Shane Murphy, Freed Pirate Hostage, Slams "Disgusting" Rush Limbaugh
by Arthur Delaney
Huffington Post
04/24/09
Shane Murphy, second-in-command aboard the ship seized by Somali pirates this month, is happy to be home. But he’s not happy to be sharing turf with land-lubber Rush Limbaugh, who politicized the pirate affair by referring to the pirates as "black teenagers."
"It feels great to be home," said Murphy in an interview with WCBV in Boston. "It feels like everyone around here has my back, with the exception of Rush Limbaugh, who is trying to make this into a race issue…that’s disgusting."
Limbaugh made the remark to suggest why President obama might have appeared preoccupied at church on the day of the operation to rescue the ship’s captain, who was taken hostage by the pirates until Navy SEAL snipers shot them in a daring rescue effort.
"He was worried about the order he had given to wipe out three teenagers on the high seas," Limbaugh said. "Black Muslim teenagers."
"You gotta get with us or against us here, Rush," Murphy said. "The president did the right thing…It’s a war…. It’s about good versus evil. And what you said is evil. It’s hate speech. I won’t tolerate it"…
Limbaugh has always been disgusting, but I think he’s getting worse. In this vignette, Limbaugh implies that Obama is a champion of black Muslim teenaged pirates. His evidence? Obama seemed preoccuppied at church that day. A remarkable piece of psychoanalysis. I’ll give that kind of detective work a shot myself. Limbaugh’s comment is obnoxious, indicating to me that it’s because he’s a fat racist bully. How’d I do?
You turn the AM on and there’s Rush, or Savage, or another of the army of right-wing radio talk show hosts. You may not be listening hard, just working, driving, doing busywork or the laundry. Yet if you listen day after day, year after year, your brain will begin to change.
Words, even those heard casually and listened to incidentally, activate frames – structures of ideas that are physically realized in the brain. The more the words are heard, the more the frames are activated in the brain, and stronger their synapses get – until the frames are there permanently.
All this is normal. It is how words work. And the right-wing message machine has found a way to take advantage of it – activating, as it were, a conservative system of thought. The problem is, those thoughts on the radio are hate city. Savage rails against what he calls "the weakening of the military" by "affirmative action," "illegal immigrants," and "Marxist politicians." What proves it? The submarine accident in the Gulf of Hormuz.
Tune in to Rush. On the one hand he’s pitching "rugged individualism," "liberty," and the absolute free market against Obama’s call to unity and a sense of national responsibility.Then he’s hammering the AIG bailout and its bonuses, not mentioning that it was the conservative destruction of reasonable regulation that lay behind our economic disaster. One diatribe after another, the crucial facts left out or lied about, day after day, city after city. It has an effect.
Where are the progressives? Largely absent. Or talking issue by issue, not about general themes. We have some icons: Rachel Maddow, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert. But they only talk to us. They are not omnipresent. Can President Obama overcome all this? He is by far the best communicator in politics today. But what we get of him are sound bites, an occasional major address, and a five-minute talk Saturdays on You Tube. Meanwhile, the reporting in the media is about positions on issues, not about general principles that get repeated…
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