It's not quite a smoking gun . . .Rush is right!

But it is a gun, and it has a pack of cigarettes laying next to it.

Edit: Welcome Toby Harnden’s Telegraph readers! I should point out that this isn’t really “protein wisdom,” it’s like the Wiki-pw. But why not stop by the mothership and see what our hosts have cooked up lately.

Via a Facebook update from Michael in MI comes a post from Smash Mouth Politics, attempting to scour the net looking for a supposed Rush Limbaugh quote declaring that James Earl Ray deserved a Medal of Honor, presumably for assassinating Martin Luther King.

Smash Mouth’s google-fu turned up an internet bulletin-board devoted to, of all things, comic books, where a similar argument was raging in 2005. One poster there, “Loren,” did yeoman’s work trying to hunt down the source of this quote and found that most places that republished it attributed it to Wikiquote, a sister website to Wikipedia that shares the trait of being totally user-created. This means it’s ripe for abuse, since anyone can post anything and attribute a false quote — BUT the saving grace is that all edits, no matter how minor, are preserved.

And that’s where you’ll find this: a Wikiquote contributor who devotes basically his entire time on the website posting quotes from Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, James Dobson, and other conservative boogeymen. At just after 6:00 AM GMT on July 20, 2005, he posted this to Rush Limbaugh’s Wikiquote page:

“You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray. We miss you, James. Godspeed.” [2/21/03]

Three minutes later, though, he fixed it:

“You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray. We miss you, James. Godspeed.” [4/23/98]

April 23, 1998 was the day James Earl Ray died, thus making “Godspeed” sound like a more accurate statement.

Now what does all this have to do with anything? Because eight minutes before uncorking that whopper and trying to tar it to Limbaugh, this vandal posted this quote and attributed it to Rush:

”I mean, let’s face it, we didn’t have slavery in this country for over 100 years because it was a bad thing. Quite the opposite: slavery built the South. I’m not saying we should bring it back; I’m just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark.” [3/14/03]

tMore...

Obama and the End of White Guilt

Barack Obama portrayed himself as America’s first “post-racial” president, yet he and his supporters continue to play the race card against ordinary Americans who oppose him. Despite a big election victory, Obama is unable to understand that ordinary Americans do not like being bullied. Nor does he understand that they do not like being called racists for political disagreements.

The Obama agenda is desperate and out of ideas. In their desperation, they deal from the bottom of the deck. The race card has never failed them before, and when the logic of their position fails, evoking racism always ends the discussion. Unfortunately for them, this time the discussion will not end. The more they smear everyday Americans with the charge of racism, the more meaningless the accusation becomes.

In the wake of town halls, tea parties and 9/12 protests against Obama’s policies, many media pundits—Jimmy Carter, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, and Newsweek Magazine, to name a few—have branded these patriotic Americans as racists. It is appalling to think that the Left has played this game for decades. Americans of all backgrounds have fought for Civil Rights for too long to have accusations of racism used in such an offhand manner. Read more:

The R-bomb: Are You A Racist?

You may think racism means prejudging or discriminating against people because of their race. All right: can you define race? Go on, try it.

Or host a party and challenge your guests to come up with an explanation that doesn't start a fight. Is race a biological classification, an ethnic one, a religious one, a geographic one, or what?

If the meaning of race is slippery, how precise can this term it feeds - racism - be? And if the definition is what enables us to evaluate the facts, where does all this leave us?

Racism today belongs to a class of words whose definitions have remarkably little fixed meaning. But racism once described unwholesome behavior that on its own was measurable -- like refusing to sell your home to members of certain minorities.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/09/the_rbomb_are_you_a_racist.html

Mark Levin Interviews Stephen A. Smith

Stephen A. Smith, a sportswriter & TV personality, shares his thoughts on what's happening in America in 2009.

Black or White or Half Black Half White