In fact, there is no objective, primary evidence the Rush Limbaugh “did you know there’s a White House dog?”/Chelsea Clinton joke ever took place. There is no tape of it and no transcript, and it wasn’t mentioned anywhere at the time it is alleged to have taken place.
The earliest known mention of it is a Molly Ivins column written November 12, 1993, which which Ivins claims it happened, but she provides no explanation of when the joke is alleged to have aired. What’s been repeated over and over is Ivins’s story, not the original event.
All the claims of “I remember such and such happening” are almost certainly memories playing tricks on people; they’re reconstructed memories of the incident based on how much it’s been written about on the Internet. The incident probably never happened.
Limbaugh’s an ass and I wouldn’t put it past him to make such a joke, but I think it’s important for the record to note that the story is very likely an urban myth, not truth.
However, whether it was actually stated or not, a (very) few Right-wing pundits condemned it and a (very) great number of ditto-heads repeated it frequently and with gusto.
You apparently missed where Sam Stone and I both saw it at the time it happened. It caused me to change my view of Limbaugh and to stop watching/listening to him. It was not a mirage.
ETA: The phrasing might have been slightly different though. As I recall it, Limbaugh was showing various Clinton-related photos and said, “And here’s the new White House dog,” followed by a photo of Chelsea.
But your insultingly mischaracterized statements about my “dog ate the post” posts, which in effect call me a liar and a coward, are okay…is that right?
Are you guys serious? Can’t you think of someone who didn’t finish their first term? Someone who maybe WON instead of being a big loser? Someone who some idiots have called “the Messiah”, but only his opponents?
I did not miss that. People do have a tendency to remember things that never happened if the story is repeated often enough and was sufficiently similar to events that happened at one or more other times. This can happen for both real and unreal events; many more people have claimed to see the Challenger explode in real time than actually did, for example. I believe you are remembering seeing something you did not see. That’s not meant as an insult, it’s a phenomenon common to all human beings. There WAS an incident in late 1992 when a photo of Chelsea Clinton was shown in conjunction with an unrelated comment about George H. W. Bush’s dog (Millie, you may recall) but it wasn’t substantively similar to the alleged “White House Family Dog” joke in any other way. It’s likely many people are misremembering that.
I will believe it happened when objective evidence is presented. For such a famous incident it certainly is curious that there’s no record of it happening. There isn’t even any evidence that it was discussed on Usenet or other similar forums of the time at the time it would have occurred, e.g. some uknown day in 1993.
Let’s see. It was 1993, so no, there’s no documented proof on the internet that it happened. Plenty of people heard it, me included; the US did not undergo some sort of mass hypnotism. I also heard his ‘apology’ the following week. Why would he apologize for something he didn’t do?
Regardless, neither comment excuses the other. Both were tasteless stupid jokes and the politics of the idiots making them doesn’t make it an acceptable tactic for the other. That said: one was over 15 years ago made by a bloviating idiot who made disparaging remarks about Michael J Fox’s disease fercryinoutloud; how hard do you have to reach to believe he said what he said about Chelsea? The other was made by a late night comedian who is not recognized as the head of his political party and would have gone completely unnoticed had the butt end of the lame joke not gone frothing at the mouth about it. Why anyone takes what either of them says seriously is beyond me.
In any case, to claim that David Letterman is responsible for Sarah Palin resigning is pathetic. She or her family were made fun of by a late night comedian so she’s quitting? Good. Because public office now means opening not only yourself but your family members to as much criticism and scorn as the pundits can heap. Scrutiny on the national stage is that much more intensive, especially if one is going to parade one’s children in front of the camera and use them as props. If she wasn’t ready for that, she should never have opened herself up to it. What if she had been elected? The Bush twins were under fire for years here when Bush 2 was governor and for eight more years when he gained the presidency. If your family can’t weather that storm then national politics are not for you.
You are of course free to set your own standards as to what you choose to believe or not. But I saw it with my own eyes and quit listening to Limbaugh immediately afterward, so outraged was I that he would make fun of a young girl’s looks, especially one who, at thirteen years of age, is at the time of life when one is most insecure about their looks, and here he is making fun of her looks to a national audience.
As for why no one made a big deal of it at the time, my guess is that Limbaugh’s show was new (and short-lived); that not many people were watching it (which is why it was short-lived ;)); that Limbaugh’s fans were unlikely to make an issue of it; and that the Clintons didn’t want to give the issue further exposure by making a big deal of it.
Remember, this was in 1992 or '93 and the Internet wasn’t around like it is today. Nor was cable. Nor were loud talking-head shows. Most people got their news from ABC, CBS and NBC, and none of those outlets was likely to report it.
So in other words, hardly anybody but Limbaugh TV watchers saw it, and those who did, even if they were outraged by it, had no outlet to make it widely known. Limbaugh subsequently did come in for heat from some of his fans and tried to convince them that it was an honest mistake (my recollection is somewhat different than Sam’s, in that Limbaugh chucklingly tried to pass it off as a mistake at the time as well), but again, by and large hardly anyone saw it when it happened, and there really was no one on the scene at that time who was in a position to make an issue of it.
It could be that we have a case of people conflating different events, and perhaps remembering one as the other.
I’m not sure if i’d even heard of the alleged incident before this thread, but i’ve done enough reading on the subject of the reliability of human memory to know that your observations about people remembering things they never actually saw is right on the money.
Anyway, i did a Lexis/Nexis search for some appropriate terms, and came up with this story:
And then i found this transcript, also on Lexis/Nexis, from The Blowhard’s show:
I can’t provide links, because Lexis/Nexis is a subscription service.
Anyway, whether or not this is (allegedly) the same incident, and whether or not this incident happened as described here, it’s clear that Limbaugh, or at least his show, associated Chelsea Clinton with a dog about a year before Molly Ivins wrote her piece.