One Arrow Too Many

Actually a fusillade of arrows too many, but that is the mission in life Rush Limbaugh has embraced.

Most of you whose favorites file includes this space and its podcast companion and predecessor know by now that I don't spend a lot of time defending the Rushter. First, because he's got a platform from which to defend himself that is like a blue supergiant to my speck of intergalactic dust, and second, because his broadcasting (though NOT writing) skills are in the same proportion to my own. He doesn't need anybody to defend him. And, frankly, his aforementioned life's mission hardly entitles him to it. The objective cynic could call it the price of its success.

Still and all, it is a worthwhile endeavor to chronicle the arrows the Maha Rushie does take, particularly when they're shot in service to something beyond mere demonization for its own sake.

Those who've listened to Limbaugh even intermittently, at least at this time of year, know he's a passionate football fan. Those of us who are also passionate football fans know well how frustrated we can get with our favorite teams at times when they don't make the decisions on personnel, whether in the draft or free agency, or in hiring and/or firing coaches, that we think they should and then lose as a result. What those of us aside from Rush Limbaugh will probably never have is the financial wherewithall to actually be able to purchase a chunk of our favorite teams, or of ANY team, in order to be an actual part of what we love so much.

Rush is a Pittsburgh Steelers fan - a sin that is only just barely forgiveable, and therefore for which I've never held this against him - but the Rooney family will have to have that storied franchise pried from their cold, dead hands. But evidently he knows Dave Checketts, who included him in a bid to buy one of the most woeful franchises in the National Football League, but also his hometown team, the St. Louis Rams.

Understand that Limbaugh's would have been a minority stake in the team. He would have been part of a group, not out in front of it, or fronting it, much less being THE owner. The bid to buy the Rams is motivated at least in part by a desire to prevent the team from moving someplace else, and Rush wished to be part of "saving" the team for (eastern) Missouri (since, of course, the show-me state also has the Kansas City Chiefs, and they aren't going anywhere).

Now then. If you've followed the post this far, you also know that El Rushbo was, briefly, a member of the ESPN NFL Countdown crew back in 2003. Brief because he, as is his want, made an entirely unremarkable and self-evidently factual observation about Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb, to wit, that McNabb was overrated by the (heavily left-wing - anybody else remember where Keith Olbermann came from?) sports media because "they want to see a black quarterback do well". If he'd said it on his weekly radio show, it would have been just as fauxly "controversial," but probably wouldn't have affected his ESPN gig, but because he said it on Countdown it made ESPN sufficiently squeamish (Tom Jackson's undisguised hostility to Limbaugh was doubtless also a factor) that they forced him out. Something that would have happened anyway when he admitted his then-addiction to pain-killing medication.

I thought at the time and still do that had I been in Limbaugh's shoes, it wouldn't have occurred to me to do anything other than to talk pure football. Perhaps he wanted to, but Countdown's producers wanted to use his radio persona, which certainly seems to be the case given the particulars of his Countdown gig (sitting apart from Berman, Jackson, and the others on-set, "throwing in a challenge flag" when he injected a comment). I really doubt that Rush would, or frankly could, have thrown his weight around and demanded "creative control" over how he was used on the program. Even in his on-radio persona his supposed huge ego is quite obviously tongue-in-cheek. He's supremely confident in that element - and why shouldn't he be? - and is legitimately passionate about the views he expresses, but I'm quite sure he was giddy as a schoolboy - and why wouldn't he be? - to actually get a chance to be around his lifelong favorite sport in some sort of official capacity and was willing to do anything ESPN wanted.

All of which is a circuitous way of saying that because of his unparalleled success as an unapologetically conservative broadcaster and effectiveness as the conscience of the Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh's enemies will never forgive him and will never allow him to escape the libelously and slanderously malevolent stereotype they've made for him whenever he ventures forth to do anything else, no matter how harmless, loveable, or little fuzzballesque.

Thus, the picosecond that it got out that Rush Limbaugh was part of the Checketts group interested in purchasing the St. Louis Rams (along with four other potential bidders), out came the long knives. Seven - out of some seventeen hundred - active NFL players announced they'd never play for the Rams under any circumstances if Rush was part of its ownership. I don't know how many additional players they were speaking for - and frankly, in a league whose ownership ranks include as MAJORITY owner flamboyant nutbags like Al Davis, Jerry Jones, and, well, Rams owner Georgia Frontiere, to say nothing of a stable of players that boasts dogfighters, any number of drug-abusers and perpetrators of domestic violence, and guys that pack unregistered heat to public places and "only" blow their own feet off, the specter of four-tenths of one percent of all the NFL's players wagging the dog of their union leadership on something that isn't even in their purview is gut-bustingly laughable - but the idea of this being cast as a MORAL stand is, well....gut-bustingly laughable. Then again, even the notion of millionaire superstar athletes HAVING a union is ludicrous. And it sure as shinola doesn't entitle them to pick and choose their bosses' bosses.

Not officially, anyway. But seven pro football players weren't the only Limbaugh-libelers, and far from the worst offenders:

As big a slur as this "plantation" crack is - to far more people than just Rush, starting with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell - it's even more empty-headedly incoherent. Limbaugh would not have "owned" the Rams. He would not have had a controlling stake. He wouldn't have had any say in personnel decisions. And even if he had, does this as-deserving-of-the-Pulitzer-Prize-as-Barack-Obama-is-of-the-Nobel-Peace-Prize chowderhead and the MSNBC animals that gave her their platform-forty-times-smaller-than-Limbaugh's to smear him seriously believe that the man who constructed a broadcasting empire and became flabbergastingly wealthy in the process AND is rather fond of WINNING would be so manifestly stupid as to purge the Rams of all black players and refuse to sign any thereafter in a league that is more than three-quarters African-American? Or jump at the chance to bring in, say, a Super Bowl-winning coach and man of immense character and courage like Tony Dungy to lead the Rams back to the glory years of a decade ago? Sweet merciful crap, Karen, are you so obsessed with slandering Limbaugh as a racist that there's no room in your slime cabinet for libeling him as a greedy plutocrat as well?

But then the "Rush is a racist" meme was based on nothing but bovine scatology as well. Hardly a surprise to anybody who's even casually heard of Rush (like, well, Karen Hunter and the animals at MSNBC and the endangered critters who traffick in the "shit Limbaugh never said" market - they know who they are).

AP thinks Rush should sue, not insofar as he would win a libel case, but to force the blessed defendants to have to substantiate their lies. But anybody who knows Limbaugh knows that'll never happen. (1) Because he's not going to invest the coin in legal fees and such unless he can actually win the case, not just to make a point that this incident itself makes in, you should pardon the expression, spades; and (2) Rush isn't as pugnacious or vindictive as everybody seems to want to think.

Besides, you have to remember one other thing: the anti-Rush slimeicane wasn't aimed at him. It was aimed secondarily at the NFL and primarily at Dave Checketts, the former of which, like the rest of corporate America, is virulently allergic to "controversy," and the latter of whom just wants to buy the Rams. Given the choice between displaying simple basic human decency and honor, if not outright loyalty to Limbaugh (and, in Goodell's case, defending the integrity of the NFL) on the one hand and "doing what's best for business" on the other, what would you have predicted would be the outcome?

Yes, another rhetorical question:

Rush Limbaugh is expected to be dropped from a group bidding to buy the St. Louis Rams, according to three NFL sources.

Dave Checketts, chairman of the NHL’s St. Louis Blues and the point man in the Limbaugh group attempting to buy the Rams, realizes he must remove the controversial conservative radio host from his potential role as a minority member in the group in order to get approval from other NFL owners, the sources said…

Exactly when Limbaugh will be dropped is uncertain, though some familiar with the situation said it could be within the next week. It is unclear if the two sides even have spoken.

So, ultimately, this little episode isn't really about Rush Limbaugh, but rather of the insatiable gutlessness of corporate America in the face of the racist Left's equally interminable racial shakedown industry. But it does offer a commentary on the impossibility of any "post-racial America" as long as the racist Left continues to exist.

After phasering and quantum torpedoing and transphasic canoning the "Rush is a racist" BS to its odious constituent quarks, how can we not let El Rushbo have the last word?