This appeared this evening over at Crooks & Liars. I heard some mumbling about this, but had no idea Rush Limbaugh was being this brazenly bigoted, live and on the air.
"King Crimson" writes:
It was Wednesday when Rush Limbaugh received an .MP3 from the Desk of WJR Detroit's Ken Rogulski, the white-haired beat reporter, who also occasionally anchors certain top hour newscasts in the conservative talk station's broadcast day. The audio gift would be the gavel with which Rush would pound out hate and bigotry, revelry in personal suffering, and twisting of words and ideas for the rest of the week.
Earlier, Rogulski scurried down to the Cobo Convention Center, locally referred to as Cobo Hall to see what kind of audio he could bring back from the huge crowd developing as the applications for federal aid for the poor and destitute were being handed out. It was to be a brief windfall of assistance to one of the hardest hit cities in the country, where bankrupt auto companies and massive home foreclosure have helped define a new level of pain and suffering for these innocent human beings. But you could hear the hope in their voices flapping in a breeze of unsureness like an untethered sail in a storm, these proud, innocent residents.
The conservo-talk reporter cherry picked through the audio booty until he found the absolute best soundbite that would most perfectly frame the city as one filled with Obama-fawning morons, black Sambos, and greedy welfare grabbers - precisely, as Limbaugh would later argue, the kind of rank idiots who would vote for someone like America's first black president.
Then C&L provides the audio (or actually one of the times Rush plays it because apparently he bounced up and down on this audio through the end of the week). Unforunately it's Adobe Flash so I can't embed it. But the writer provides somewhat of a transcript as how one of them goes.
"Where's the money coming from?!" Rogulski quickly quizzes.
"Obama!," the giddy resident chirps, confident the day will end in a bill being paid, or a week's worth of groceries to stuff into the old fridge.
"And where does Obama get it from?!" Rogulski follows up. To the more politically refined in the conservative talk world, the answer is loud and clear - TAXPAYERS. But Rogulski knows full well these "Motown simpletons" will not be so cynical as to believe he's recording them with intentions of caricaturing them later as thigh-slapping morons.
"I dunno! His stash, I dunno. But he givin' to us! We love him!
(...)
Listen to how the first audio soundbite is edited to end with a laugh, which to the racist's ear is a dog-whistle. To a bigot, it is the laugh of bug-eyed Jemima. But to the rest of America, it is the innocent guffaw of a child holding out her hands for a cool drink of water in one of the hottest economic downturns in a century. Note how Limbaugh allows the sound of her laugh to hang in the air for a moment, to let it be the last thing you hear, to let it resonate with the comedic timing of George Burns before going on to the next soundbite. A pause so small and so seemingly insignificant. but silence is a moment as important as a word, that has been practiced and mastered by comedians and even broadcast greats like the similarly conservative late Paul Harvey.
Rush closes by characterizing Detroit residents as "Dumb, uninformed, shockingly saddeningly STUPID!"
I've heard Rush tiptoe up to the line. This time he pirouettes right up to it, then stomps over and does the touchdown spike dance on the other side.
Rush ...... needs ....... to be taken .......... down.
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