In case you missed it---In his “statement” on Saturday on the Sandra Fluke controversy, Rush Limbaugh said he didn’t “mean a personal attack” on the Georgetown University law student. If so, then there’s an enormous disconnect between the guy’s intentions and his actions, because the transcripts on his site reflect upwards of 20 very personal attacks on Fluke.
Elsewhere:
*Richard Cohen of the Washington Post writes that Andrew Breitbart was a “bomb-thrower without ideas.”
Every journalist knows the expression “too good to be true.” But for Breitbart, the Sherrod story was too good not to be true. It had to be true. She was exactly the kind of person that a left-wing, socialist, Muslim president like Barack Hussein Obama would like to appoint to high federal office. Call Breitbart’s tactics what you will, it wasn’t journalism.
Cohen contrasts the contributions of Breitbart with those of James Q. Wilson, the conservative scholar famous for the broken-window theory.
The distance from Wilson to Breitbart is one way to measure how deeply lost the American conservative movement has become. The recent lineup of earnest fools who have proclaimed their readiness to rule the nation and the world was — and remains — a depressing and frightening sight. Imagine President Perry or Santorum or Bachmann or Palin or Gingrich. This horror is partially the product of a Republican intellectual and political establishment that has only one value: to win.
*Daily Caller notes that Sandra Fluke credits Media Matters for an “excellent story on their website” about the Limbaugh affair. Included in the Daily Caller write-up is an h/t for Media Matters for the item. Later, Bill O’Reilly plays the same clip of Fluke crediting Media Matters and makes this observation: “Anyone citing Media Matters has to be a committed leftist.” That include the Daily Caller?
*Ed Schultz complains of the “false comparison” between his own “slut” moment and the prolonged, “slut”-including attack of Rush Limbaugh on Sandra Fluke. Watch the video below of Schultz’s apology — to conservative tough Laura Ingraham. Airtight.
*The New York Observer looks at the Twitter implications of the Rush Limbaugh-Sandra Fluke flare-up. The piece notes that there’s an “unverified” Rush Limbaugh Twitter account (@limbaugh) out there: “The only thing worse than not having a verified account is actually having a verified Twitter account with far fewer followers than an unverified account of you that’s never actually been used.” Lesson? People enjoy Rush when he’s saying nothing, according to the Observer.
*Confusion descends on the Rush Limbaugh advertising situation. Here are the lead graphs of a Chicago Tribune piece on the topic:
Two Chicago-area companies were caught up Monday in the growing backlash over Rush Limbaugh’s on-air branding of a law student as a “slut,” but both said their commercials aired on the radio talk show by mistake.
Responding to calls that they pull their ads or face boycotts, Sears and Allstate both said that the commercials were never scheduled to run on the “Rush Limbaugh Show” in the first place.
How does that happen?
*NewsBusters blasts MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow over how to characterize level of government “mandation” in contraception coverage.
*The country’s alt-weeklies are putting together something of a wire service to share content. It’ll be called the AltWeeklies Content Exchange and members will be able to share their stuff for free; outsiders will need to pay a licensing fee.
*Just how fast does Michele Bachmann want to sprint away from her previous statements on gay rights/gay marriage? Watch her get in the starting blocks in this interview with Piers Morgan, who swats away her contention that she’s not judgmental.
