Uninformed Limbaugh Wonders ‘Where Was The Union’ At Non-Union Mine Disaster
ThinkProgress
April 13, 2010Last Friday, Rush Limbaugh asked why a coal miner union didn’t protect the 29 miners who were killed when Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch Mine in Montcoal, WV, exploded under unsafe conditions:Was there no union responsibility for improving mine safety? Where was the union here? Where was the union? The union is generally holding these companies up demanding all kinds of safety. Why were these miners continuing to work in what apparently was an unsafe atmosphere?
There’s a simple reason the union didn’t protect the miners: the Upper Big Branch Mine, like nearly all of the mines under Massey CEO Don Blankenship’s control, is non-union. In fact, the United Mine Workers of America [UMW] “tried three times to organize the Upper Big Branch mine, but even with getting nearly 70 percent of workers to sign cards saying they wanted to vote for a union, Blankenship personally met with workers to threaten them with closing down the mine and losing their jobs if they voted for a union”…
The fact that Rush Limbaugh is uninformed and made a massive faux pas like this only highlights an already completely proven point – Rush Limbaugh is an idiot who reads his writer’s lines with his huff-and-puff bravado, but hardly even knows what he’s saying. He just knows how to make whatever it is sound contemptuous. Here’s the discouraging part. What he said was completely wrong, but it doesn’t matter. His job is to offer a daily dose of contempt and mockery to keep his listeners pumped and unable to see "them" [any enemy of the Limbaugh meme] as anything but complete dirtbags. So what if he’s asking why the Unions hadn’t represented their miners in a mine that wasn’t even unionized. He got his dig in at the Unions and deflected attention away from the mine owners. He played blame-the-victim as he does on most shows. And if confronted with this massive blooper, he’ll have a spin story to explain it. But it doesn’t seem to have made it to his web site by today’s show. Instead we have a new crop of sarcastic mockery. Why bother with yesterday?
And right this very minute, his writers are combing for news to brew up tomorrow’s dose of poison…
What makes a person so evil?