BY DAN
KENNEDY
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See the World Through My Daughter's Eyes (Rodale, October 2003),
click
here.
Thursday, October 16, 2003
Mush from a wimp. Boston
Globe columnist Ellen
Goodman today derides
herself and other liberals for showing too much sympathy for Rush
Limbaugh, who admitted last week that he's addicted to prescription
pain-killers. "This is the curse of liberal wimpathy," she
writes.
Among the fellow wimps she
identifies is Joe Conason, the author of Big
Lies, who writes a
column for the New York Observer and a weblog
for Salon. Her evidence is this Conason sentence: "It's hard
not to feel sorry for anyone whose suffering causes them to hustle
narcotics."
I was surprised, because I'd
recalled Conason's being pretty tough on Limbaugh. I looked it up,
and I was right.
Not only did Conason quote from an
e-mail suggesting Limbaugh's pill-popping might have caused his
deafness, but Goodman took Conason's sentence out of context. Here's
the context from Conason's October
3 blog entry (subscription
required) -- written before Limbaugh had even come clean:
From what I've read, it
seems that Limbaugh may have been overmedicating himself for pain.
That's no excuse, as he would surely have said of any liberal
caught doing likewise, but it's hard not to feel sorry for anyone
whose suffering causes them to hustle narcotics. Perhaps he and
his hard-hearted dittoheads might begin to understand addiction
differently now.
Now that Rush has gone public,
Conason is even more unstinting. Here's a choice bit from
his
column in this week's
Observer:
So whatever punishment Mr.
Limbaugh must endure will be handed down in the court of public
opinion. He enjoys the support of millions of character witnesses,
including prominent fellow hypocrites such as his close friends
William Bennett and Newt Gingrich. But they would all be
hard-pressed to describe the mighty radio mouth as someone who has
earned great sympathy. This is, after all, a man who earned
millions by lampooning the plight of AIDS victims, spreading
rumors that implicated Hillary Clinton in murder and Bill Clinton
in cocaine abuse, and mocking the physical appearance of their
young child. His brilliant career was founded on daily
"entertainment" of this quality.
This casts Conason's "liberal
wimpathy" in a rather different light, doesn't it?
New in this week's
Phoenix. I talk with Peter
Dinklage, the star of
The Station Agent. Dinklage's portrayal of the lonely railroad
enthusiast Finbar McBride may be the most important role a dwarf
actor has ever had.
Also, the last
days of Al Giordano's
Narco News Bulletin.
posted at 8:23 AM |
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MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
