A Sincere Apology

he first apology by Rush Limbaugh, posted on his website over the weekend, sounded forced, qualified, almost defensive. The second, broadcast live on his Monday show, sounded sincere and heartfelt.

Rush Limbaugh did something not usually associated with either himself or bombastic talk radio. He apologized for calling a woman a "slut" and a "prostitute."

The woman, 30-year-old Sandra Fluke, a law student at Georgetown University, wants the Catholic school to pay for contraceptives in its insurance policy because, she says, she and her friends cannot afford the cost otherwise. Apparently Fluke is not aware that contraceptive pills, according to John McCormack of The Weekly Standard, "can be purchased for as low as $9 per month at a pharmacy near Georgetown's campus." Or that some places dispense them for free, along with condoms.

Back to the Limbaugh apology. I have known Rush for some years (he wrote a forward to one of my books) and I think I can tell when he is sincere. A lot of what he does is theatrics designed to rev up his audience with red meat and to dramatize a point. It isn't that he is insincere about his positions; rather, it is because the media environment, in which we are all forced to live, requires some to be louder and more emphatic than others to attract attention and ratings.

Limbaugh opened his Monday show sounding contrite: "I acted too much like the leftists who despise me. I descended to their level using names and exaggerations to describe Sandra Fluke. It's what we have come to know and expect from them, but it's way beneath me. And it's way beneath you. It was wrong and that's why I've apologized, 'cause I succumbed. ... Don't be mad at them or mad at her. Everybody here was being true to their nature except me. I'm the one who had the failing on this, and for that I genuinely apologized for using those words to describe Ms. Fluke."

That sounds sincere to me and should end the controversy, but it probably won't. Limbaugh's political enemies have never demonstrated anything approaching contrition when it comes to their desire to destroy him. They have succeeded in getting several sponsors to drop ads from his show and calls for a boycott of his show continue. Limbaugh's detractors have the example of Glenn Beck, late of Fox News Channel, as inspiration. That network dropped Beck in part because, though his ratings were high, few sponsors wanted to be associated with his controversial remarks.

Limbaugh's apology shifts the burden to his critics, including Ms. Fluke. If they keep attacking Limbaugh, they risk damaging their own character for refusing to forgive. In fact, Ms. Fluke went on ABC's "The View" Monday morning to say that Limbaugh's apology changed nothing.

As noted in many other places, there is often a double standard when it comes to speech. Horrible things have been said about conservatives and especially conservative women, but have a conservative said anything close to those things about a liberal woman and you have the Sandra Fluke controversy. Rush is right, though. Such things ought to be beneath conservatives.

That civil discourse may be on life support is not news to anyone paying attention to political rhetoric. Part of this has to do with fundraising, which mostly relies on negatives, not positives, because as a fundraiser once told me, you can't raise money on a positive. Part of it is also ratings. In an uncertain world, people like to tune into programs -- liberal and conservative -- that reinforce views they already hold.

Limbaugh might resist this next suggestion, but I speak from experience, having had to apologize for a recent misstatement of my own. Limbaugh should invite Sandra Fluke to lunch and get to know her as a person, not a label. At the very least, he would send an important message that civility and strong political speech do not have to be contradictory.

Who knows, he might even persuade her to become a conservative. From his perspective, and mine, that would be a win-win for everybody, except liberals.

I wouldn't even go as far as to say commonly. Here's a freeper's common response.

Dear Ass Clown, You swine. You vulgar little maggot. Don’t you know that you are pathetic? You worthless bag of filth. As we say in Texas, I’ll bet you couldn’t pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel. You are a canker. A sore that won’t go away. I would rather kiss a lawyer than be seen with you. You are a fiend and a coward, and you have bad breath. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you. You are a bloody nardless newbie twit protohominid chromosomally aberrant caricature of a coprophagic cloacal parasitic pond scum and I wish you would go away. You’re a putrescence mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon. You are a bleating fool, a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world. An insensate, blinking calf, meaningful to nobody, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling beasts who sired you and then killed themselves in recognition of what they had done. I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, a malformity. I barf at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell? If you aren’t an idiot, you made a world-class effort at simulating one. Try to edit your writing of unnecessary material before attempting to impress us with your insight. The evidence that you are a nincompoop will still be available to readers, but they will be able to access it more rapidly. You snail-skulled little rabbit. Would that a hawk pick you up, drive its beak into your brain, and upon finding it rancid set you loose to fly briefly before spattering the ocean rocks with the frothy pink shame of your ignoble blood. May you choke on the queasy, convulsing nausea of your own trite, foolish beliefs. You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You are grimy, squalid, nasty and profane. You are foul and disgusting. You’re a fool, an ignoramus. Monkeys look down on you. Even sheep won’t have sex with you. You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot. And what meaning do you expect your delusionally self-important statements of unknowing, inexperienced opinion to have with us? What fantasy do you hold that you would believe that your tiny-fisted tantrums would have more weight than that of a leprous desert rat, spinning rabidly in a circle, waiting for the bite of the snake? You are a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a disease, you puerile one-handed slack-jawed drooling meatslapper. On a good day you’re a half-wit. You remind me of drool. You are deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go. I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid so stupid that it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. Your writing has to be a troll. Nothing in our universe can really be this stupid. Perhaps this is some primordial fragment from the original big bang of stupid. Some pure essence of a stupid so uncontaminated by anything else as to be beyond the laws of physics that we know. I’m sorry. I can’t go on. This is an epiphany of stupid for me. After this, you may not hear from me again for a while. I don’t have enough strength left to deride your ignorant questions and half baked comments about unimportant trivia, or any of the rest of this drivel. Duh. The only thing worse than your logic is your manners. I have snipped away most of what you wrote, because, well... it didn’t really say anything. Your attempt at constructing a creative flame was pitiful. I mean, really, stringing together a bunch of insults among a load of babbling was hardly effective... Maybe later in life, after you have learned to read, write, spell, and count, you will have more success. True, these are rudimentary skills that many of us “normal” people take for granted that everyone has an easy time of mastering. But we sometimes forget that there are “challenged” persons in this world who find these things more difficult. If I had known, that this was your case then I would have never read your post. It just wouldn’t have been “right”. Sort of like parking in a handicap space. I wish you the best of luck in the emotional, and social struggles that seem to be placing such a demand on you. P.S.: You are hypocritical, greedy, violent, malevolent, vengeful, cowardly, deadly, mendacious, meretricious, loathsome, despicable, belligerent, opportunistic, barratrous, contemptible, criminal, fascistic, bigoted, racist, sexist, avaricious, tasteless, idiotic, brain-damaged, imbecilic, insane, arrogant, deceitful, demented, lame, self-righteous, byzantine, conspiratorial, satanic, fraudulent, libelous, bilious, splenetic, spastic, ignorant, clueless, illegitimate, harmful, destructive, dumb, evasive, double-talking, devious, revisionist, narrow, manipulative, paternalistic, fundamentalist, dogmatic, idolatrous, unethical, cultic, diseased, suppressive, controlling, restrictive, malignant, deceptive, dim, crazy, weird, dystopic, stifling, uncaring, plantigrade, grim, unsympathetic, jargon-spouting, censorious, secretive, aggressive, mind-numbing, arassive, poisonous, flagrant, self-destructive, abusive, socially-retarded, puerile, clueless, and generally Not Good.ative forum on a regular basis.

I think that was a good day.

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