Friedersdorf: Rush the Race-Baiter
At the Daily Beast, Conor Friedersdorf makes an excellent point about the well-documented racially charged comments of a certain right wing deity talk show host: Rush the Race-Baiter.
I share a powerful distaste for characters like Al Sharpton, who deliberately play on the racial anxieties of Americans. As one of the most powerful slurs in American life, “racist” is an accusation that ought to be made rarely, after careful deliberation, with incontrovertible evidence, and never merely to score points at the expense of a political adversary. So I join Mr. Hinderaker and Mr. McCarthy in asserting that Mr. Limbaugh has never been proved a racist, and that race-baiting is an awful feature of American public discourse. It damages reputations and undermines our ability to target actual racism. Those who engage in it deserve our ire.
But even a cursory review of Limbaugh’s radio archives reveal the talk radio host to be a frequent race-baiter, one of the guys who obsessively trades on race.
In fact, based entirely on statements made by Mr. Limbaugh in 2009, one begins to wonder whether he’s been a bigger racial demagogue than even Al Sharpton during that period.
Frank says: