Rush on ‘Massa’
LIMBAUGH: Are you sure that Paterson appoints or is there a special election?
CALLER: I am reasonably sure that Paterson will be appointing the replacement, assuming that he, you know, doesn’t resign in the next 60 or 90 days.
LIMBAUGH: Let’s assume you’re right. So, David Paterson will become the massa…
CALLER: Yes.
LIMBAUGH: …who gets to appoint whoever gets to take Massa’s place. So, for the first time in his life, Paterson’s gonna be a massa. Interesting, interesting.
via Rush Limbaugh races to inject racial joke about Paterson into Massa mess.
I go for long stretches of time without listening to Rush/Hannity-esque hate radio, so I forget from time to time what utter douche bags these people are. The shock factor of not listening to these guys for months and then switching them on out of the blue is really awesome; it’s like visiting another planet.
Today I listened to Michael Medved and some moron from a “Religious Liberty” think-tank flipping out about the end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Their thesis was that forcing God-fearing, 1000% straight men like themselves to share locker rooms and barracks with gay men will mean the end of civilization. Presumably this is because all that uncorrupted religious straight-dude flesh will be too much of a temptation for gay soldiers — who naturally will have enlisted for deadly dangerous combat in stinking Middle Eastern hell-holes just to get a glimpse of toothless Christian boys from Arkansas naked. These megachurch-bred anti-gay advocates with their visceral terror about the end of the closet, sure that liberated gay men by the hundreds will be lying in wait to rape them the instant the shower-nozzles turn on … I mean, the amount of projection going on is so obvious, it’s almost laughable.
Then I get home and I read that Rush Limbaugh is making a funny about New York Governor Paterson and the scandal surrounding Representative Eric Massa. Massa is naturally is the hot news on every right-wing talk radio station in the country today because he is a poster child for exactly this same conservative sex-paranoia — a Democratic politician who apparently felt liberated enough in our permissive cultural environment to grope and tickle straight male staffers. Limbaugh, discussing the scandal with a caller who mistakenly believed that Massa’s resignation would allow Paterson to appoint a replacement, then made the above pun.
It’s not so much that Rush made a racist joke. Nor does it even bother me that the whole premise of the discussion was incorrect (Paterson doesn’t get to appoint a replacement). We’re used to Rush being both racist and factually indifferent.
It’s more that Rush is such an intellectually lazy piece of shit who’s been on dumbly racist autopilot for so long that he literally can’t avoid making a dumb, unfunny black-baiting joke when the opportunity is shoved in front of his face. You could see this joke coming from thirty miles away, and Rush is so intellectually obese, he still couldn’t get out of the way in time. I mean, the minute the conversation switched to a discussion of the black governor Paterson and a guy named “Massa,” who among us didn’t think that Rush was going to go there?
If the guy had even an ounce of self-awareness left, he would have tried to surprise us by not making the joke. It actually might have been funny, if he had left it alone, just this once, just to fuck with us, as it were. But the guy has been self-plagiarizing for like eighteen consecutive years now — hasn’t added a single thing to his act since the first Clinton term at least — and this shit is just muscle memory with him by now. He’s just mailing it in over and over again, using as little mental energy as possible broadcast after broadcast, so that he can make it to the end of every day and stuff his face with pills or French fries or whatever his drug of choice is these days. Ugh…