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.”
Again to those who support Sarah Palin and were livid about how the MSM tried to present her performance in one interview as typical of her being dumb and a moron: How disgusted were you with the MSM and Obama?
We know that the MSM were wrong then and we would be hypocritical if we weren’t as charitable towards Steele. Please be magnanimous now. He did apologize to Rush.
You need to brag about it like me :) (see tagline/profile)
“I am angry at Steele, but for the sake of the conservative movement, I will give him another chance because everyone deserves a 2nd chance.”
the republican party may not get a second chance if he gets a second chance. I don’t get angry for the sake of angry. I don’t hold a grudge. But if he’s going to be a liability then he has to go.
“I have yet to be able equate running his mouth with leadership.”
And being able to type makes you the leader of whom, exactly.
Steele stepped on his dick, bigtime.The battle between rinos and conservatives is out in the open now and you rino bastards have awakened a sleeping giant.No money whatsoever will be a damn good start.’Course I am sure you rinos will keep taking it from soros and his cronies.
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And again, I am not saying not to criticize either... just realize that there are other ways to go about showing displeasure that do little to help advance the liberal agenda on the media... hitting the RNC in the checkbook is a start.....
evidently not with the rnc.
I said no such thing.
"Get real. It figures you have a screen name named after a liberal group."
For the last damn time...I'm not named after that group!
You need to get over yourself, bucko.
You don't know me, and you don't know what you are talking about.
So he got “bamboozled” by the likes of D.L. and Tavist?..after all the hip-hop and other crap?
Not ready for prime time?
Not ready for overnights.
TOO LATE asshat Steele, we are onto you.
I remember being pissed off wishing he would say something like that to me.. (I’m certified mutt enough to comment on anything like this. :-> )
I read on Michelle Malkins site how Steele agreed with Hugley about how the GOP Convention looked like “Nazi Germany” yeah Michael, how can you sit there and nod your head when that kind of crap is spewed
The script as posted here. Not sure if it’s legit or not.
The transcript of the relevant portion of the segment, which began 15 minutes into the 10 pm Eastern hour of Hughley’s program, “D.L. Hughley Breaks the News:”
D.L. HUGHLEY: ...The tenets of the Republican Party are amazing and they seem warm and welcome. But when I watch it be applied — like you didn’t have to go much further than the Republican National Convention.
MICHAEL STEELE: Agreed.
HUGHLEY: It literally look[s] like Nazi Germany — it really did. I make — said that point. It just does not seem — like not only are we not welcome — not only are we not welcome, but they don’t even care what we think. And that —
STEELE: Well, I’m here now —
HUGHLEY: That seems to be the way I —
CHUCK D: I’d like to say — I covered the Republican convention in ‘96 for MTV. I have been involved with the Choose or Lose and all — Rock the Vote for the last 12 to 20 years and — seriously, their agenda was totally somewhere else, which totally — you know, didn’t have black people or people of color in mind. So they have a big — they may have the right person to try to sell them. I’m just saying the tricks should be over as using something else to try to get black people. I mean, real talk is going to have to get people of color for real things. I mean, I feel that — first of all, the two-party system is just played. It has to expand. The Green Party had Cynthia McKinney and Rosa Clemente, with issues and dealing with a lot of issues that we kind of felt, but also at the same time, maybe the rest of America would have had a problem with it. So it’s got to be a situation where maybe three parties — maybe four parties, talk to all of the people, and maybe the whole system being repaired.
HUGHLEY: Well, you’re right. A lot of the things I see Republicans do specifically are reactionary. They’ll go, you know what — oh, they don’t like Hillary? Let’s give them Sarah Palin. They voted for Obama. Let’s give them Michael Steele, and the other guy who will not show who he is yet. And so, it is always so — it is so plastic, that you go, wow, is this what they think? They think that we — they’re missing the entire point of what happened during the Obama transformation. They missed the entire point, and I don’t understand that. That’s what seems so off-kilter to me.
STEELE: But let me mention a couple of things. There was a Michael Steele before there was a Barack Obama. I mean, the reality of it is, I had established — I was the only black lieutenant governor in the country at the time. I was the only statewide black elected official when I was lieutenant governor of Maryland from 2003 to 2007. And then Obama got elected in 2005. And so that wasn’t about, you know, oh, geez, let’s do this because of Obama. The fact is — let me make the second point. The second point is — you know, when I talk about hip-hop, I’m really not talking about specifically just hip-hop. I’m talking about the Republican Party having — having [an] urban agenda, an agenda where our community lives, where our community is creating wealth, going to school, living and dying — and have something to say to them. I’m not trying to play off of hip-hop. I’m not trying to use hip-hop. What I’m trying to recognize is there something of value that’s happening in the community that’s reflected on the economic side of hip-hop, and I think that’s something we’re talking about.
Yep...you got it.
They aren’t the first and, sad to say, they won’t be the last.
Rush also said that Obama was doing this to provoke the Republicans into criticizing him, and Gibbs confirmed it at the press conference. If Steele and Cantore and the rest of them are smart, they can flip this table right back over on the White House. But I won’t hold my breath.
Steele needs to reason like Rush and take FUBO on the issues like Rush does.
Oh,he proved himself alright.He’s a rino. What more proof does one need.
A Few Words for Michael Steele (TRANSCRIPT/RUSH CALLS STEELE OUT!)
Rush Limbaugh Show - transcript from site | 3-2-09 | Rush
Posted on 03/02/2009 3:08:41 PM PST by The Spirit Of Allegiance
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2197617/posts
Limbaugh at CPAC (RINO David Frum whining)
The New Majority (of weasels) | March 02, 2009 | David Frum
Posted on 03/02/2009 2:49:34 PM PST by SolidWood
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2197604/posts
Amen, you are EXACTLY right.
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