Hey, everybody! Rush Limbaugh has issued a gracious apology for his attacks on Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown law student who testified before congress on the costs of birth control. Here it is:
For over 20 years, I have illustrated the absurd with absurdity, three hours a day, five days a week. In this instance, I chose the wrong words in my analogy of the situation. I did not mean a personal attack on Ms. Fluke.
After a long paragraph in which he basically repeats his original argument about birth control, such as it was, this time without directly referencing Fluke, he continues:
My choice of words was not the best, and in the attempt to be humorous, I created a national stir. I sincerely apologize to Ms. Fluke for the insulting word choices.
Uh, “I chose the wrong words in my analogy of the situation???”
“My choice of words was not the best??”
Here’s what he originally said:
So Miss Fluke, and the rest of you Feminazis, here’s the deal. If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex. We want something for it. … We want you post the videos online so we can all watch.
He also called her a “prostitute.”
So let me rewrite that for you, with some nicer words this time:
So my dearest Miss Fluke, and the rest of those who share a love of feminism and the tenets of National Socialism, I would like to present to you a most intriguing proposition: If we are called upon to help finance your purchase of medical treatment and/or various and sundry items designed to prevent pregnancy, and thus to provide financial support to you as you make sweet, tender non-procreative love with your beloved, we humbly request something in return for our investment. To wit, we would like you to memorialize your lovemaking in video format, and for you to graciously place this video tribute on the Internet so we may share in the pleasure of enjoying these tender moments.
Oh, and instead of “prostitute,” why not refer to her as a “courtesan?”
Yeah, that’s not really any better. (And for some reason you still think taxpayers are paying for birth control, when in fact the issue is insurance coverage.)
In an attempt to be humorous, I would like to suggest to you, Mr. Limbaugh, that you stuff your apology up your ass, you worthless piece of shit.
I do not, of course, mean that as a personal attack.
Also, NWO, your solution of let them starve is unsatisfactory as well. Do you propose to eat yearlings? Jonathan Swift made some excellent points for it.
So your choice, Owlyslave, is that poor women should never have sex, and that if they have sex their children should starve?
Well, uh. I’d love to say it was a surprise, but.
But since women’s bodies are our sexuality, and some of those poor women may be conventionally attractive, what happens when they inadvertently arouse some random guy?
Obviously they can’t have sex with him, since they can’t afford birth control, but as Slavey has informed us in the past that would make them evil bitches. So I guess they just shouldn’t ever leave the house?
If aspirin really was a contraceptive, they wouldn’t talk about banning it, because they use it too.
And what is it with women and their love of big government?
You do realize the founders of libertarianism were women, right?
Rose Wilder Lane
Isabel Patterson
Ayn Rand
Last time I checked, libertarianism meant NO GOVERNMENT.
MRAs have a certain illogic so twisted it boggles the mind just trying to unravel it to find out exactly how it doesn’t make any sense. Reading MRA posts and watching MRA videos is like watching VenomfangX videos.
Limbaugh’s fauxpology might have been slightly less pathetic if it hadn’t come at the end of three solid days of publicly smearing a private citizen for nothing more than a) testifying before Congress about health-care coverage and b) being recognizably female.
On Day Three, he mocked her for receiving a phone call of support from the President, making smarmy comments and kissy-kissy noises in what might be the most embarrassing display of transparent personal jealousy ever broadcast over the radio.
Frankly, I see this as my cue to keep pushing and get the sad little creep off the airwaves permanently. How is he still around, anyway?
B-but Shaenon, don’t you know women are nothing more than spoiled princesses who get whatever they want and are always pardoned for their mistakes? You aren’t suggesting women actually have to put up with discrimination, do you? My small MRA brain just can’t take it! There is so sexism against women! EVER!
/has been recently watching a lot of Daria on DVD lately. Translation: sarcasm.
That’s the only thing that surprises me about all these “women should be forced to have children as punishment for having sex” types. They have absolutely no issue with sacrificing the health and well-being of kids in order to punish those dirty dirty women. Hey misogynists: some of those kids are boys!
I guess if they wanted to be able to eat regularly, they would have had the good sense to have been born to rich people, right?
yep, they don’t count kids as people.
One of the most hilarious things about red scare panics is how utterly disconnected they are from reality. There are no self proclaimed communist nations who have made great economic advances or great health care advances in the past few decades? Really, I’m sure the Chinese and Cubans would be shocked to hear about those things. Even if you are accepting post-Mao “Maoist” idealogy and Stalinism as true communism/socialism (which a pretty large share of Marxists would not), it’s still not true that all of those countries have failed either. I can find more than one example of a capitalist country that suffered economic collapse or was taken over, but somehow all they ever have is that the Soviet Union didn’t work out, that’s it, that’s their proof that all Stalinist, or even more hilariously Maoist, countries are doomed.
That’s wrong by definition. Any system that is working this way is by definition failing at the task of socialism (esp. communism). The idea of wealthy communist bankers is more than a little amusing though, it’s like short giants or something.
@DSC
always did find it hilarious that the commie scare of the 50s is now the current socialist scare.
I have not read this yet but it looks like a good read http://www.pfaw.org/rww-in-focus/rise-of-the-new-mccarthyism-how-right-wing-extremists-try-to-paralyze-government-throug#communism
I’m kinda tired of the “I don’t want my tax dollars funding XYZ! It’s insulting to force me to pay for XYZ!”
You know what? Chances are high you specifically won’t be paying for it. Nobody tracks every penny of tax you pay, it all gets lumped to a big pool to be spent by the government. Your money is another step removed when your money could possibly be payed to an organization which then may spend it on something.
Yes, citizens should have a say in how tax money is used, but it is actually more “government should spend that money wisely” not “I am personally outraged at the $.000000001 that I and every other citizen are being forced to pay.”
Chances are, in fact, that if everyone could choose how their personal money was spent, there would be enough progressives out there that whatever money went towards abortion/contraception/etc would be covered by them, and you could happily put yours towards ND or something…
* are being forced to pay on average
Actually that is an excellent question.
Hey, NWO, how do you think your personal contribution to the tax system should be spent? What are you OK with funding/subsidising?
Like when people objected to their taxes going to fund the ABC, and the ABC did an advertising campaign with the slogan “your 8c a day”. Wonder what that would look like with health care “your X cents a day”. 🙂
@Cassandra
Legislation that forces all women to beat the crap out of each other each month probably. We all know his obsession with women shedding blood for men and all that.
@ Quackers
Maybe we can do it during our periods as a sort of apology to men for menstruating at them.
Silly Cassandra don’t you know menstruation is just an evil feminazi plot to kill eggs that could eventually become a real babby?!
Next time I have to pay for another fucking sport stadium in my city so dudes can impress one another, I’ll send Rush the bill.
Even though this isn’t about tax dollars, I’m a woman and I pay goddamn taxes. I’m pretty sick of the whole “we mustn’t spend men’s tax money on women” thing. (Gosh, and I thought the wage gap was a myth… suddenly when we come to who pays more taxes, MRAs are happy to acknowledge it!)
Really, we spend so much of the tax money collected from private citizens on corporations, if you’re worried about “wealth redistribution,” women’s healthcare is not the place to start.
Not that it matters, because this isn’t about tax dollars. It’s about women who already pay for healthcare getting contraception included in the package that they’re paying for, the same way other preventative healthcare is included.
I’m kinda tired of the “I don’t want my tax dollars funding XYZ! It’s insulting to force me to pay for XYZ!”
Because spending a small amount of your earnings on other people who may really need it is such a communist thing to do!
Seriously…here technically all taxpayers DO pay for birth control (and all other healthcare). You don’t even have to pay the standard prescription charge (£7.20, or $11, unless you’re old or a kid or don’t have a job or you have a disability or so on). It’s all free. And I’ve never heard anyone complain about it other than, like, extreme Catholics.
I sometimes wish that taxes were more directly tied to specific spending-it tends to make people more willing to vote for it.
I had a Facebook argument with one of these types…he swore up and down he thought children were a blessing but used this phrase when talking about Ms Fluke: “presumptively so she can get laid without worrying about consequences.”
As soon as you say that, it stops being about anything less then punishing women for having sex by making them have a child.
Just the personalizing of all these attacks is weirding me out. Fluke wasn’t speaking about her own sex life. She wasn’t asking for contraceptives specifically for herself.
I’m having trouble imagining a man who spoke in favor of defense spending getting broadly described in the media as “the murderer who wants Congress to give him money to kill people.”
had a Facebook argument with one of these types…he swore up and down he thought children were a blessing but used this phrase when talking about Ms Fluke: “presumptively so she can get laid without worrying about consequences.”
Same here. There’s a certain frothing-at-the-mouth quality about those who just keep hammering on consequences, consequences, consequences. Taking responsibility for your reproductive health isn’t enough, if you think you deserve it, you have to be willing to pay for it in some arbitrary way. Life’s a bitch and there are still consequences to spare left for men or women who make poor choices, sexual or otherwise. But that’s never enough for some people. They have this idea that young, sexy women are behaving badly, and they want to see blood. I like to ask why the punishment of some hypothetical Coed McTramp is so important as to sacrifice the health and happiness of all the other women in the world? What makes her comeuppance so much more vital than any other consideration? Sometimes it makes the frother pause but mostly not.
Here’s something I don’t get about Rush: How is he so ignorant about how hormonal BC works? A bunch of people have pointed out how hypocritical it is for a four-times-married man with no children to bluster on about how he thinks women who need access to birth control are sluts. I want to know how a four-times-married man with no children never learned that the amount of hormonal BC that you take does not vary by how much sex you’re having. Did he never talk to any of his sexual partners about birth control? Did he just assume the woman would handle it? Did the women he was with have no problems with that arrangement?
I have spoken in-depth about The Pill with every man I’ve ever been with. Me and my boyfriend talk about my birth control lots. We talk about any conflicting medication I might be prescribed, we talk about if/when I plan to take a week off pills, I talk about it if there’s a day when I forget and take it a couple hours late, he asks how many packs I have in the house and whether or not he could give me a ride to the pharmacy. I mean, we don’t rant on and on about it obsessively, but it plays a major role in a) my health and b) our relationship, so it definitely comes up on a regular basis. There’s no way he could be ignorant about the use of hormonal BC by this point in our relationship even if he didn’t have a good understanding of it when we got together (which he did, of course). I don’t understand how Rush could possibly know so little about it.
A cynical part of me wonders if he knows how The Pill is used, but pretends he doesn’t because it gets in the way of his slut-shaming.