Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Rush Limbaugh did not make "James Earl Ray" statement

More at Zennie62.com | Follow me on Twitter! | Get my widget! | Visit YouTube | Visit UShow.com

While I may dislike Rush Limbaugh's takes on African Americans it does not mean I will not defend him if he's falsely accused of making a statement. I will defend Rush Limbaugh.

In this case, there's a quote that has flown around the Internet almost unchecked and found its way into a famous "Top 10 racist quotes" list that has been used by everyone from myself to some cable television news outlets.

It's this:

“You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray. We miss you, James. Godspeed."

Well, it turns out this is one statement Rush Limbaugh never said. It's hard to find but one really good blog item on this, and that's by a blogger named Samurai at the blog Smash Mouth Politics in 2005. He did a time-consuming research job and attributed the quote to a person named "Cobra". Samurai wrote:

First, the quote and the date that it was supposedly made by Rush: “You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray. We miss you, James. Godspeed. [4/23/98]” Rush never said it. It was made up back in about 2005 and this article proves it.

I am no computer research guru, but I was able to track down enough to prove that this quote first arose back in the fall of 2005, and there is no evidence of the quote before that date. Bottom line, it is inconceivable that such a quote was made by Rush Limbaugh back in 1998 and then never got any attention on the internet or elsewhere until 2005.

...Evidently, “Cobra” was still making this exact same claim in 2006 ON A STILL DIFFERENT blog site, when he was contemporaneously busted for making this s-- all up!

But even with the great research by Smash Mouth Politics, the quote was still passed around and grew new legs with Rush's interest in an NFL franchise, the St. Louis Rams. But the bottom line is it's wrong and Rush himself has taken action to address the matter.

But even with his work, there's no definitive article or post entitled "Rush Limbaugh did not make "James Earl Ray" statement" until now.

That does not change my view of Rush with respect to the NFL. I feel that given the overall weight of his statements regarding blacks, for him to own a team even part of it would be modern slavery. That's just my view. As I said in my video here -



- Rush can change this just by being a lot less angry toward African Americans. At least that's the way he sounds to me, and I've listened to him many times.

No comments:

Post a Comment