Rush becomes more brazen in his race baiting. I guess he must be feeling pretty confident that the white Rs are behind him 100%. Another one to put in my GOP racist file.
Decoding Limbaugh
Posted by Hendrik Hertzberg
The latest example of Rush Limbaugh’s disgusting race-baiting merits analysis.
Listen to the first minute of this excerpt from Limbaugh’s radio show yesterday (courtesy of Media Matters):
To review: in the sound bite Limbaugh plays, taken from the President’s talk to a group of state governors earlier in the day, Obama says, or tries to say,
As a condition of receiving access to Title One funds, we will ask all states to put in place a plan to adopt and certify standards that are college- and career-ready in reading and math.
Obama seems to pronounce the word I’ve boldfaced as “ax.” Limbaugh, after saying “Did you catch that?” and playing the sound bite a second time, sneers, “Obama can turn on that black dialect when he wants to and turn it off.” Then he suggests that the incorrect pronunciation was purposely spelled that way on the teleprompter. (Very funny.) Then he speculates that the President was trying to “reach out” to “the Reverend Jackson.” (Ho ho, if I may be permitted a bit of “black dialect.”) Then he says,
If I use the word “ax” for the rest of the day, am I going to get beat up and creamed for making fun of this clean, crisp, calm, cool new articulate President? Maybe we should do it and see what happens. I’ll ax my advisers.
Emphasis Limbaugh’s. (Limbaugh “jokingly” pronounces “ask” as “ax” several more times during the remainder of the program.)
What is one to make of this?
If you listen carefully, Obama actually pronounces it “aksk.” This may seem a small point, but it reinforces a larger one: Obama’s mispronunciation obviously had nothing to do with “black dialect.” It was, literally, a slip of the tongue, precipitated by what comes immediately before it in the same sentence: “As a condition of receiving access…” Pronounced ak-sess. Ak-sess … aks-k.
The reader will have already noticed the racist coding of Limbaugh’s description of Obama as “clean” and “articulate.” Yes, I know—Joe Biden used the same words about Obama during the campaign. But you’d have to be pretty obtuse not to notice the difference in intent, the difference between awkwardness and haplessness on the one hand, malice and contempt on the other.
Anyway, if there were any doubt about the matter, it was cleared up later in the program, when Limbaugh described Obama’s health-care reform as “a civil-rights bill” (dittospeak for “a black people’s bill”) and “reparations.”
It is a continuing scandal that this vicious demagogue is kowtowed to by Republican politicians and enabled by nominally respectable media corporations and advertisers.
Read more: newyorker.com |
