Stop the War on Women

Monday, my assignment was to listen to Rush Limbaugh on the Boston Station Talk Radio 1200. The signal was weak; I had trouble getting the station to come in where I was working so I listened to it on computer via iHeart Radio on Talk 1200′s website.

Most of the ads were national sponsors, local station promos and FREE Ad Council Ads (this is your brain; this is your brain on Limbaugh.) Perhaps the Ad Council ads would be good for some of his listeners; self proclaimed DittoHeads will benefit from the promotions for help with addictions like gambling, smoking and sugar, healthy eating, exercise (get up off the couch) help with foreclosures and so on.

I did my homework, the list and record of ads are here, and the national sponsors referred to are here.

I haven’t really listened to Rush’s show before. And, just like that time I ate hot dogs and drank a huge slush before that centrifugal carnival ride when I was 12; I was wishing I hadn’t had lunch before tuning in to that hate and ugliness. I felt ill.

In the little bit of his rantings that I could digest, I listened to him discuss the Trayvon Martin Case, repeatedly comparing Zimmerman to Richard Jewel and accusing NBC of making a “race issue” out of the shooting. He implied quite a bit, (and overtly to those of us who don’t regularly drink his lunchtime koolaid), that Zimmerman isn’t really white and thus, “how could it be a race issue.” He never discussed the law that allowed Zimmerman to carry a gun and that seemed to protect him from being charged because he claimed to feel threatened …..

Limbaugh is divisive and dangerous. The rhetoric he uses, the pitting of one group against another, the guilt and assumed corrupt motives of anyone who isn’t a white man is clearly inflammatory.

He takes pleasure in insinuating racism under the guise of “entertainment.”

He revels in misogyny to the delight of an audience of primarily white men, most of them lonely or frustrated, between 25-55 who don’t know the definition or understand the meaning of the word.

It is frightening that we have people who drink this all of this in with their lunch, and then move around in society among the rest of us.

I believe that he, and the likes of him are responsible for the tone and tenor of national our conversation and it’s time for him to go.

Thus I pledge at least an hour a day to do my part to help this movement, to contact sponsors who advertise on his show to and boycott any sponsor who declares they stand by his “right to free speech” and refuse to get his filth off the publicly accessible airwaves.

Will YOU?

-PK