enough that we have Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, calling gays -- and by association, the thousands of gays who serve in the U.S. military -- immoral. Now that jokester Rush Limbaugh has stuck his foot in it by calling troops who support withdrawal "phony soldiers":

During the September 26 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, Rush Limbaugh called service members who advocate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq "phony soldiers." He made the comment while discussing with a caller a conversation he had with a previous caller, "Mike from Chicago," who said he "used to be military," and "believe[s] that we should pull out of Iraq."

Along with everyone else, my first thought was of the seven active-duty soldiers who wrote the now-famous op-ed, "The War As We Saw It.” Not long after its publication, two of the authors were killed in Iraq and one was shot in the head, though is expected to recover.

To be called “phony soldiers” by chickenhawk Rush who avoided serving in Vietnam because of a cyst on his ass is beyond despicable.

Is this the way conservatives support the troops?

(Via Atrios.)

Is Limbaugh Insane?

Rush Limbaugh claims Democrats are only interested in the humanitarian crisis in Darfur because people in Darfur are black, and African Americans (who are also black! Get it?!) are part of the Democratic base.

Seriously.

If this weren’t so sick, I’d be laughing:

On his nationally syndicated radio show, Rush Limbaugh claimed that Democrats "want to get us out of Iraq, but they can't wait to get us into Darfur." He continued: "There are two reasons. What color is the skin of the people in Darfur? It's black. And who do the Democrats really need to keep voting for them? If they lose a significant percentage of this voting bloc, they're in trouble." A caller responded, "The black population," to which Limbaugh said, "Right."

This means, according to Limbaugh, that only black Americans care about what’s happening in Darfur. And only white Democrats pretend to care, because they're sucking up to black voters. Now, what kind of sick mind would dream that kind of thing up?

I dunno, I drive around Nashville and see all of these churches with “Save Darfur” banners on their front lawns, and I think, the crisis in Darfur isn’t exactly a Democratic issue. It’s not a Republican issue, either. It’s a humanitarian issue -- you know, like the tsunami or Katrina or flooding in Ohio, where we put aside our political/ideological differences and recognize the humanity of those who suffer and pull our resources together to help fellow human beings.

I guess stuff like that is just beyond the comprehension of Rush Limbaugh, who views everything in black and white, Dem or Repug, liberal or conservative.

Which, I have to say, does not surprise me one bit.