Posted on 03/02/2009 3:20:29 PM PST by Dan Nunn
Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele says he has reached out to Rush Limbaugh to tell him he meant no offense when he referred to the popular conservative radio host as an “entertainer” whose show can be “incendiary.”
“My intent was not to go after Rush – I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh,” Steele said in a telephone interview. “I was maybe a little bit inarticulate. … There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership.”
The dust-up comes at a time when top Democrats are trying to make Limbaugh the face of the Republican Party, in part by using ads funded by labor. Americans United for Change sent a fund-raising e-mail Monday that begins: “The Republican Party has turned into the Rush Limbaugh Party.”
Steele told CNN host D.L. Hughley in an interview aired Saturday night: “Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer. Rush Limbaugh — his whole thing is entertainment. He has this incendiary — yes, it's ugly.”
Steele, who won a hard-fought chairman's race on Jan. 30, told Politico he telephoned Limbaugh after his show on Monday afternoon and hoped that they would connect soon.
“I went back at that tape and I realized words that I said weren’t what I was thinking,” Steele said. "It was one of those things where I thinking I was saying one thing, and it came out differently. What I was trying to say was a lot of people … want to make Rush the scapegoat, the bogeyman, and he’s not."
“I’m not going to engage these guys and sit back and provide them the popcorn for a fight between me and Rush Limbaugh,” Steele added. “No such thing is going to happen. … I wasn’t trying to slam him or anything.”
On Monday’s show, Limbaugh reacted both to the comment and to the assertion on CBS’s “Face the Nation” by White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel that the radio host is “the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party.”
Limbaugh said: “I'm not in charge of the Republican Party, and I don't want to be. I would be embarrassed to say that I'm in charge of the Republican Party in the sad-sack state that it's in. If I were chairman of the Republican Party, given the state that it's in, I would quit. I might get out the hari-kari knife because I would have presided over a failure that is embarrassing to the Republicans and conservatives who have supported it and invested in it all these years.”
On the RushLimbaugh.com home page, the transcript is labeled: “A Few Words for Michael Steele.”
In the interview with Politico, Steele called Limbaugh “a very valuable conservative voice for our party.”
“He brings a very important message to the American people to wake up and pay attention to what the administration is doing," Steele said. "Number two, there are those out there who want to look at what he’s saying as incendiary and divisive and ugly. That’s what I was trying to say. It didn’t come out that way. … He does what he does best, which is provoke: He provokes thought, he provokes the left. And they’re clearly the ones who are most excited about him.”
Asked if he planned to apologize, Steele said: “I wasn’t trying to offend anybody. So, yeah, if he’s offended, I’d say: Look, I’m not in the business of hurting people’s feelings here. … My job is to try to bring us all together.”
You're right. It's exactly a non-apology and a refusal to be accountable for one's own words and actions. I'm sure Rush is too smart to miss that, but I expect he'll be a gentleman and accept the non-apology. That is, if this non-apology was offered in person, which I can't quite tell from the way the article's written.
But I allow for an ocaaaasional verbal flub.
The evil leftists would love to incite an internecine feud among us. I'll err on the side of keeping order in our house, and hope that everyone (meaning Michael Steele) takes a good lesson from it.
.
Rush was ON FIRE today. It was a really good show. The amazing thing about his is that he speaks so well extemporaneously.
BTW, should you care to do so, go through my posts and you will find that I supported Blackwell for RNC chair.
Fire that skunk! It is time to fight.
Nowhere in my post did I disagree with that. I’m not condemning Rush in any way. I’m ashamed at the way Steele is being treated on this site. I’m willing to accept the man’s apology and move on. Many are not.
Crazy.
We would be better represented by a retarded person than by Michael Steele. He is almost as stupid. He sounds like a dumb jock or something. No one should send a single penny to the RNC so long as this imbecile is in charge.
NOW GET BACK IN THE GAME AND GET THE DAMN BALL!!!!
I'm willing to take a "wait and see" approach with Steele. He made a major mistake. If he's smart, he'll learn from it, and be a better, stronger, leader now. He needs to listen to everything Rush said.
These are unprecedented times. Conservatives are not going to sit idly by, while our country is being torn apart, and our children are turned into indentured servants for the State.
RR didnt mean RINOS
“Will we ever get strong conservatives to represent us again?”
Only if we become people who honor God once again. We are now reaping what we’ve sown.
what’s this Obama urban agenda? Eliminating school vouchers for DC kids stuck in terrible public schools? Eliminating the tax deduction for charities? Encouraging abortion to wipe out black babies?
You also don’t win elections by helping the other side bring down all of your candidates.
I understand the point of avoiding the dims denegrate the opposition by portraying it as composed of ‘right wing shock-jocks.’ But, there has to be a better way to triangulate the attack on the dims and 0bama. I don’t have a problem with GOPers telling a camera that they want the President to succeed, — as long as they do absolutely nothing to help him.
In other words, play the dim “I support the troops, but not their mission” card on them.
In fact, run the dims playbook against them. Blame everything on 0bama. If 0bama ever does something we like, lament that it was too little, too late, etc.. That’s for mass consumption.
For those of us already in strong opposition, work behind the scenes to get the candidates we want. Don’t fight in public.
He’s just trying to give Joe Biden a run for his money in the 2009 Foot in Mouth Competition.
Are you crazy or do you just like losing?
You may have misunderstood me. I am more than willing to accept Steele’s apology and move on. People make mistakes. He apologized. It’s over. Steele and Rush probably both know they share a lot of common ground and will do more for conservatives by presenting a united front.
SUCKER!
A couple months ago I got a call from the National Republican Party. Their pitch was that they needed my money to fight the RATS is congress. I told them I wasn't about to give them money to solve a problem that they caused. I'm with you, once they get to DC they lose their minds. I think it is a very social town, so in order to be invited to the right parties, you need to think like the rest of the herd.
I'll happily answer that when you show where I made that assertion.
You redirect the topic from the evidence of leadership regarding Limbaugh.
Beyond speaking, what does he do?
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