"Fat, Lazy and Stupid"

by The Cranky Media Guy

Rush Limbaugh

I could be wrong, but I don't think Rush Limbaugh has ever been the Weasel of the Week before...not for a long time, anyway. Whether that's because Lard Ass is now perceived by the general public as the apologist blow-boy for the Republicans that he is, or because I can't stand listening to the disingenuous gas bag (and therefore don't catch the hundreds of Weasel-worthy droppings that fall from his mouth), I don't know. Either way, in the Great Scheme of Things, Rush's number has come up.

The other day, Al Gore encountered Winnie Skinner. She's a senior citizen who is forced to supplement her income by picking up aluminum cans and taking them to a recycling center for money. Her heart and blood-pressure medications cost more than she can afford, so she's forced to scrounge to make ends meet.

How, you ask, did a person like Winnie Skinner turn up at one of the carefully-controlled events Gore attends? Well, she was brought there by the United Auto Workers Union, which favors changes in medical care in this country.

As a commentator, Limbaugh is certainly within his rights to question such a staged event. One could argue that it's sleazy at best to use a poor old lady to promote a political agenda (especially when it could be pointed out that Gore, as a member of the Clinton administration, has done little or nothing to help people in Skinner's situation over the past eight years).

If he had stuck to discussing the sleazy tactics used by the Gore campaign to win the election, Limbaugh would have been hard to argue with. But because he's a mean-spirited asshole, Rush just couldn't resist taking things to the next level.

"It's obvious what's happened here," he said. 'Algore' went into Altoona, Iowa and said to his union buddies, 'Go find me some hobo I can use to make my case for socialized prescription drugs.'"

Hobo? This is a poor old lady who's struggling to survive. What does calling her names accomplish? So far, no one's refuted her story of collecting cans for income, so she hasn't been shown to be a liar. If anything, ridiculing her detracts from the argument Limbaugh seems to be trying to make that she was being used by Gore. If he could have resisted the impulse to be a bully, his point would have been much more persuasive.

Gore was callously using a poor old woman to score points with the senior citizens of this country and he deserves to be criticized for it. Calling Winnie Skinner a "hobo" though, just adds insult to injury.

Doing a radio show heard on over 500 stations (and having a call screener competent enough to ensure that no intelligently expressed opposing view will ever be heard on your show) must be intoxicating; that's the only way to explain the stupidity and cowardice of a multimillionaire gas bag verbally attacking a poor old woman.

If you want to persuade people of the correctness of your point of view, Rush, you might want to lay off calling old ladies "hobos". It just makes you look fat, lazy and stupid and as Dean Wormer said in Animal House, that's no way to go through life. On second thought, it might be a little too late to give you that advice, huh, Slim?

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