Rush Lies Again: ‘There Were Union Workers’ At Non-Union Mine Explosion
ThinkProgress
By Brad
April 16, 2010
Last Friday, Rush Limbaugh demanded to know why a coal miner union didn’t protect the 29 miners who were killed in one of Massey CEO Don Blankenship’s mines. After ThinkProgress reported that there was no union at the mine, Limbaugh claimed yesterday that it was a “fact” that “there were union workers there.” Limbaugh cited a news article that the “National Labor Relations Board has affirmed a decision that Massey Energy must rehire 85 coal miners who alleged they were illegally discriminated against because of their union affiliation.” Limbaugh concluded that “the left” who “are trying to blame the Massey disaster on its union busting” were wrong:
So there were union workers there, and so the United Mine Workers should have been overseeing their safety. United Mine Workers of America. There were union workers at that mine, and the left is trying to say, “You can’t say that, Limbaugh! Why it’s a nonunion shop. That SOB CEO got rid of all the unions!” No, no. He agreed to bring back 85 of them. You people, it’s been 21 years. At some point you are going to learn: If you go up against me on a challenge of fact, you are going to be wrong. It’s just that simple.On this “challenge of fact,” Limbaugh is wrong once again. The 85 union coal miners were actually at a different Massey subsidiary at a different mine in a different county than the one where the disaster occurred. The coal miners that Limbaugh references were located at Mammoth Coal’s Mammoth [formerly Cannelton] mine in Kannawha County, WV, while the tragedy occurred in Performance Coal’s Upper Big Branch-South mine in Raleigh County, WV. In fact, Blankenship successfully fought three different attempts by the United Mine Workers of America to unionize Upper Big Branch in the 1990s. After the last union drive failed, Blankenship cut bonuses in half and increased hours by fifty percent…
Since Rush’s listeners are not readers of ThinkProgress or Media Matters, they have no idea that what he said last week is wrong [unless they happen to be miners in West Virginia]. So the exposure of his first lie was meaningless except to those of us who already see him as one of the planet’s true bottom feeders. But one of his staffers, probably the one who blew it by feeding him the anti-Union line, found some way to make his silly gaff sort of sound like he was right all along. So he got to do it again today and impugn the liberals who are out to discredit him. His listeners got their daily dose of poor Rush under attack by the leftie meanies. They aren’t reading Media Matters, or Think Progress, or this tonight. They’re just living another day in the glow of Rush and the other Sarcasticrats.
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