From mediamatters
What the hell was Rush’s point with this? What did he THINK he meant? Did he have an explanation for his use of this oh-so-clever play on words? Is there some kind of legitimate political point buried in there somewhere? If this isn’t just naked race-baiting, what IS it?
And why bring Halle Berry into it?
I’m hoping that it’s the last guffaw/horrified gasp of misogenism. Stupid puns for Tiny minds.
Demagogue Fear Mongerer Limbaugh Panders to Dittoheads! Film at eleven.
Ever read Allure, or Jane magazines? They routinely tip their readers on such things as the coming polkadot and miniskirt craze. Rush is just doing the same for his demographic.
Film of his radio show? That doesn’t sound very interesting. I think I’ll pass.
I think “Halfrican American” is used to describe the offspring of biracial parents. No particular reason to use it aside from appealing to your audience, so yeah it’s race baiting. Actually it’s worse than race baiting, because it makes fun of her parents as well. Equivalent to “you’re ugly and yo mamma dresses you funny”.
I understood that it was a crack at them being biracial, I just don’t understand WHY he would tak a crack at them being biracial. I didn’t think Rush was dumb enough to be OPENLY racist, but I can’t find any other way to take this.
My take is that is just trying to get the phrase out there. He’s a media whore, but his listeners are unlikely to abandon him if he simply reinforces the stereotypes they hold. He doesn’t give a rat’s ass if if the ‘libruls’ call him a racist. It would be more like a badge of honor.
(Edit)
Didn’t he popularize “feminazis,” and “environmemtal cases?” Same same.
In political terms, I suppose he’s trying to undermine any claim that might be made for Obama as a “black” candidate representing the African-American community – practically all of whom are of mixed race anyway, however dark their skin.
Sure, but whose fault is it that he couldn’t just flat out call them ‘niggers’? The PC Liberals. I see that you place no blame at THEIR feet in your rant.
Hypocrite!
-Joe
Are you sure he wasn’t joking? I think the end was merely the pun itself.
It’s cheering to note that despite three marriages Rush Limbaugh has never reproduced.
Is that a road he really wants to go down? Demanding that people prove their “black” credentials before they’re allowed to identify as black? Does Rush think Obama should identify as white?
Obama is, for all intents and purposes, a Black American. He clearly self-identifies and thinks of himself as “black.” His wife is black, his kids are black, he belongs to a black church and feels at home in the black community. Perhaps even more importantly, he’s spent his life in a country which is going to perceive him as “black” even regardless of his own self-perception.
Rush can’t be sincere with that angle, and it wouldn’t matter to his audience anyway. No matter what angle you look at this from, it’s still amazingly offensive, pointless and unavoidably racist in how it sounds.
Umm…yeah. This was the “Rush Limbaugh Right-Wing Hate Show”…not NPR, right?
-Jod
I don’t think he was going for anything profound. Limbaugh tends to go for the cheap laugh, and he was just making the joke that if a black person is an “African-American”, somebody who’s half black is a “Halfrican-American”. So, when he heard that a biracial celebrity was endorsing a biracial politician, he figured he’d be cute.
In other words, what Pizzabrat said.
That’s most likely it. No shot too cheap. But I also pick up overtones of calling “phony”, as though they were pretending to be black in order to reap the cornucopia of benefits available, but they weren’t “really” black, just “half-rican American”.
I can’t put my finger on it, but there is something very distinctive about Africans that black Americans just don’t have. (Forgive the phraseology, this is awkward territory). If Obama stood with a group of black Americans about the same height, skin tone, etc., he would stand out, he looks more “African”.
I freely accept that is my impression, and may not be commonly held. And if it need be said, no disrespect to any carbon-based life forms, etc.
It could be worse. He could have sung the Cher song “Half Breed.”
Otherwise, I think it is a reprehensible mix of race bating and an attempt to diminish the legitimacy of Obama’s racial identiy, wrapped up in a pathetic attempt to justify it as weak humor.
I think you just nailed it. It has enough of a resemblance to a “joke” to put a bikini on the race-baiting but I think the real intent is both to try to undermine Obama’s “black” credentials and (on an even more insidious level) get the subliminal message out to the true troglodytes in the audience that his father had sex with a white woman.
No – what distinguishes Obama from most African-Americans is not that he is more African than they, but that he is culturally more white than anything else, having been raised mostly by his mother. And his ancestors were not American slaves. So he’s not really part of the “African-American community” by birth. OTOH, he has married into that family and embraced it.