Rush To The Exits

Perhaps you got the idea Saturday evening that Ken didn't take Rush Limbaugh so-called "apology" to Sandra Fluke at face value. Apparently neither have Limbaugh's advertisers, as more and more of them are withdrawing their financial support of his Hate Talk radio program-- even after the apology. This came on the heels of the apology from David Friend, CEO of Carbonite, now an ex-sponsor of Limbaugh's radio show. First the update and then the original announcement:

“No one with daughters the age of Sandra Fluke, and I have two, could possibly abide the insult and abuse heaped upon this courageous and well-intentioned young lady. Mr. Limbaugh, with his highly personal attacks on Miss Fluke, overstepped any reasonable bounds of decency. Even though Mr. Limbaugh has now issued an apology, we have nonetheless decided to withdraw our advertising from his show. We hope that our action, along with the other advertisers who have already withdrawn their ads, will ultimately contribute to a more civilized public discourse.”

Original post:

Over the past two days we have received a tremendous amount of feedback on Rush Limbaugh’s recent comments.  I too am offended and very concerned about his comments.  Limbaugh’s remarks have us rethinking our future use of talk radio.  

We use more than 40 talk show hosts to help get the Carbonite message out to the public.  The nature of talk radio is that from time to time listeners are offended by a host and ask that we pull our advertising. This goes for conservatives like Limbaugh and progressives like Stephanie Miller and Ed Shultz. We even get customers who demand that we pull the plug on NPR. As an advertiser, we do not have control over a show’s editorial content or what they say on air. Carbonite does not endorse the opinions of the shows or their hosts.

However, the outcry over Limbaugh is the worst we’ve ever seen. I have scheduled a face-to-face meeting next week with Limbaugh during which I will impress upon him that his comments were offensive to many of our customers and employees alike.  

Please know your voice has been heard and that we are taking this matter very seriously.

Sincerely,

David Friend

Limbaugh's colleagues on the right-- like Eric Cantor-- are relieved and cautiously distancing themselves from his remarks, even if his the GOP far right lunatic fringe, like Satan-worshipper Bryan Fischer is disappointed. Yesterday, perhaps with Cantor's timidity in mind, George Will was on This Week with George Stephanopoulos admitting Republican politicians are afraid of the fat drug addict so popular with the GOP mouth-breather base. "GOP leaders," wrote Stephanopoulos, "have steered clear of harshly denouncing Limbaugh’s comments because 'Republican leaders are afraid of Rush Limbaugh'.”

“Boehner comes out and says Rush’s language was inappropriate. Using the salad fork for your entrée, that’s inappropriate. Not this stuff,” Will said. “And it was depressing because what it indicates is that the Republican leaders are afraid of Rush Limbaugh. They want to bomb Iran, but they’re afraid of Rush Limbaugh.”

ABC News political analyst Matthew Dowd said the Republicans’ apprehension to say anything negative about the conservative big hitter is based on the “myth” that Limbaugh influences a large number of Republican voters.

“I think the problem is the Republican leaders, Mitt Romney and the other candidates, don’t have the courage to say what they say in quiet, which, they think Rush Limbaugh is a buffoon,” Dowd said.  ”They think he is like a clown coming out of a small car at a circus.  It’s great he is entertaining and all that.  But nobody takes him seriously.”

While President Obama has denounced Limbaugh’s comments as “reprehensible,”  Republican leaders and GOP presidential candidates have used far milder language.

While Rick Santorum said Limbaugh’s comments were “absurd,” he said the radio host was an “entertainer” and “an entertainer can be absurd.”

“No,” Will said about Santorum’s response. “It is the responsibility of conservatives to police the right and its excesses, just as the liberals unfailingly fail to police the excesses on their own side.”
Rather than criticizing Limbaugh’s choice of words, Newt Gingrich instead blasted Obama for “opportunistically” calling Fluke on Friday to thank her for testifying.

When I asked Gingrich on Sunday about what Democrats are calling the Republican “war on women,” Gingrich again trained his scorn at the president, saying the issue was really about “religious liberty.”

Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan said during the This Week Round Table that Limbaugh’s comments “confused the issue.”

“It played into this trope that the Republicans have a war on women.  No, they don’t, but he made it look they that way,” Noonan said. ”It confused the larger issue, which is the real issue, which is ‘Obama-care,’ and its incursions against religious freedoms, which is a serious issue. It was not about this young lady at Georgetown.”

Noonan said Limbaugh’s comments were “crude, rude, even piggish” and that they were “deeply destructive and unhelpful.”

“It was just unacceptable, he ought to be called on it,” she said. “I’m glad he has apologized.”

Limbaugh issued an apology to Fluke on Saturday, saying his “choice of words was not the best” and that he did not mean for his “insulting word choice” to come off as a “personal attack.”

Gingrich did concede that Limbaugh was “right to apologize.”

But even his apology has been scorned. Obama’s senior campaign adviser David Axelrod told me Sunday that Limbaugh’s “quasi-apology” was based on the same “falsehood” as his original comments, which he said were “predicated on a lie” that taxpayers will have to foot the bill for birth control when in fact insurance companies will pick up the tab.

“I think what Rush Limbaugh said about that young woman was not only vile and degrading to her, but to women across the country,” Axelrod said.

Meanwhile Bob Schieffer had GOP also-ran, Ron Paul, as a guest on Face the Nation where Paul pretty much made it clear he considers Limbaugh nothing more than a bloviating hypocrite. He said the apology was insincere and it "was in his best interest... He's doing it because some people were taking their advertisements off of his program. It was his bottom line he was concerned about," Paul said. Of course, as an Ayn Rand devotee, Paul probably admires the whole way this is playing out.