A Final Note on Limbaugh & The NFL

I touched briefly on this last week but I could let the Limbaugh/NFL debacle conclude without mentioning an article written by sportswriter Mike Lupica.

With all the sports wingnuts (who just so happen to agree with Rush) calling in to the local NY sports radio station last week in support of Rush being allowed to own a team, I couldn't stand the idiocy of these people not understanding the difference between free speech and private enterprise.

Rush has said some pretty vile shit over the years and he's completely free to say whatever he wants thanks to our 1st Amendment rights. But that doesn't mean that he can't be held accountable for what he says. And so his racist rants came back to bite him in his ample ass, as the ownership group he was a part of found him too toxic to their cause. And the free market being what it is, they decided his services and his money would no longer be required, so they bid farewell to Mr. Oxycontin. It's as simple as that.

But Limbaugh, not knowing why in the world anyone would reject him, immediately blamed his woes on a conspiracy, vast left wing conspiracy, when he should have just been looking in the mirror.

Well, Mike Lupica's column hit the nail on the head so well, I had to include it here in it's entirety.

Mike Lupica: Rush Limbaugh learns there is no room for him as a team owner in the NFL

Rush Limbaugh is always an advocate of a robust free-enterprise system, as it relates from health care to everything else. Only now he squeals because the same free-enterprise system rejects him as a possible owner of the St. Louis Rams football team.

You may have heard, Rush isn't taking this well at all, being told an exclusive private club of National Football League owners, along with Commissioner Roger Goodell, only want him as close to their sport as he is watching games with his NFL Sunday Ticket package.

So this must be a conspiracy. And an attack on conservatism, too, even though no one knew until now that comparing the behavior of the Chargers and Patriots one time to the Bloods and Crips was just another example of Rush being the acknowledged leader of the conservative movement in America.

President Obama is part of the conspiracy, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, the head of the NFL Players Association, DeMaurice Smith, a hateful media, and whomever stole the strawberries on Capt. Queeg in "The Caine Mutiny."

Why? Because the league couldn't possibly be telling him they don't want him, that's why.

Except that is exactly what is happening. It's not conservatism they're rejecting.

It's him.

Rush gets banged out of Dave Checketts' ownership group-and what did Checketts suppose was going to happen when he asked Limbaugh to get on board with him?-and immediately started screaming about the "race hustlers" like Sharpton and Jackson doing him in. No. He did himself in, with his own body of work. And, let's face it, Limbaugh calling anybody else a race hustler is pretty wonderful. You'd say this was an example of the pot calling the kettle black but, well, you know.

Sharpton in particular is a champion race hustler. So is Limbaugh. What he said about Donovan McNabb one time was just one small lyric in a song he's been singing for years, all the way to song parodies about "Barack the Magic Negro." But that was all right, that's what he told us, he was just looking for some laughs and, besides, it was just something he read in a Los Angeles Times headline.

Limbaugh says that the media has only gone after him this way because it hates him. But he's not important enough to hate.

There Limbaugh was on the "The Today Show" earlier this week talking about how his critics are just shooting "BB's at a battleship." Then he starts taking fire from all directions at even the notion that he could be a part-owner of the Rams, and gets hysterical. You dish the way Limbaugh does, you have to be able to take it better than this.

This is what they're doing to the country, folks! This is what is happening on Wall Street! Now it's happened to me! Limbaugh is never funny when he tries to be. But this week he was as funny as he's ever been.

The best idea of all here was that this is America, he's got the money, why shouldn't he be able to buy a seat at the table? Right. Rush should try that with Augusta National, where he likes to remind us he's played golf plenty of times. He's got the money. He likes golf. He should just show up at the front gate with a check and tell them he's ready to join, and where's the first tee. See how that works out for him.

Back when Martha Burk tried to force Augusta National's hand and get the club to admit a woman member, Limbaugh praised Hootie Johnson, then the chairman of the club, for not "caving" in. Right. A private club deciding who-and what-it wanted. The NFL basically did the same thing to him. Only now, because it's him, it's a vast left-wing conspiracy and a secret plot from the NFLPA because of an upcoming collective bargaining agreement.

The race hustlers, the lefties, they're behind this. Sportswriters, too. Yeah, owners in sports always do exactly what we tell them in the sports section.

Rush Limbaugh thinks he can say anything he wants to about anybody, black or white, and never have to face any consequences. Only this week there were consequences. Imagine something like that happening to a big powerful guy like him.

The NFL treated him like he was Rodney Dangerfield trying to join the club in "Caddyshack."