“I think a fair read of what Rush Limbaugh said is that she was promiscuous.”
Not if you read it IN CONTEXT!
If he really thought she was a slut, or super-promiscuous, it wouldn’t be funny. It would be sad. The reason he was laughing was because the idea was so ridiculous.
Yes, if you take individual sentences out of a 3 hour broadcast, you can make it mean almost anything. But if he really thought that Fluke and others at Georgetown were having 1-2000 episodes of sex every year, then it would VALIDATE her testimony rather than refute it.
He used absurdity to highlight absurdity - as he always does. The idea that a coed in law school has time for sex 5 times a day is absurd - thus the idea that a coed in law school needs the government to help her pay for her birth control is absurd.
The first absurdity (she has sex over 1,000 times each year) reveals the second absurdity (she needs help paying for birth control). The first is a funny mental image, but the fact that the idea is ridiculous means her testimony and her argument for sponsored birth control was ridiculous.
I think Rush apologized because it became obvious that people didn’t appreciate the irony. Hard as it is for me to believe, they didn’t realize that the idea of a law school coed having sex well in excess of 1,000 times a year is ridiculous.
What has shocked me is that so many on FreeRepublic also didn’t catch the point...
I didn't have to make it mean almost anything, because Rush is an excellent speaker and he was specific.
Do you have a copy of the transcripts from 2/29 and 3/1? I do.
You won't find them at Limbaugh's site; he removed them today.
I keep a .pdf or .html copy of things I find on the Internet in case they are deleted.
It wasn't individual sentences, it was paragraph after paragraph, particularly 'double-down' day, 3/1.
He said she was base and immoral based on the amount of sex she was having. It's not being 'absurd' to call someone base and immoral and to say it's based on the amount of sex they are having. "Base" and "immoral" were his words, and he's the one who made up the part about the amount of sex she was having.
That was then deleted from the transcript on the website. Why? Was it because those of us reading it among the other words weren't reading it in context?