“From The Mouth Of A Bully”: Rush Limbaugh’s 53 Smears Against Sandra Fluke
While Rush Limbaugh has offered his fake apology to Sandra Fluke for calling her a slut and a whore, it’s important to recall each of the 52 times last week when Rush insulted Fluke. So I’ve compiled a comprehensive list, each of them linked to Limbaugh’s own transcript of what he said. Does one half-hearted apology make up for 52 smears?
I’d love to see someone compile the audio (or better yet, a video) of Rush making all 52 insults against Sandra Fluke. If anyone would like to do that, please email me at collegefreedom@yahoo.com, and I’ll give you my password to Rush’s website.
Here are the 52 smears by Rush Limbaugh.
Feb. 29, 2012:
2) “they’re having so much sex they can’t afford the birth control pills!”
4) “Sandra Fluke. So much sex going on, they can’t afford birth control pills.”
March 1, 2012:
5) “You’d call ’em a slut, a prostitute”
7) “are having so much sex that they’re going broke”
9) “the sexual habits of female law students at Georgetown”
10) “are having so much sex that they’re going broke”
11) “having so much sex that it’s hard to make ends meet”
12) “four out of every ten co-eds are having so much sex that it’s hard to make ends meet”
13) “Now, what does that make her? She wants us to buy her sex.”
14) “to pay for these co-eds to have sex”
16) “Therefore we are paying her to have sex. Therefore we are paying her for having sex.”
17) “Have you ever heard of not having sex so often?”
20) “’If we’re paying for this, it makes these women sluts, prostitutes.’ And what else could it be?”
22) “I’m having sex so damn much, I’m going broke.”
23) “She’s having so much sex that she’s going broke! There’s no question about her virtue.”
24) “having so much sex she’s going broke at Georgetown Law.”
26) “She’s having so much sex it’s amazing she can still walk, but she made it up there.”
27) “Maybe they’re sex addicts.”
28) “to pay for her to have sex all the time.”
29) “she wants the rest of us to pay for her sex.”
30) “She wants all the sex that she wants all the time paid for by the rest of us.”
31) “Here this babe goes before Congress and wants thousands of dollars to pay for her sex.”
32) “a woman who is happily presenting herself as an immoral, baseless, no-purpose-to-her-life woman.”
33) “She wants all the sex in the world, whenever she wants it, all the time.”
34) “If this woman wants to have sex ten times a day for three years, fine and dandy.”
35) “to provide women from Georgetown Law unlimited, no-consequences sex.”
36) “so she can have unlimited, no-consequences sex.”
March 2, 2012:
39) “she’s having so much sex, she can’t afford her birth control pills anymore.”
40) “she’s having so much sex, she can’t pay for it — and we should.”
41) “She’s having so much sex, she can’t afford it.”
44) “Does she have more boyfriends? Ha! They’re lined up around the block.”
45) “It was Sandra Fluke who said that she was having so much sex, she can’t afford it.”
46) “By her own admission, in her own words, Sandra Fluke is having so much sex that she can’t afford it.”
47) “they’re having a lot of sex for which they need a lot of contraception.”
49) “who admits to having so much sex that she can’t afford it anymore.”
50) “she’s having so much sex, she can’t pay for it.”
51) “As frequently as she has sex and to not be pregnant, she’s obviously succeeding in contraception.”
UPDATE: added thanks to your comments;
By: John K. Wilson, Daily Kos, March 4, 2012
“From Eve To 2012”: What’s Behind The Slut-Shaming
As leading Republicans have been asked about Rush Limbaugh’s typically despicable attacks on Sandra Fluke—the law student who testified before congressional Democrats about the importance of health insurance coverage for contraception—they’ve offered some pretty weak responses. Mitt Romney said that when Limbaugh called Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute,” “it’s not the language I would have used.” Perhaps he meant that he would have called her a “harlot” or a “trollop.” Rick Santorum, whose opposition to contraception is well-established, said that Limbaugh was “being absurd, but that’s, you know—an entertainer can be absurd.” Before we move on to this week’s controversy, it’s important to note just what kind of venomous beliefs this episode has brought to the fore. Republicans are insisting that this isn’t really about contraception, it’s about religious freedom. But for some people, it’s about something much more fundamental: the dire threat of uncontrolled female sexuality.
Limbaugh is indeed an entertainer, and he’s an entertainer who understands his audience very well. Does anyone think that when he called Fluke a “slut” that millions of his listeners didn’t nod in agreement? The real threat, as Limbaugh sees it, the thing that must be shamed and ridiculed, is the idea that a woman might be in control of her own sexuality. As Limbaugh said, “So Miss Fluke, and the rest of you Feminazis, here’s the deal. If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex. We want something for it. We want you post the videos online so we can all watch.” In other words, her sexuality is only acceptable if it can be placed in a context where it exists for his pleasure and not hers.
In rushing to Limbaugh’s defense, Bill O’Reilly offered only a slightly different take. “Let me get this straight, Ms. Fluke, and I’m asking this with all due respect,” he said. “You want me to give you my hard-earned money so you can have sex?” Displaying his typical ignorance, O’Reilly, like Limbaugh, is under the impression that this issue is about taxpayer money and not what is being covered by the private insurance that women themselves are paying for. It’s convenient, because that way he can still consider himself involved, and claim the right to withhold his payment. And that way, the decision about whether a woman will have sex, and what will happen to her if she does, still lies in some measure with him.
It’s no wonder that even when a group of conservative state legislators passes a law requiring any woman who wants an abortion to get it only if she’ll submit to a series of humiliations, they usually insert exceptions for rape and incest. If it were about the fetus, it wouldn’t matter how a woman became pregnant. But if she was raped, then she wasn’t committing the violation of willingly having sex, so she need not be punished. So long as her sexuality doesn’t belong to her, she hasn’t fallen.
This is an old story, of course, going all the way back to Eve, through Hester Prynne, and going strong in 2012. So if you thought there weren’t still people, lots of them, who view the idea of a woman controlling her own sexuality with horror and rage, then the last week was a helpful reminder.
By: Paul Waldman, The American Prospect, March 5, 2012
“Taking Pills For Recreational Purposes”: Have You No Shame, Rush?
As a woman who has been viciously slashed by Rush Limbaugh, I can tell you, it’s no fun.
At first you think, if he objects to the substance of what you’re saying, why can’t he just object to the substance of what you’re saying? Why go after you in the most personal and humiliating way?
Then, once you accept the fact that he has become the puppet master of the Republican Party by stirring bloodlust (earning enough to bribe Elton John to play at his fourth wedding), you still cringe at the thought that your mom might hear the ugly things he said.
Now he’s brutalizing a poised, wholesome-looking 30-year-old Georgetown law student as a “slut,” “a prostitute” and “round-heeled” simply for testifying to lawmakers about wanting the school to amend its health insurance to cover contraception.
Sandra Fluke “goes before a Congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex, what does that make her?” Limbaugh coarsely ranted. “It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? We’re the pimps. The johns.”
Isn’t this the last guy who should be pointing fingers and accusing others of taking pills for recreational purposes?
He said insuring contraception would represent another “welfare entitlement,” which is wrong — tax dollars would not provide the benefit, employers and insurance companies would. And women would not be getting paid just “to have sex.” They’d be getting insurance coverage toward the roughly $1,000 annual expense of trying to avoid unwanted pregnancies and abortions, and to control other health conditions. This is something men and conservatives should want too, and not just because those outcomes actually do cost taxpayers money.
Limbaugh leeringly suggested that were taxpayers to be stuck with the bill, Fluke and other “feminazis” should give them something back: sex videos. “We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch,” he said.
Fluke was lobbying Georgetown University to change its policy for three years before she became a cause célèbre outcast when the Republican congressman Darrell Issa barred her from an all-male panel on contraception. But her conflict with her Jesuit school did not stop its president, John DeGioia, from eloquently defending his student (who ended up testifying for Nancy Pelosi’s all-Democratic panel).
“She provided a model of civil discourse,” he said in a letter to the school. “This expression of conscience was in the tradition of the deepest values we share as a people. One need not agree with her substantive position to support her right to respectful free expression.”
He branded the reaction of Limbaugh and some other commentators as “misogynistic, vitriolic and a misrepresentation of the position of our student.”
Given this season’s lava spill of hate, it was fitting that DeGioia evoked St. Augustine: “Let us, on both sides, lay aside all arrogance. Let us not, on either side, claim that we have already discovered the truth.”
It’s hard to believe that not that long ago, Bob Dole, the former G.O.P. leader and presidential nominee, was a spokesman for Viagra. (Mother Jones pointed out that Rush, a Viagra fan, might be confusing the little blue pill and birth control, since “when and how much sex you have is unrelated to the amount of birth control you need.”)
Rush and Newt Gingrich can play the studs, marrying again and again until they find the perfect adoring young wife. But women pressing for health care rights are denigrated as sluts.
On Thursday, the Senate narrowly voted down a puritanical Republican attempt to let employers and insurance companies deny coverage for contraceptives on any religious or moral grounds they could dream up.
Only a last-minute media glare caused Virginia’s Republican governor, Bob McDonnell, and its Republican-led Legislature to modify a shockingly punitive law aiming to shame and in many cases penetrate women seeking abortions. The version that passed on Thursday is still harsh enough to damage McDonnell’s vice presidential prospects.
By Friday, President Obama, who had started out fumbling the contraception issue, and the Democrats were taking gleeful advantage, raising $1.6 million to combat the G.O.P.’s “war on women.”
Mitt Romney reacted to Limbaugh for days with craven silence before finally allowing on a rope line on Friday night that “it’s not the language I would have used.” Is there a right way to call a woman a slut?
Rick Santorum, whose views on women are medieval, said “an entertainer can be absurd.” Speaker John Boehner offered a tepid comment through a spokesman that Limbaugh’s words were “inappropriate.”
President Obama called Fluke and bucked her up, probably hoping to get Limbaugh to double down. El Rushbo, as he calls himself, obliged. “Did you ever think of backing off the amount of sex you’re having?” he demanded of Fluke on Friday’s broadcast as some advertisers were fleeing: Sleep Train Mattress Centers, Quicken Loans, Select Comfort and AutoZone.
The law student got the call from the president as she was about to go on Andrea Mitchell’s show on MSNBC. She darted into an empty office to talk to Obama and closed the door; soon Chris Matthews was wondering who was inside and sending a staffer to check it out.
“The president just wanted to make sure I was O.K.,” she said. “And I am O.K. I’m pretty level-headed.”
The childless radio yakker wondered snidely how Fluke’s parents, who live in rural Pennsylvania, would feel about her crusade. Fluke, a Methodist Democrat, said she was particularly touched that the president told her, speaking as the father of two daughters, that her parents should be proud.
“My parents and I don’t always agree politically,” she said, but about the issue of insuring contraception, “we see eye to eye.”
Update: On Saturday evening, Rush Limbaugh posted a statement on his Web site, which can be read here.
By: Maureen Dowd, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, March 3, 2012
Celebrating Women’s History Month: The Republican’s “Vagina Monologue”
When will Republicans stop their vagina monologue?
March is federally recognized as Women’s History Month, and Republicans have been celebrating the occasion in a most unusual style: with a burst of interest in women’s private parts.
On Thursday, the Senate took up an amendment proposed by Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) that would allow employers to deny women birth-control coverage if the employer found contraception morally objectionable.
About 100 miles south of Washington on that same day, Virginia legislators passed a measure requiring a woman to be offered an ultrasound image of her fetus before aborting it. The legislation, which opponents say could also require some women who have miscarriages to be offered ultrasonic images of their dead fetuses, is the successor of a bill that would have required women to undergo an invasive “transvaginal ultrasound.”
Still on Thursday, the industrious Virginia House of Delegates also approved legislation bestowing rights on people, including a father, to bring a lawsuit over the death of the fetus.
On Wednesday, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, a powerful influence among Republican lawmakers, described as a “slut” the law-school student invited by House Democrats to testify in support of birth control. “It makes her a prostitute,” Limbaugh said of the woman, blocked last month by House Republicans from testifying on what became an all-male panel. “She wants to be paid to have sex.”
On Tuesday, Oklahomans held a protest at the state capitol to oppose a bill, passed by the state Senate and now being taken up by the House, that would bestow “personhood” on fetuses — one of many such efforts across the nation. Democrat Judy McIntyre, one of just four women in the 48-member state Senate, was so upset that, according to the Oklahoman newspaper, she held a protest sign proclaiming: “If I wanted the government in my womb, I’d [expletive] a senator.”
Democrats think they have a political winner in the Republicans’ fascination with reproduction at a time when economic production is what voters have in mind. The party is raising money with a petition against the “Republican War on Women,” and 11 Democratic women running for the U.S. Senate are using the occasion to launch a fundraising tour.
They are attempting to tie together everything from last year’s effort to defund Planned Parenthood to the proposed repeal of Obamacare (which expanded coverage of mammography and birth control). And Obama campaign strategists tell me they are confident that the two leading Republican presidential candidates, a Mormon and a devout Catholic, will have difficulty beating the rap that the party is obsessed with reproduction.
Evidence that the Republicans realize they’re in a pickle: Mitt Romney spontaneously flip-flopped on his initial opposition to the Blunt amendment, which would also provide employers with a moral opt-out from other elements of Obamacare. Romney first said that “questions about contraception within a relationship between a man and a woman, husband and wife, I’m not going there.” But he quickly reversed himself in favor of the amendment, aligning himself with Rick Santorum, who has voiced doubts about the constitutional protections for birth control.
More evidence: After championing the Blunt amendment, Republican leaders backed away from their demands for a vote on the provision. And Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), an early proponent of the amendment after hearing about the issue during a Catholic Mass, disappeared from the debate. So Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) wound up forcing a vote on the provision, which was narrowly defeated Thursday afternoon.
“Today, the Senate will vote on an extreme, ideological amendment to the bipartisan transportation bill,” Reid said, kicking off Thursday’s debate. “This amendment takes aim at women’s access to health care.”
The Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell (Ky.), made no mention of birth control in his reply, countering that “it is not within the power of the federal government to tell anybody what to believe, or to punish them for practicing those beliefs.”
Most other Republicans followed McConnell’s lead in avoiding mention of contraception. Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (Utah), however, said the provision in the health-care law requiring preventive medical coverage for women is “questionable policy,” and he accused the administration of “deferring to its feminist allies” by mandating contraceptive coverage.
After the amendment went down to defeat, its sponsor gave a General MacArthur. “I’m confident this issue is not over,” Blunt said. “It won’t be over until the administration figures out how to accommodate people’s religious views as it relates to these new mandates.”
The monologue will continue.
The “Sluts Of America” Are Fighting Back
I am a slut.
Before this week, I didn’t know I was a slut. But Rush Limbaugh set me straight:
What does it say about the college co-ed Susan Fluke, who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex? What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute.
Sandra Fluke is the Georgetown law student who testified about the necessity of providing insurance coverage for birth control. She spoke about her friend who suffers from polycystic ovarian syndrome, which was being treated with birth control pills, until she could no longer afford to shell out $100 a month for her treatment.
Ms. Fluke did not talk about her own sexual activity. She did not claim that she was having so much sex that she could not afford the cost of contraception. She did not demand that she be paid for having sex.
But no matter—according to Rush, Ms. Fluke is a slut. I don’t know what dictionary Rush is using, so let’s see if we can suss out what exactly he thinks makes Ms. Fluke a slut:
- Maybe it’s because she can use the word “contraception” without blushing. So can I. Guess that makes me a slut.
- Maybe it’s because she cares about women having affordable access to necessary medical care. So do I. Guess that makes me a slut.
- Maybe it’s just because she’s a woman. So am I. Guess that makes me a slut.
And you know what? If you can talk about contraception, care about women’s health, or have the audacity to possess a vagina, you’re a slut too.
When he was called out for his obscene attack on Ms. Fluke, Rush didn’t back down; he doubled down:
It was Sandra Fluke who said that she was having so much sex she can’t afford it. […] She’s spending $3000, $1000 a year, on pills and she’s going broke and wants us to buy it. […] By her own admission, in her own words, Sandra Fluke is having so much sex that she can’t afford it. […] Does she have more boyfriends? They’re lined up around the block. Or they would have been in my day.
Ms. Fluke said none of those things, but you know the Republican rule: When you’re losing an argument, just make shit up and hope no one notices. This afternoon, Rush issued an “apology,” in which he basically said he was sorry if any sluts were offended by being called sluts, but if they weren’t such sluts, he wouldn’t have to call them sluts. Some apology, eh?
Of course, people did notice. Like Republican Rep. Darrell “Vaginas violate my religious liberty” Issa in Congress:
Democrats are largely to blame for the name-calling and personal insults of the contraception debate, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) charged Friday. […]
“While your letter raises important concerns about these inappropriate comments and the tone of the current debate over religious freedom and Obamacare, I am struck by your clear failure to recognize your own contributions to the denigration of this discussion and attacks on people of religious faith,” Issa said in response to Cummings.
You see, if those damn sluts hadn’t objected to Issa’s No Girls Allowed hearingabout how birth control makes Catholic bishops sad, Rush Limbaugh wouldn’t have had to attack those sluts for being sluts. See? It’s all their fault. You might even say they were asking for it.
Bill O’Reilly, who once had to pay millions of dollars to settle a sexual harassment claim, so you know he’s highly educated about what makes a woman a slut—refusing to have sex with Bill O’Reilly and his falafel—also joined Rush Limbaugh in his slut crusade:
“Let me get this straight, Ms. Fluke, and I’m asking this with all due respect,” he said. “You want me to give you my hard-earned money so you can have sex?” (Fluke is actually calling for her university’s private insurance plan to cover birth control.)O’Reilly went on, saying that, since Fluke wanted society to cover her “activities,” the government should also have subsidized his college football uniforms, since an injury might “cost society a lot.” He also said that perhaps taxpayers should pay for gym memberships for men so they could stay physically fit.
But a funny thing happened on the way back to the 17th century. Women Sluts took notice too. Known slut and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called Limbaugh’s attack “obnoxious.” The sluts at the Washington Post wrotein an editorial, “This is not the way a decent citizen behaves.”
Even President Obama, the slut-in-chief himself, called Ms. Fluke to offer his support:
“He encouraged me and supported me and thanked me for speaking out about the concerns of American women,” Fluke said. “What was really personal to me was he said to tell my parents that should be proud, and that meant a lot because Rush Limbaugh questioned whether or not my family would be proud of me, so I just appreciated that very much.”
The sluts of America are fighting back, and they’re hitting Rush right where it hurts: his corporate sponsors. Sleep Train, Select Comfort/Sleep Number, Quicken Loans, Cleveland Cavaliers, Citrix and LegalZoom have all pulled their support from Rush’s show. [Late today, the CEO of Carbonite announced that despite Rush’s “apology,” Carbonite is pulling its supporttoo.]
So, sluts, you know what to do: Click here to send an email to Rush’s other corporate sponsors, demanding that they stop supporting him and his slut crusade.
And then click here to tell Bill O’Reilly’s sponsors to drop him like a hot falafel.
By: Kaili Gray, Daily Kos, March 3, 2012
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