Stephen Colbert really put a spotlight on Rush Limbaugh's incredibly racist rant against Chinese President Hu Jintao when he mocked the Chinese language in a bad Chinese accent.
RUSH LIMBAUGH (1/19/2011): I'm watching the news conference. ... Hu Jintao is speaking, speaking, and speaking, but no translator. They wait till he finishes. And then they read what he says in toto. And of course, we don't know. Translator could be making it all up. ... When I hear Chinese or Japanese, it sounds like all the same word. And I can't comprehend of anybody understanding it!
Exactly! Who on Earth could understand that kung pow jibber jabber? Off the top of my head, I can only think of 1.5 billion people. But Rush was determined to get to the bottom of this.
Video and transcript below the fold.
Nation, the United States is presently hosting Chinese President Hu Jintao. At least I assume it's him, it's always possible we got a cheap Chinese knockoff. And there's one thing about the coverage of Hu's speech that upset me, and upset talk radio's #1 man-dumpling. Jim?
RUSH LIMBAUGH (1/19/2011): I'm watching the news conference. ... Hu Jintao is speaking, speaking, and speaking, but no translator. They wait till he finishes. And then they read what he says in toto. And of course, we don't know. Translator could be making it all up. ... When I hear Chinese or Japanese, it sounds like all the same word. And I can't comprehend of anybody understanding it!
Exactly! Who on Earth could understand that kung pow jibber jabber? Off the top of my head, I can only think of 1.5 billion people. But Rush was determined to get to the bottom of this.
LIMBAUGH: I found myself trying to write down what Hu Jintao was saying in Chinese, phonetically, so that I could repeat it to you:
(in bad Chinese accent) Ching chong ching chow chong cha chong chong joo joo chon chong ching ching chong chong chong jee jee caw caw! Che chi che! Jing jong guo ma zhen zhen zhi je zhang ji! Guooooooooo ji jo la ba ba ji chi jo ja!
Nobody was translating!
Shocking! And shocking that no one was translating the Chinese that Rush was just speaking there! Jimmy, can we please run his Chinese through a translator?
TRANSLATOR: My favorite doughnut is every doughnut. When I stand up, my chair smells like a cat shelter.
Wow, for someone who can't understand it, he speaks Chinese beautifully. Unfortunately, things then took an ugly turn. Jim?
LIMBAUGH: Hu Jintao could be telling us... who knows what he was saying to us? ... (in bad Chinese accent again) We want to work together, two countries in the world, China is developing country, America developed country, but not for long!
I don't know about you folks, but I am deeply offended by Rush's cheap insensitive ripoff of my character, Ching Chong Ding Dong!
STEPHEN COLBERT (11/3/2005): (in bad Chinese accent) You so pretty, American girl, you come here, you kiss my tea, make all sweet. I no need no sugar when you around. Haha, come on my rickshaw, I give you a ride to Bangkok! Too doo loo loo loo loo, loo loo loo.
Come on, Rush! Don't take my only character! You have a huge repertoire of impressions. Like black guy.
LIMBAUGH (6/22/2009): If I were Sharpton, I say, "He gon' take from the rich, he's gonna give it to you".
LIMBAUGH (2/19/2010): Al Sharpton goes in da fron' do. In an' out da fron' do.
LIMBAUGH (2/19/2010): Yes, I spoke a little Negro dialect there. I can do that when I, when I want to.
And then there's your beloved Parkinson's sufferer.
LIMBAUGH (10/25/2006): Well, he is exaggerating the effects of the disease. He is moving all around (Rush flails around in the studio) and shaking....
(laughs) It's funny because it's incurable. So Rush, please, just leave some hilarious characters for the rest of us. Don't be an impression hog. Not that you don't do a great impression of a hog.
And yes, even with this, Rush's dittoheads are defending his racism (see the comments section). Generally, the claim is that it's just "satire".
More on Rush's racist rant from:
Balloon Juice
Salon
Rump Roast
Talking Points Memo
Talking Points Memo (on Stephen's clip)
Steve Benen
Gawker
Crooks and Liars
Huffington Post
Mediaite
Boing Boing
Ian Gurvitz
So... I wonder if any Republican is going to even mildly rebuke Limbaugh for this racist filth. As a HuffPo commenter noted:
I wonder if Mitch McConnell's wife, Elaine Chao, thought it was funny?
Now, for those who say we should simply ignore what Rush has to say, I say... no. And it's largely because of what brooklynbadboy and Josh Marshall said about not ignoring the likes of Sarah Palin.
This is actually a real blind spot for liberals in general -- the idea that things that are crazy or tawdry or just outrageous are really best ignored. Don't give them more attention. You're just giving them what they want. Or maybe it's not so practical and utilitarian. Maybe, they say, it's just beneath us. Focus on the important stuff.
On so many levels this represents an alienation from the popular political culture which is not only troubling in itself but actually damages progressive and center-left politics in general no end. It's almost the fatal flaw. Democrats often console themselves that even when they don't win elections, usually their individual policies are more popular than those of Republicans. Too bad you can't elect a policy. It's true for instance that Health Care Reform -- which still has more opponents than supporters -- is pretty popular when you ask people about its individual components. But why is that? It's not random, because that pattern crops up again and again. It's another one of the examples where liberals -- or a certain strain of liberalism -- focuses way too much on the libretto of our political life and far too little on the score. It's like you're at a Wagner opera reading the libretto with your ear plugs in and think you've got the whole thing covered.
Politics can never be separated from policy, unless you're in a political science class or getting a Phd in health care economics. The two are inextricably combined. And any attempt to pry them apart in a deep way is not only hopeless but also deeply wrongheaded.
Same thing with Rush. He IS a powerful voice in the GOP, and you ignore him at your own peril.
Update: So, I was just on the phone with my parents (if you didn't know already, I'm Chinese-American), and they reassure me that nobody in China is going to give two shits about what Rush Limbaugh has to say. They seriously have bigger fish to fry than care about a shock jock in the U.S. They have yet to see even one word about this in the Chinese TV news or newspapers.
Put it this way. If a Chinese media personality that's popular in China said some racist shit about white people, would any of us even know about it, or give a shit?
Still, for our part, since this is in our backyard, we've got to deal with it. And I'll cite a quote that's been attributed to Edmund Burke (even though he didn't actually write this exactly, the sentiment's similar).
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Let us not do nothing about Rush's racist rants.
OK, this comment FTW!
Chinese is a heavily tonal language: depending on the value given the words, Rush might actually have hit on a coherent translation:
Ching chong ching chow chong cha chong chong joo joo chon chong ching ching chong chong chong jee jee caw caw! Che chi che!
Could possibly mean:
"I am a fat fool, and my comments are as the gas from a pig's rectum. No one should ever listen to what I have to say".
Jing jong guo ma zhen zhen zhi je zhang ji! Guooooooooo ji jo la ba ba ji chi jo ja!
Same as the above, but in Cantonese....
by Jay C on Fri Jan 21, 2011 at 07:04:12 AM PST
ROFLMAO!