It’s certainly a lie of omission, given his previous comments about drug abuse. But we can leave that out for now.
You must have been taking lessons from Rush. “Can’t come up with a single example?” I’ve given you a source for a long list of examples. The fact that you don’t like them doesn’t allow you to ignore them completely.
Well, I’ll try to find some right-wing sources that have documented Rush’s misstatements of fact. You do realize how silly that comment is, don’t you?
Can you provide us with anything factual? Simply shouting “hysterical” and “a joke” won’t do.
If you’re demanding that I listen to Rush Limbaugh, then go out and do research to debunk some of the crap he comes out with, I’ll have to disappoint you. Life’s too short for that.
Debaser, please describe to my why any of FAIR’s documentations of Rush’s lies are factually incorrect. Make sure it’s not just an opinion that you don’t like. Come up with something factual that they said that is a lie. Or something that they’ve quoted Rush saying that isn’t one.
Fortunately, we do not put people in jail for hypocrisy. Otherwise every person who, like yourself, says out of one side of their mouth that addiction is a disease and its victims deserve treatment and compassion while out of the other side of their mouth proclaiming their unbending desire that Rush spend time in a prison cell would be doing 20 to life.
Hypocrisy cuts both ways. It’s pretty goddamned easy to be sympathetic towards those you like. It’s much harder to be sympathetic towards those you don’t. I leave it to the reader to decide which instance is the truer measure of compassion.
Having just re-read the point-counterpoint-countercounterpoint between FAIR and Rush over FAIR’s much-vaunted 1994 report, I’d have to say that FAIR’s allegations are pedantic to the point of absurdity. I mean, Good Lord, they call his misattribution of a story to “CBS News” (which the listener would assume meant CBS TV news) that actually came from a CBS Morning Resource bulletin (a service of CBS Radio) as a “lie.” That, to my mind, is an error that is just Not A Big Deal[sup]TM[/sup], and the FAIR report is just chock full of that kind of stuff.
Liberal, Rush-haters can slam him because he preached about right and wrong and then got caught doing something wrong. Hence the name calling (hypocrite). Liberals can hold their heads up high because they dont preach right or wrong, so when one of their guys does something wrong, they cant be called a hypocrite. Senator Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Hillary, etc. We just dont see all the handwringing by liberals when a liberal does something wrong, but jump up and down they do when a conservative slips up. Arent liberals all about compassion and giving people second chances? Whats with all the Rush hate speech in this thread? Talk about hypocritical.
The man screwed up, what he did was wrong. It was not on the same scale as murder (Kennedy), failing to provide information for a Grand Jury (Hillary), or perjury (Bill).
I never listened to him until about 7 months or so ago. I got curious because of how much some people hate him.
From what I’ve heard firsthand for the last 7 months, the hatred is baseless.
But Foxnews, Coulter, O’reilly, and Limbaugh too aren’t reallly important for what they do or say.
They’re important because they’re like a PH strip, revealing the wacky irrational wingnuts just as surely if they had “Knee-jerk partisan hack” tattooed on their foreheads.
To be FAIR, the CBS misattribution is not called a “lie”. What they say is that “Limbaugh reported a false claim and misidentified his source. But to hear Limbaugh tell it, quoting an inaccurate source somehow means that you are accurate.”
An example of what FAIR calls a “lie” is Limbaugh’s assertion that “I don’t have ‘troops.’ I do not encourage listeners to call anybody. In fact, I do just the opposite” (naturally there are several documented examples of him doing just that).
Again, I haven’t heard Rush much, so I don’t know if he’s told a lot of lies or not.
But I’d just like to point out that this guy sits on the air offering opinions and facts what, two hours a day? Five days a week? For the last 10 years?
If he were even remotely predisposed to lying, his enemies should be able to fill huge books with them. If he were even casual with the facts, you should still have hundreds of errors to use as ammo.
How many other commentators on the left or right do you know that could talk for so long without making major errors?
If all you’ve got is an 9-year old FAIR report, then the conclusion I would draw is that Rush is EXTREMELY careful with his facts. He may bias and slant things, but he knows he’s got enemies hanging on his every word, waiting to catch him at something. So he’s probably pretty accurate.
Didn’t he hire an auditing firm to listen to his show and report on his accuracy?
What a very lawyerly post. A nice piece of substitution. I said:
I’m real glad Rush got caught. I hope he spends a lot of time in jail-- he deserves it … wait for it …
NOT BECAUSE OF HIS DRUG ABUSE
but because of his hypocrisy.
But you, of course, make it seem as if I’m calling for Rush to be jailed because of his drug abuse. I know it’s not so, now others know it’s not so. Sorry it didn’t work, Dewey. All your base are belong to us.
yeah, and it’s true that if hypocrisy were illegal a lot of people would be in jail, but I think it’d run about 90 percent conservatives and 10 percent liberals in the pokey under those circumstances. And in any event, being glad someone is facing jail time is different from calling for a law to be created. I’d a thunk you’d a knowed that.
Don’t start moving ‘zig’ for great justice just yet, Sparky.
I didn’t say that you wanted Rush to be jailed because of his drug abuse. I just said that your desire to see Rush go to jail exposes your own lack of compassion – it shows you put petty policy disagreements over your alleged desire to see sick people get treatment.
That is, you bitch about Rush showing very little compassion whilst simultaneously showing very little of your own. Which to my mind is hypocritical of you.
It’s still a fatuous accusation. It’s like saying an ad for “pure” juice is inaccurate because the bottle only contains 99.95% of actual juice.
As for the inaccuracy of the story, I think Limbaugh is perfectly entitled to rely on news reports from major reputable news organizations. If they fuck up their reportage, I don’t think Limbaugh should be on the hook for their mistakes. FAIR had months to research a handful of Limbaugh quotes; Limbaugh has to prep a fresh show every single day. I don’t think it incumbent on him to track every single story he cites on-air down to its ultimate source – there just isn’t enough time to do that and still have an up-to-date show.
My Throbbing Brain, and a local talk show host who discussed this very topic this afternoon, whom I usually agree with, especially on political issues.
Shit, youre right. Her column was better though, more thorough. Although his five minute rant was pretty good. In fact hell be sitting in for Rush on Monday.
I suspect he reads Coulter.
I feel differently about hypocrites than I do about junkies, hence it’s not hypocrisy on my part. The evil that men do sometimes bites them in the ass big time. I think Rush HAS been evil. I don’t think junkies NECESSARILY have been evil (though some of them have been, of course.)
Oh, yeah, the part about Rush not talking about drugs after his back problem occurred? is there some FORCE that stopped him from speaking on it, something to the effect that, oh, it’s a lot easier to get addicted than you might suppose, maybe we should think about this lock 'em up stuff…"
Don’t believe the bastid ever said anything like that, did he, even when he was gobbling oxycodins like they was M&Ms. You’d think, being so honest and wonderful and all, it might have occurred to him to say something along those lines. Must have been hard for him, being a hypocrite, blowhard and liar and all.
I don’t really think there’s any moral difference between somebody who is prescribed opioids for pain control and becomes an addict, and somebody who seeks out heroin. At some point in their lives, both types of addicts make the decision to start using opioids for non-medical purposes.
From what I’ve read, approximately 1/3 of the general population is susceptible to opioid addiction – that is, they get feelings of euphoria from taking opioids.
Of that third, many will at some point in their lives be exposed to opioids for one reason or another – be prescribed hydrocodone for dental surgery, get a shot of morphine for a broken leg, be given Demerol for labor pains, taking some of grandma’s OxyContin out of curiosity, whatever.
Of those who are given opioids for pain control, virtually none will become addicted. Three separate studies concluded that the rate was practically negligible – on the order of one in ten thousand patients prescribed opioids for legitimate pain control will become a “problem user.” Even if we assume that two-thirds of those patients did not feel any euphoria from the pain medication and therefore would not be susceptible to addiction, that still means that few than one in three thousand people who are susceptible to opioid addiction become problematic users of opioids after legitimate medical exposure. Most of them, like Scylla, choose not to start using opioids for emotional relief, even if they found the sensation of taking opioids pleasurable.
I’m not surprised that Rush is being thought of as a hypocrite – given his outspoken views on taking personal responsibility and making individual choices and willpower and the like, it does seem somewhat hypocritical for him to have chosen not to stop using opioids once his pain was gone. But personally, even though I don’t agree with much of what Rush says, I don’t think of his behavior here as hypocritical, really, because I think that opioid addiction is a medical condition, not a moral failing – I believe there is something malfunctioning in the brains of those who become addicts, perhaps a defect in the endorphin system, or some form of depression, or something else entirely. Whatever it is, I don’t really blame addicts for becoming addicts. I don’t think addiction is an excuse for bad behavior – i.e., I don’t think addiction is an excuse for stealing from your family, or for hurting somebody in a car accident, or whatever – but I don’t blame people for becoming addicted to something.
… I’ve also been wondering if Rush was taking all these opioids because he was in pain, like Larry Flynt was portrayed as doing in the movie The People vs. Larry Flynt. If he was taking opioids for pain, then I wouldn’t consider him an addict, no matter how long he was taking them, or how many he took, or whether he got them legally or illegally. There are legitimate chronic pain patients on high doses of opioids for years who are not addicts. (They’re probably physically dependent, but that’s a separate phenomenon from addiction.) But it sounds like that is not the case, since Rush went to rehab and tried to stop but couldn’t.
On May 29, 2001, Rush was presumably in negotiations to finalize a new contract with Clear Channel Radio. He appears to have signed the contract at least a month later, in July of 2001, for a sum that has been reported to be between $250 million and $285 million.
Rush was monitoring his hearing loss before he signed his contract. Did he tell Clear Channel before he signed? I don’t know.
According to the, ahem, New York Daily News, Rush’s maid was already by then his main man, so to speak. Wilma Cline claims that she was hiding Rush’s deliveries under his bed so that his wife wouldn’t find it. By 1999 Rush was complaining about ear pain, from his, you know, rare degenerative disease. Back then, he was asking for hydrocodone (another opiate derivative) from his dealer, but also oxycontin.
Rush purportedly asked for his “small blue babies,” which sounds resoundingly like Mexican Vicodin (do your own search on “blue vicodin”), which is apparently much stronger than the American version.
One could make an argument that Rush was satisfying an elephantine habit for opiate derivatives, while complaining about ear pain, while possibly abusing a controlled substance which was illegally trafficked into the United States, which caused his hearing loss (and pain?), while concealing the opiate-induced hearing loss from his employer, while negotiating one of the largest contracts in entertainment history.
But people who believe that tripe are the kind of people who believe Vince Foster was murdered, right?
And this is nothing about nothing, but if you’ll read those cites you’ll find that Rush Limbaugh also happens to live–and has lived–in no other place than Palm Beach County, Florida.
Maybe that whole flap back in 2000 was just Rush’s absurd opium dream, and I’m just a figment of his imagination.