Conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh yesterday attacked actor Michael J. Fox, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease, for inserting his voice into the U.S. Senate campaign in Missouri.
Limbaugh suggested that Fox was “acting” in a commercial where he’s shown shaking while endorsing the importance of stem cell research.
“He is exaggerating the effects of the disease,” Limbaugh told listeners yesterday, encouraging them to go online to watch Fox’s commercial, which first aired Saturday in St. Louis during a World Series game. “He’s moving all around and shaking and it’s purely an act.”
The Kosdiary I swiped this from likes that the WaPo considers this newsworthy. I like more that it’s written as straight news, as it would be written if Bill Clinton called Limbaugh a fuckface. For way too long, we’ve been laughing off this creepy bully and histin-hat fascisti followers. Everybody I know has had that conversation, the one with the Limbaugh listener who sneers, “Oh, it’s just a joke. Relax. Can’t you take a little kidding?” As if the problem isn’t spreading poison and lies over the airwaves, the problem is your lack of ability to let somebody say to your face that they’d like to see you killed.
Treating their outrageous statements as noteworthy ensures that people will hear them for what they are. That’s important. You can’t ignore a festering, gangrenous part of the body politic and hope it just falls off without poisoning every other organ. Reporters looking around and bemoaning all the “tone” in politics and all the “division” and all the other words they use to describe the atmosphere Limbaugh helped to create need to start covering incidents like thisas news stories if they ever want to understand why, and how, we all came to hate each other this much.
A.