As in most such things, it’s not necessarily what you say as how you say it. I’ve known people who could look you in the eye and call you a lousy sumbitch.....and you’d laugh. Seriously. Some people can just do that and get away with it. I’ve always found it a bit of a strange phenomenon.
Rush, among other talents, is an amazing wordsmith. He can eviscerate someone with words without swearing which takes REAL skill with the Queen’s English.
His use of the words “slut” and “prostitute” were, of course, taken completely out of context by the Liberals. Typical. They never, ever consider the little term “context” (one of my personal mantras on this subject is “Context counts”). In context, his characterizations of Fluke were dead on; hoisted her by her own petard.
Liberals don’t do that. They decide you offend them because you disagree with their sick world view and it’s all over: they’ll call you everything but ‘white’.
We shouldn’t fall into that same cesspool, but to suggest that Rush foolishly fell overboard into said cesspool is inaccurate. Did he realize the firestorm he’d create when he said what he said? Probably not at the moment, but shortly thereafter; probably during their next break after his ‘rant’. He then knew EXACTLY what was coming and was more than ready for it.
That’s also why he has survived over two decades on the air; hell, he has flourished.
After getting out of the service in the late 60s, I worked at a lumber yard in southern Missouri for a while, among the men I worked with, "sumbitch" was just a normal part of speech and was not even considered derogatory, all us sumbitches said it. If one wanted to be derogatory or say it in real anger, one said son-of-a-bitch, sounding it all out.