Harlan Ellison Vs. Rush Limbaugh

The following is a response that HE made to a posting on a message board at Ellison Webderland about the Michael J. Fox ad and Limbaugh's mocking of it and Mr. Fox.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Copyright c 2006 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation. All rights reserved.

You really should have seen/heard the totality of Limbaugh's vile performance.

He accused Michael J. Fox of acting; that is, PRETENDING to have the acute symptomology. And only an ignorant meanspeaking person, either passively or intentionally uneducated as to the symptoms of this awful malaise, would fail to understand that when one goes OFF one's meds with this disease, one grows LESS agitated, and movement becomes so restricted that, eventually, they cannot move at all. Are, in fact, frozen like a gnat in amber.

But even were this NOT the case, Limbaugh did not rationally question Fox's acute wrenching, he repeatedly -- let me say that again -- he REPEATEDLY used the words

DESPICABLE

and

INDEFENSIBLE

and

INEXCUSABLE

though he admitted on-air that he had ABSOLUTELY NOT A SCINTILLA of evidence that Fox was "guilty" of his assumptions, his accusations: not taking his medicine...merely "acting." (And why SHOULDN'T he, if he was trying to make a passionate point, to demonstrate as powerfully as he was able, what the scourge looks like to the uninitiated, all in service not of, say, a lying semiliterate president who spins truth to his own self-righteous purposes day after day, sending hundreds to their deaths, just to keep his party in power and to burnish his ego, but in aid of scientific advancement that well might banish such awful terrors from human ken,) Urged to be their attack-hound yet again, Limbaugh unshipped his faux-outrage not because he gives a fuck about the verities of Fox's appearance, but because of the power, the passion, the EFFECTIVENESS of what this young man did. Had it been a dud, we'd have heard not a caw from this butcherbird.

He excoriated a young man whose career has been exemplary, his life scandal-free, his behavior gracious and decent, and he did it for odious ends. The pillhead lynch-mob spokesman fulminated on-command for his masters.

He is, like his coven mates Coulter, O'Reilly, Buchanan, Falwell, Robertson and the rest of that slavering wolf-pack of loathesome inhuman scuts, a disgrace to the human race. They operate with twisted eugenics and mildewed DNA, behaving like the worst foaming beasts ever bred in Satan's Cauldron. Their like cannot be tolerated a moment longer. They sully the earth they walk, they poison the air we breathe, they blacken and char the wings of the angels of our better nature.

Do not -- I beg you -- for even one vagrant moment, try to levy rationality into the behavior of these gobbets of human excrescence, all under the misperception that "fairness" requires giving them the barest. They count on ratiocinative evenhanded folks such as you to permit them the duplicity proffered by decency on your part, by well-intended "well, maybe..." rat-holes they need for plausible deniability.

They are the offspring of all the evil, self-serving, amoral Dems AND Republicans who have bludgeoned our great America to its knees, made it wallow in its most charnelhouse behavior, and drive us insane with The Big Lie again and again and again, using golem like this Limbaugh monster. They are no less than KILLING us, by crib-suffocating the kindness in us, the graciousness in our potential. They are turning us, may ALREADY have turned us into their troll and monster like.

This is NOT a minor news item, Josh; this is what one calls an emblematic insight. It is America Today in Microcosm. It is a rune, a glyph, an aphorism of the debased human spirit writ both large and small at the same time. Its resonance is that which we feel when we see the bullies kicking the crap out of a crippled kid in a schoolyard.

Limbaugh is as one with all sociopaths who drown their babies and slaughter their schoolmates with AK-47s and drive through crowded markets with pedal to the metal and fire into random cars on the freeway and pull off Enron scams robbing thousands of innocent investors and dilute medications and knife fast food employees for a few dollars. He is blood-brother to the scumbag who set the huge Esperanza fire here in Riverside, Southern California, today, and set it purposely in such a manner that the santa ana winds would pick it up and carry it directly into residential areas; and in the process got five firefighters barbequed. What soulless drives motivate these selfish, self-serving, bestial creatures?

Limbaugh should not be given slack for having abased himself (after months of denial and posturing) after he came out of rehab, because his forelock-tugging was mockery, and his true hemlock behavior toward someone whose affliction should have brought kindness and moderation to his criticisms, manifested itself yet again, for the thousandth time. They are swine, all of them -- Coulter disrespecting 9/11 widows, Santorum trying to force us back into Biblical Times, O'Reilly pretending Democrats are responsible for the Senate page sex scandal -- and giving them the barest claw-hold on "well, maybe..." plays right into their duplicity.

Please don't reply to this.

You're a good guy, and I don't mean to jump all over you.

I could hold my peace no longer.

Go, FBI, arrest a 16-year-old schoolgirl because she had the Emperor is Naked audacity to put on her blog what most of us who did NOT vote for the Beasts in Power think every day.

I have rejected the misuse of the word "rant" as used by blathering webfarts for any posting in which passion is demonstrated, but I think it only fair to say yes, this HAS been a rant.

Daily, I grow more and more ashamed of what my country has become. What it tolerates. What it responds to with "well, maybe..."

Harlan Ellison