Rush & the Civic Duty to Marginalize Conservatives [Andy McCarthy]

My friend Diana West has a terrific column on the lesson of the NFL’s hypocrisy and shabby treatment of Rush. She starts by pointing that bastion of the league’s upright, inclusive image — Keith Olbermann:

This job [i.e., Olbermann's NBC Sunday Night Football gig], now into its third season, makes Olbermann not a team owner, of course, but certainly a public face of the NFL. And a public face of the NFL with many filthy things coming out of it. These include, just sampling from recent days, his pronouncement that Limbaugh claiming his own success paved the way for Glenn Beck is “is like congratulating yourself for spreading syphilis.” We could slap a headline on that — “NFL talker compares star radio and TV conservatives with venereal disease” — except that trash talk against conservatives doesn’t generate mainstream outrage.

Take Olbermann’s noxious attack this week on Michelle Malkin for what he characterized as her “total mindless, morally bankrupt, knee-jerk, fascistic hatred without which Michelle Malkin would just be a big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it.”

Get that? Olbermann calls an accomplished and best-selling conservative author, commentator, blogger, wife and mother (who also happens to be beautiful) a “big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick,” but such dehumanizing venom doesn’t count as controversial, or even lightly strain his NBC-NFL connection. Why, at this rate, he could end up on a box of Wheaties. His comments certainly don’t rate as “divisive” or “inappropriate” – two of the coded charges leveled at Rush Limbaugh’s “public remarks” by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay that got Limbaugh’s blackball rolling in the first place.

It was all over so fast. Barely a day passed between the news that Limbaugh was bidding with Dave Checketts for the St Louis Rams and the news that Checketts was dropping Limbaugh as a partner.

But what a day. It goes down in the annals as the day the demonization of conservatism achieved not consensus, but normalcy, and the day the marginalization of conservatives became not a public sport but a civic duty.

Rush should sue. What happened to him was slander. He’d win it to. I am never watching another game again. In fact if anyone can find the phone number of the commissioners office or the email I’d love to tell Goodell that he lost a lifelong Packer fan. They call out Joe McArthy for telling the truth and yet they lie and slander Rush Limbaugh. Thats what McArheyism was all about only its only the left that does it.