In light of Monty not being able to provide the links he has on the topic, I indeed went searching through both sides of the rhetoric. I began at daily KOS where I've had an account for quite some time. While I find the site unreadable at times, it is usually a good place to pick up the trail of a story to follow it back upstream for the real truth. Usually it's the people that the daily KOS wail about the most that seem to have a better grasp on things. These are from the National Review, but both articles seem to put things into perspective quite well.
http://article.nationalreview.com/print ... hlNzVjNzc=A Tale of Two Soundbites
Which one sounds “divisive” to you?
By Mark Steyn
Here is a tale of two soundbites.
First: “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.”
Second: “The third lesson and tip actually comes from two of my favorite political philosophers, Mao Tse-Tung and Mother Teresa. Not often coupled with each other, but the two people that I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point, which is: You’re going to make choices. . . . But here’s the deal: These are your choices; they are no one else’s. In 1947, when Mao Tse-Tung was being challenged within his own party on his own plan to basically take China over, Chiang Kai-Shek and the nationalist Chinese held the cities, they had the army. . . . They had everything on their side. And people said ‘How can you win . . . ? How can you do this against all of the odds against you?’ And Mao Tse-Tung says, ‘You fight your war and I’ll fight mine . . . ’ You don’t have to accept the definition of how to do things. . . . You fight your war, you let them fight theirs. Everybody has their own path.”
The first quotation was attributed to Rush Limbaugh. He never said it. There is no tape of him saying it. There is no transcript of him saying it. After all, if he had done so at any point in the last 20 years, someone would surely have mentioned it at the time.
Yet CNN, MSNBC, ABC, other networks, and newspapers all around the country cheerfully repeated the pro-slavery quotation and attributed it, falsely, to Rush Limbaugh. And planting a flat-out lie in his mouth wound up getting Rush bounced from a consortium hoping to buy the St. Louis Rams. The NFL commissioner, Roger Goodell, said the talkshow host was a “divisive” figure, and famously non-divisive figures like the Rev. Al Sharpton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson expressed the hope that, with Mister Divisive out of the picture, the NFL could now “unify.”
The second quotation — hailing Mao — was uttered back in June to an audience of high-school students by Anita Dunn, the White House communications director. I know she uttered it because I watched the words issuing from her mouth on The Glenn Beck Show on Fox News. But don’t worry. Nobody else played it.
So if I understand correctly:
Rush Limbaugh is so “divisive” that to get him fired leftie agitators have to invent racist soundbites to put in his mouth.
But the White House communications director is so un-divisive that she can be invited along to recommend Chairman Mao as a role model for America’s young.
From my unscientific survey, U.S. school students are all but entirely unaware of Mao Tse-Tung, and the few that aren’t know him mainly as a T-shirt graphic or “agrarian reformer.” What else did he do? Here, from Jonathan Fenby’s book Modern China, is the great man in a nutshell:
“Mao’s responsibility for the extinction of anywhere from 40 to 70 million lives brands him as a mass killer greater than Hitler or Stalin.”
Hey, that’s pretty impressive when they can’t get your big final-score death toll nailed down to closer than 30 million. Still, as President Obama’s communications director might say, he lived his dream, and so can you, although if your dream involves killing, oh, 50–80 million Chinamen, you may have your work cut out. But let’s stick with the Fenby figure: He killed 40–70 million Chinamen. Whoops, can you say “Chinamen” or is that racist? Oh, and sexist. So hard keeping up with the Sensitivity Police in this pansified political culture, isn’t it? But you can kill 40–70 million Chinamen and that’s fine and dandy: You’ll be cited as an inspiration by the White House to an audience of high-school students. You can be anything you want to be! Look at Mao: He wanted to be a mass murderer, and he lived his dream! You can too!
The White House now says that Anita Dunn was “joking.” Anyone tempted to buy that spin should look at the tape: If this is her Friars Club routine, she needs to work on her delivery. But, for the sake of argument, try a thought experiment:
Midway through Bush’s second term, press secretary Tony Snow goes along to Chester A. Arthur High School to give a graduation speech. “I know it looks tough right now. You’re young, you’re full of zip, but the odds seem hopeless. Let me tell you about another young man facing tough choices 80 years ago. It’s last orders at the Munich beer garden — gee, your principal won’t thank me for mentioning that — and all the natural blonds are saying, ‘But Adolf, see reason. The Weimar Republic’s here to stay, and besides the international Jewry control everything.’ And young Adolf Hitler puts down his foaming stein and stands on the table and sings a medley of ‘I Gotta Be Me,’ ‘(Learning to Love Yourself Is) The Greatest Love of All,’ and ‘The Sun’ll Come Out Tomorrow.’” And by the end of that night there wasn’t a Jewish greengrocer’s anywhere in town with glass in its windows. Don’t play by the other side’s rules; make your own kind of music. And always remember: You’ve gotta have a dream, if you don’t have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?”
Anyone think he’d still have a job?
Well, so what? All those dead Chinese are no-name peasants a long way away. What’s the big deal? If you say, “Chairman Mao? Wasn’t he the wacko who offed 70 million Chinks?”, you’ll be hounded from public life for saying the word “Chinks.” But, if you commend the murderer of those 70 million as a role model in almost any school room in the country from kindergarten to the Ivy League, it’s so entirely routine that only a crazy like Glenn Beck would be boorish enough to point it out.
Which is odd, don’t you think? Because it suggests that our present age of politically correct hypersensitivity is not just morally unserious but profoundly decadent.
Twenty years ago this fall, the Iron Curtain was coming down in Europe. Across the Warsaw Pact, the jailers of the Communist prison states lost their nerve, and the cell walls crumbled. Matt Welch, the editor of Reason, wonders why the anniversary is going all but unobserved: Why aren’t we making more of the biggest mass liberation in history?
Well, because to celebrate it would involve recognizing it as a victory over Communism. And, after the Left’s long march through the institutions of the West, most are not willing to do that. There’s the bad totalitarianism (Nazism) and the good totalitarianism (Communism), whose apologists and, indeed, fetishists can still be found everywhere, even unto the White House.
Rush Limbaugh’s remarks are “divisive”; Anita Dunn’s are entirely normal. But don’t worry, the new Fairness Doctrine will take care of the problem.http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YT ... wNjk=#moreOn Race, Rush Called It Right
Rush’s take on McNabb might well be applied to Obama.
By Stephen Spruiell
Full disclosure: I hate the Philadelphia Eagles. Always have. I grew up in Arlington, Texas, and even before Jerry Jones built a colossal monument to football (and to Jerry Jones) right in the middle of our town, my family worshipped the Dallas Cowboys. According to tradition, Cowboys fans are supposed to hate the Redskins most of all. But so many other objectionable things come streaming out of Washington that I never could muster the same antipathy for its football team. No, I reserve the full measure of my wrath for the Birds.
My hatred for the Eagles can cause me to underestimate the team. Last year, for instance, all the Cowboys needed to do to make the playoffs was beat the Eagles in the last game of the regular season. No sweat, I thought at the time. The Eagles’ offense had managed to hang only three points on a mediocre Redskins team the week before. But I overlooked the fact that Philadelphia had won three straight leading up to that game and was peaking at the right time. In other words, I convinced myself that the Eagles were a terrible football team because I wanted them to be a terrible football team. The Cowboys lost 44–6, and the Eagles advanced to the conference finals.
In 2003, after the Eagles got off to a rocky 0–2 start, Rush Limbaugh, early in his brief stint as a commentator for ESPN, made some remarks about Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb that got him into trouble.
His comment started out innocently enough: He called McNabb “overrated.” No big deal. Professional athletes are labeled “overrated” or “underrated” every day on sports talk radio and television. It happens for all kinds of reasons. For instance, just the other day, ESPN columnist Bill Simmons laid out a theory of why Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo is overrated:
Well, the name “Tony Romo" . . . I mean, that’s a great name. That sounds like the name of someone who is going to be such a smash hit, he’ll end up winning a couple of Super Bowls and opening a chain of BBQ restaurants. I want to root for “Tony Romo.” I want to believe that “Tony Romo” is going to come through on this game-winning drive. I want “Tony Romo” to plow through a series of hot actresses and singers. I want “Tony Romo” to stay single past retirement, develop a drinking problem and eventually hit on a sideline reporter during a live telecast before entering rehab. These are the things that “Tony Romo” should do. This is why we projected talents for Romo that he didn’t actually have.
The controversy over Rush’s comments wasn’t that he thought McNabb was overrated, but why he thought that.
“I think what we’ve had here is a little social concern in the NFL,” Limbaugh said. “The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well.” In other words, the media overrated McNabb because they wanted him to be great, just as I have occasionally underrated him because I want him to be terrible. The week after Rush made his comments, which led to his resignation from ESPN, sportswriter (and Eagles fan) Allen Barra came to his defense with a piece in Slate. In it,
Barra explained why Rush’s analysis was correct:
So far, no black quarterback has been able to dominate a league in which the majority of the players are black. To pretend that many of us didn’t want McNabb to be the best quarterback in the NFL because he’s black is absurd. To say that we shouldn’t root for a quarterback to win because he’s black is every bit as nonsensical as to say that we shouldn’t have rooted for Jackie Robinson to succeed because he was black. (Please, I don’t need to be reminded that McNabb’s situation is not so difficult or important as Robinson’s — I’m talking about a principle.)Looking back on the 2003 episode, I wonder whether these comments would even be controversial if they had been uttered after the election of Barack Obama. In February of 2008, liberal writer Gary Kamiya wrote a piece for Salon titled, “It’s OK to vote for Obama because he’s black,” in which he echoed Barra’s reasoning.
White enthusiasm for Obama is driven by his race. But there’s nothing wrong with that fact. Those who criticize it are simultaneously too idealistic and too cynical: They assume that it’s possible to simply ignore Obama’s race, while also imputing unsavory motivations to those who are inspired by it. The truth is that whites’ race-driven enthusiasm for Obama is an almost unreservedly positive thing — both because electing a black president is a good thing in its own right, and because of what that enthusiasm says about race relations in America today.
Many liberals and some conservatives, including many in the media, were drawn to Obama’s candidacy for precisely the reason that only a few, like Kamiya, were willing to state: They were rooting for America to right history by electing its first black president. Even a few conservatives who disgreed with Obama about everything admitted that his election was worth celebrating on those grounds alone. Most conservatives, appalled by Obama’s policies, have since begun to criticize his actions. But many in the media continue to root for Obama to succeed — for a variety of reasons, to be sure, but partly because he is America’s first black president.
Is Obama overrated? Well, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize after only nine months in office and almost nothing in the way of concrete accomplishments: How overrated can you get? Whether you think Obama has been a good president or a bad one, it is hard to argue that he has lived up to the hype the press generated around his candidacy and his presidency. His administration’s numerous missteps are well documented and require no recapitulation. One senses at times that even he struggles under the weight of these unreasonable expectations. His Nobel Prize acceptance remarks reflected this unease: “I do not view [the prize] as recognition of my own accomplishments,” he said, “but rather as an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations.”
In 2007, four years after Rush made his comments, McNabb told HBO’s Bryant Gumbel that, as a black quarterback, he felt pressured to live up to unreasonable expectations. “There’s not that many African-American quarterbacks, so we have to do a little bit extra,” McNabb said. “Because the percentage of us playing this position, which people didn’t want us to play . . . is low, so we do a little extra.”
McNabb’s analysis is flawed in one respect: Black quarterbacks face more pressure not because people don’t want them to play, but because people — primarily the sports media and the NFL — want a black QB to hurry up and make history by joining the pantheon of the greatest QBs of all time. One will, eventually, but, in the meantime, average-to-good black QBs face unrealistic pressures to be that guy. That says more about the media and the league than it does about the ability of blacks to be great quarterbacks, and Rush said so. Six years later, he’s still being punished for it.
— Stephen Spruiell is a staff writer for National Review Online.
In law, defamation–also called calumny, libel (for written words), slander (for spoken words), and vilification–is the communication of a statement that makes a claim, expressly stated or implied to be factual, that may give an individual, business, product, group, government or nation a negative image. It is usually, but not always,[1] a requirement that this claim be false and that the publication is communicated to someone other than the person defamed (the claimant).
In common law jurisdictions, slander refers to a malicious, false and defamatory spoken statement or report, while libel refers to any other form of communication such as written words or images. Most jurisdictions allow legal actions, civil and/or criminal, to deter various kinds of defamation and retaliate against groundless criticism. Related to defamation is public disclosure of private facts, which arises where one person reveals information that is not of public concern, and the release of which would offend a reasonable person. "Unlike [with] libel, truth is not a defense for invasion of privacy."[2]False light laws are "intended primarily to protect the plaintiff's mental or emotional well-being."[3] If a publication of information is false, then a tort of defamation might have occurred. If that communication is not technically false but is still misleading, then a tort of false light might have occurred.[3]
I think Rush may have to hire a chauffer for his wallet.
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