Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby, in the course of thrashing Colin Powell, cites a 16-year-old William Raspberry column in which Raspberry apologized for accusing Rush Limbaugh of bigotry without having listened to him for more than a few minutes in bits and pieces.
Powell, who’s been critical of Limbaugh, must be similarly ignorant, according to Jacoby.
But wait. Has Jacoby seen the “Top 10 Racist Limbaugh Quotes”? [Link now fixed.] Two of them, at least, have been verified by Snopes, the gold standard for such things:
- “Have you ever noticed how all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson?”
- “Take that bone out of your nose and call me back.” [Spoken to an African-American woman who’d called.]
Two of the most incendiary quotes on the list — a paean to James Earl Ray, who assassinated the Rev. Martin Luther King, and a comment that the streets were “safer after dark” during slavery — appear to come from a book by Jack Huberman called “101 People Who Are REALLY Screwing America (and Bernard Goldberg is Only #73).”
I do not know the provenance of those quotes, and Wikiquote says they are in dispute because Huberman did not provide dates. So we’ll leave those in the interesting-if-true category.
On the other hand, there is no question that Limbaugh lost his gig as a football analyst after he made racially insensitive remarks about Donovan McNabb, a quarterback who’s black. And he’s had great fun with a parody song called “Barack the Magic Negro,” not least because he gets to claim, over and over, that his critics don’t get it and he’s not really racist.
William Raspberry retired in 2005. But he might want to consider his 1993 apology to Limbaugh. The evidence is clear that Raspberry got it right the first time.