Separated At Birth?
by digby
Oh my goodness. This Rush thing is really causing some dissonance in the GOP. I've been watching them dance on the head of a pin all day trying not to offend him while not endorsing his comments. It's almost painful.
But he is, as some of us have been pointing for years, the true leader of the Republican Party. And we were told by all the serious people that he was a harmless, mainstream entertainer and that we should all just lighten up --- even as luminaries of the Republican party and the luminaries of the conservative movement bowed and scraped like abused streetwalkers at the feet of their violent pimp. They defended his comments about Abu Ghraib, fergawdsake. He can literally do no wrong.
Sure enough, like clockwork, the head of the RNC just went crawling on his belly and begged for forgiveness for suggesting otherwise:
Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele says he has reached out to Rush Limbaugh to tell him he meant no offense when he referred to the popular conservative radio host as an “entertainer” whose show can be “incendiary.”
“My intent was not to go after Rush – I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh,” Steele said in a telephone interview. “I was maybe a little bit inarticulate. … There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership.”
The dust-up comes at a time when top Democrats are trying to make Limbaugh the face of the Republican Party, in part by using ads funded by labor. Americans United for Change sent a fund-raising e-mail Monday that begins: “The Republican Party has turned into the Rush Limbaugh Party.”
Steele told CNN host D.L. Hughley in an interview aired Saturday night: “Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer. Rush Limbaugh — his whole thing is entertainment. He has this incendiary — yes, it's ugly.”
Steele, who won a hard-fought chairman's race on Jan. 30, told Politico he telephoned Limbaugh after his show on Monday afternoon and hoped that they would connect soon.
“I went back at that tape and I realized words that I said weren’t what I was thinking,” Steele said. "It was one of those things where I thinking I was saying one thing, and it came out differently. What I was trying to say was a lot of people … want to make Rush the scapegoat, the bogeyman, and he’s not."
That's just sad.
BTW: Am I the only one to see a bizarre and freakish resemblance between these two pimps?
*I thought of this when I read Tom Watson's amusing take on Rush's speech.
** In case you don't have HBO, the other pimp is this guy.
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