So it leaks that Rush Limbaugh is a small part of a large consortium attempting to purchase the St. Louis Rams NFL franchise . . . and then the world blows up. If this sad little story has done one thing it is this: it has exposed an entire swath of our society as some very sick people.

The long, sordid tale is below:

Rush is approached by St. Louis Blues chairman Dave Checketts who invites him to join a consortium of potential buyers of the St. Louis Rams. The idea being to keep the Rams in St. Louis and not move the team again to greener pastures. Rush being a monster NFL fan and a Missouri native loves the idea and signs up, though not without warning Checketts that certain people in this country just don’t like the name Limbaugh.

On his syndicated show Thursday, Limbaugh said he was approached by St. Louis Blues chairman Dave Checketts earlier this year about participating in a Rams bid. He also said Checketts assured him his involvement as a minority investor had been vetted by the NFL.
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“I said to him at this meeting, ‘Are you aware of the firestorm?’ He said ‘We wouldn’t have approached you if we hadn’t taken care of that,”‘ Limbaugh said.
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Limbaugh added that Checketts had told him his involvement had been cleared at the “highest levels of the NFL.”
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Despite getting sacked, Limbaugh said he still loved the NFL and would probably be “the biggest non-paid promoter of the sport.”

After it leaks out that Rush Limbaugh is trying to “buy an NFL team” the left in this country goes into overdrive and pulls out all the stops. A list of Rush Limbaugh quotes is leaked out onto the internet, including some very racist statements.

You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray [the confessed assassin of Martin Luther King]. We miss you, James. Godspeed.

This was apparently said live on the air in 1998 (back when nobody was listening to Rush Limbaugh /sarcasm) but only appeared out in the world in 2005 when “cobra” inserted into WikiQuote. When challenged “cobra” relied on that most excellent of authorities “zedladdy” who also had inserted some of his own racist but unfortunately not real Limbaugh quotes. Who are “cobra” and “zedladdy”? The American Thinker has a story on their traced IP to an upscale New York law firm: Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP.

Another example of fake but accurate. Rush is a racist, so even if we can’t find anything he said that is obviously racist we can in good conscience make up something because we are promoting a higher truth. I wish I was making this up, but these people really think this way, they claim Rush said this:

Take that bone out of your nose and call me back(to an African American female caller).

I’ve been listening on and off to Rush Limbaugh since 1997. The guy is no racist. I know real racists, they are rare but they are out there and Rush just isn’t one. You know the only people who think Rush is a racist? Lefties who don’t listen to his show and whose own view of race are so dysfunctional it would make your head spin. The idea that Rush would even say this would only make sense to someone on the left. No one on the right has been fooled by these false quotes because they don’t even pass the smell test. They are gross caricatures of what leftists think Rush believes about race.

Interestingly, they mixed into the fake montage of quotes some real ones (apparently when you lie like a dog, if you mix in a little truthiness in goes down easier), for example:

I think the media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well. They’re interested in black coaches and black quarterbacks doing well. I think there’s a little hope invested in McNabb and he got a lot of credit for the performance of his team that he really didn’t deserve.

We should all remember this one, it got Limbaugh wrongfully dismissed from ESPN Sunday Night Football back in 2003. You know the one problem I had with this quote? It wasn’t Limbaugh’s, he stole it. The guy was channeling every Eagles fan I knew in calling out McNabb as a QB that the media built up into a football god but was really only average and was holding the team back. We know why the media did it, it made them feel good that a charismatic, nice guy like McNabb was a black QB on a successful NFL team. Of course privately many in the sports world agreed with Rush, but they just didn’t have the guts to come out and say so, I mean look what happens when you do:

In his notorious ESPN comments last Sunday night, Rush Limbaugh said he never thought the Philadelphia Eagles’ Donovan McNabb was “that good of a quarterback.”
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If Limbaugh were a more astute analyst, he would have been even harsher and said, “Donovan McNabb is barely a mediocre quarterback.” But other than that, Limbaugh pretty much spoke the truth. Limbaugh lost his job for saying in public what many football fans and analysts have been saying privately for the past couple of seasons.

That’s Allen Barra, I guess we need to add another name to the racism list.

Rush Limbaugh didn’t say Donovan McNabb was a bad quarterback because he is black. He said that the media have overrated McNabb because he is black, and Limbaugh is right. He didn’t say anything that he shouldn’t have said, and in fact he said things that other commentators should have been saying for some time now. I should have said them myself. I mean, if they didn’t hire Rush Limbaugh to say things like this, what did they hire him for? To talk about the prevent defense?

Rush had to burn because he called out the media for their ra-ra cheer leading of a mediocre QB because they liked the color of the guy’s skin. That’s unforgivable if you understand how twisted these people are when it comes to things like race.

Rush also said this in 2007:

“Look, let me put it to you this way: the NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons, there, I said it.”

Raise your hand if you think the NFL doesn’t have a problem with too many of its players committing crimes off the field, acting like thugs on it or disrespecting the game in general with their behavior. No one? You only think Rush’s statement is a problem if you think the NFL doesn’t have one when it comes to its players. Michael Vick is back in football and Rush Limbaugh is the bad guy for pointing out the obvious fact that the NFL has an issue with thugs on the field? Eric Scheie at Classical Values is a little stunned by all this:

So the NFL won’t allow the likes of Rush Limbaugh within its hallowed tent, but dog torturer Michael Vick is just fine.

Yeah, I mean do we really want to get into the debate about the character of the NFL players?

The message? Uttering opinions with which powerful activists like Al Sharpton disagree is worse than feloniously torturing animals.
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OK, Rush may have been right, but rules are rules, and apparently whoever the authoritarians are that run things decided that you cannot express the opinion that the media wants black quarterbacks to do well. Rush got booted out of ESPN for saying that. And apparently there is no such thing as forgiveness in the sports world. Unless…
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Unless you electrocute and drown dogs, and slam them to death?
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Will someone please explain to me how expressing the opinion that the media wants black quarterbacks to win is worse than such vicious torture?
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As usual I’m not getting it.

Me either Eric, but I am a filthy racist and my enlightened racial betters really do know best. Guys like Jesse Jackson (extortionist, scumbag and crook) or Al Sharpton (anti-Semite, racist and liar). To be fair all six labels probably apply to both men. These two race heroes have led this recent attack against Rush Limbaugh and they have done it in their usual bomb throwing style. Rush shreds Jackson here and Sharpton here. The tragedy is that anyone lets them on the air anymore.

So why do Sharpton and Jackson get still airtime to spread these lies? Andy McCarthy writing in Corner has some thoughts:

I’m hunkered down on some projects and just heard about the phony attacks on Rush by the race-hustlers extraordinaire, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. I know Rush has big shoulders and he’ll handle it just fine. But everytime one of these stories comes up, which is all too often, I can’t help but think it says a lot more about us than whoever happens to be in the cross-hairs. Why do Sharpton and Jackson have careers? Why aren’t they shown the door for serial racism and dishonesty? Why does anyone give a damn what they say? Why does the press treat them like they matter when they’re a walking, talking parodies?

Because the press is as twisted and complicit as they are? Because they are of one mind when it comes to racial politics? Because we let them?

There’s only one way this nonsense ever goes away: When we say “enough!” and tell the race-baiters their time is up. It’s too much of an industry, so it probably won’t happen tomorrow. But the Sixties ideal is crashing and burning before our very eyes, and I think it’ll take a lot of its warped obsessions down with it.

The best press response to this though has been from Chris Matthews, who has (and I am not making this up) fantasized live on the air about sticking a CO2 capsule in Limbaugh’s head and blowing him up. Yeah, just like in James Bond.

At MSNBC of course when people carry firearms to political protests they are hinting about their dark, racist intentions to murder the president (even if they themselves are black), but when Chris Matthews openly talks about blowing someone’s head off, it’s all fun and games. What a sad joke. This guy really doesn’t see a problem with what he said and he certainly doesn’t see the double standard.

The absurdity of all this is that it only makes sense to the left. The (Australian, not British) Daily Telegraph wryly points out that if Rush had said any of the fake (but accurate!) quotes they claim he said, it would have been WWIII at the time, not a decade later when he tries to buy an NFL team. One of their commenters, Dave S. makes a nice point:

How is it that when Righties quote Lefties, they have video, audio, and notarized confirmation from the Pope, but when Lefties ‘quote’ Righties, they have Wiki entries contributed by ‘Cobra’?

Truth doesn’t require evidence apparently. Dealing with the left is like arguing with religious fanatics.

Stephen Spruiell has an nice comparison of what is and isn’t acceptable anymore in the NFL.

George Soros is acceptable.

What do I mean? Well he is rumored to be a part of the consortium buying the Rams. Yep, the guy who manipulated the Thai baht and nearly brought down the entire forex system plunging millions in East Asia into poverty with the ‘97 currency crisis. The guy who has bankrolled numerous organizations that have poisoned the political dialogue in recent years. Moveon.org’s “General Betray Us” ad and the Bush as Hitler ad were both funded with Soros money.

Soros (and his odious politics) can stay in the group, but Rush has been asked to leave to avoid further controversy.

Mark Steyn notes that CNN is more interested in fact checking SNL to make sure their comedy sketch didn’t stray too far from reality than in even bothering to see if these Limbaugh quotes existed. I mean Limbaugh’s every word is tracked for exactly this reason, the left is convinced he is a closet racist waiting to explode on the air.

As someone called Jason Whitlock says:
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“Limbaugh doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt on racial matters.”
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Why not? He does his show every day with an off-mike black sidekick yakking in his ear (Mr. Snerdley) and he has a black guest-host (the great Walter Williams). More to the point, when I began guest-hosting for Rush, I was amazed to discover that George Soros pays a team of stenographers, many of them called Zachary, to work their tippy-tappy fingers to the bone for three hours transcribing everything Rush or his fill-ins say in the hope that their efforts will one day be rewarded and he will deliver the big career-detonating soundbite. Among the afficionados of this service are, as I discovered recently, America’s “newspaper of record,” which faithfully follows the George Soros typing pool and dutifully plasters any potentially damaging bon mot on page one.
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And, aside from all that, 20 million people are out there listening.
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So where are these racist soundbites? Where’s the audio? Where’s the transcript? Name the year. Heigh-ho, say CNN’s Rick Sanchez and the rest of the basement-ratings crowd. Not our problem: It’s for Limbaugh to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he’s never said it. We’re too busy fact-checking anti-Obama jokes to fact-check our own reporting . . .

You can’t make this stuff up, if you tried they’d accuse you of lying (and racism of course). Oh and CNN’s Rick Sanchez who refuses to retract (or source) the quotes? This scumbag ran over a someone while driving drunk, then fled the scene. Red State has the whole story. His victim died paralyzed, in a nursing home in 1995, five years after the accident, but his killer gets to pontificate on the air about other people’s morality?

How about I come up with some fake but accurate stuff that liberals have said. Oh wait I meant accurate but accurate.

8. California Democrat Diane Watson thinks interracial marriage is icky: “He’s married to a white woman. He wants to be white. He wants a colorless society. He has no ethnic pride. He doesn’t want to be black.”

Real? Check. Racist? Check. Newsworthy? Negative, she’s black you fool, they aren’t racist.

6. Joe Biden explains why southern Democrats should vote for him: “My state was a slave state.”

Got it, you knew Joe Biden was on the list somewhere.

3. Democratic Mayor of New Orleans Ray Nagin denies that white people might live in New Orleans: “I don’t care what people are saying Uptown or wherever they are. This city will be chocolate at the end of the day.””

I’m waiting for the mayor of Fargo to declare his city “vanilla at the end of the day”. Should go over well.

2. Democrat Steny Hoyer reviews Michael Steele’s career: “[He has] a career of slavishly supporting the Republican Party.”

Slavishly supporting the Republican Party? This stuff is painful to read. I guess Hoyer is now out as a potential buyer of the Redskins should they ever come up for sale.

Every single one of those quotes is a real, legitimate, well-sourced quote. Totally real; not fake.
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Now ask yourself why the unsourced fake Limbaugh quotes get so much more play than these actual statements. Not so funny anymore, huh?

The MSM’s bias was never funny.

We live in a country where it has been 85 days since a black man was beaten into a wheelchair by white union thugs in the name of defending the president’s health care agenda from criticism. He was called racial slurs, it was caught on video and seen by numerous witnesses and guess what?

No charges have been brought against the men who did this.

Racism, don’t make me laugh, the left doesn’t care about racism and they never have.

We live in a country where the highest echelons of academia have been overtaken by people who think discrimination is okay.

According to the data, not all races are considered equal in the college admissions game. Of students applying to private colleges in 1997, African-American applicants with SAT scores of 1150 had the same chances of being accepted as white applicants with 1460s and Asian applicants with perfect 1600s.

An Asian makes a 1600 on the SAT and gets bounced for a black applicant who makes a mere 1150? Racism is real folks, but the real racism we don’t talk about, just the fake kind.

Somehow we have let people with terribly bent minds take over the halls of universities, police departments, the NFL, the media and politics. As a society we have a major sickness in that some of our members are allowed to openly lead lives that damage and discriminate against others without us complaining about it. Why aren’t we telling these racists to shut up? Why aren’t we sending a message that making up quotes about a man being a racist gets you fired? In what moral universe does Rush Limbaugh incite outrage but George Soros does not? Since when do men of the caliber of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson guide our racial conscience? Why are we okay with all of this?

Something has got to change because this isn’t a healthy way for us to live, the con men among us are running the show.