On Rush Limbaugh's radio show today, a caller (talking about her daughter) commented that Obama looks like "Curious George". Limbaugh laughed. He then later "apologized" to Obama, all the while pretending to not know who Curious George is. As reported in the Boston Globe:
Don't make me laugh," Limbaugh said, chuckling. "I can't laugh."
He later apologized to Obama after, he said, staffers told him that Curious George is a monkey.
"I never heard of Curious George," he told listeners, according to a transcript on Limbaugh's website. He went on to say that when he was growing up, he watched Yogi Bear and the Jetsons instead.
On his website transcript of the show, Limbaugh rambles on about different cartoons, but repeatedly claims that he had never heard of the Curious George character. Unfortunately, neither the Globe, nor ABC's report on the story, bothered to take a minute and expose Limbaugh's lie as the caller was doing.
Now of course we all know Limbaugh is a racist and a liar, no news there; and a caller phoned in to tell Limbaugh that it’s obvious he’s lying:
CALLER: Hi. You know what, Rush? I just wanted to say, um, first of all, I think you are lying. There is no way you have never heard of Curious George. No way possible! It's people like you that's making this whole election something that it's really not supposed to be. And you're digging deep just like Hillary and her camp, digging deep, and so you gonna get real down and dirty -- and that's what this is all about right now, and it's really a shame. It's sad, and it really shows that you have no class.
RUSH: Uh, I have no class. Well, sorry you think that, Tanisha. By the way, Tanisha is one of my all-time, top-ten favorite female names. Honest-to-goodness, I never heard of Curious George until today. I'm still getting people sending me e-mails. "Hey, it wasn't a cartoon. It was children's books."
And you don't even have to bother going back to Limbaugh’s childhood, we only need to look at an item in 2007 from Limbaugh’s "Stack of stuff" to show that Limbaugh is familiar with the character Curious George.
On the following page on Rush’s site, look at the links under sources taken from the Boston Globe (!).
You might want to check soon, as I wouldn’t be surprised to see the link disappear.
There, in Rush’s own "Stack of stuff", from Septemer 6, 2007, you’ll find a link to a story about PBS’s production about "the famed cartoon monkey", with a picture of a producer holding a stuffed animal version of Curious George:
Someone with access to his audio archives could surely go and listen to his show from that day and hear what he had to say about Curious George. But I won’t hold my breath for someone in the mainstream media to make that minimal effort to expose the nature of the racist garbage peddled by Limbaugh.