How Do You LIke It Now?

by digby

Limbaugh has a supporter at the Washington Post:

I am no Limbaugh fan. Not only is he infamous for ugly remarks, but he is a practitioner in the politics of hate. But — and here I write as someone with a special interest in the First Amendment — Limbaugh is being banished for essentially exercising his right to speak.

Why do educated people continuously write this tripe? The first amendment only protects us from government censorship. I’m no constitutional scholar, but I don’t think there’s any guaranteed right to own an NFL team written anywhere in the constitution. (Was it in the footnotes?)

Meanwhile, Limbaugh is now donning metaphorical blackface and saying he’s a victim of a high tech lynching just like Clarence Thomas and claiming that the NFL is an “outpost of racism and liberalism.” (That’s not even close to being true, of course.)

But he just can’t help himself:

“Who do these 70 percent African American players think is paying their salary?”

Golly, can you see why the NFL might have thought this racist jackass was more trouble than he’s worth?

Pat Buchanan tells us on Hardball that this is a form of McCarthyism and compares it to Hollywood writers being denied their jobs during the black list (which is just funny since Pat Buchanan usually considers McCarthy a great American hero.) Apparently, the NFL not wanting to deal with Limbaugh’s baggage is tantamount to censorship. (And Pat Buchanan agitating to have that totally obscure professor Ward Churchill fired for writing something he didn’t like, is a completely different thing.)

Whatever. I actually think Ed Schultz made the best observation about all this:

I do want to point out that for years Limbaugh has been saying that the free market doesn’t want liberal talk radio. Well, there’s a lot of conservative owners that would never even try progressive talk radio or liberal talk radio.

Rush, how’s that free market working for you tonight, buddy? It’s about ownership. I’m glad you found it out.

He’s right. Rush had no problem with the owners of America calling the shots until they decided that he was too radioactive to own a business in which the valuable talent is majority African American. Now he’s saying that the billionaire NFL franchise owners are trying to kill conservatism by not allowing him to “mainstream.” I guess he’ll have to go to the bank and comfort himself by having a good old fashioned cry in the great piles of thousand dollar bills they pay him.

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