In a town so tough that most murders get just a few paragraphs in the paper, somebody called The Sun about 8 a.m. Thursday with a tip about a vandalized billboard. By noon, the story was all over the Internet, Rush Limbaugh was kicking off his national radio show with it, and City Hall was fielding calls from as far away as California. By 5 p.m., the story had become one of the three most popular individual articles in the history of the paper’s Web site, with nearly 200,000 page views. There’s a reason the story had legs. The paint-splattered billboard featured Limbaugh’s mug. And the tipster was a spokesman for a city agency — the one responsible for cleaning up graffiti — who let it be known that he was no “dittohead.”…. “It looks like they took globs of paint and threw it on his face,” Robert Murrow of the Department of Public Works told The Sun. “It looks great. It did my heart good.”
OK, so normally I’m not big on public vandalism, but there are times I’m willing to make an exception. Rush Limbaugh is as much about reasoned (and reasonable) political discussion as John Belushi was about saying no to drugs. Yes, I’m cognizant of the fact that in a free society, free speech can be- and often is- offensive speech. (Hmm…where have I heard that one before??) And they don’t come much more offensive than Limbaugh, who has turned ignorance, disrespect, and arrogance into a cottage industry. The man is revered by “dittoheads” from coast to coast, though what his contribution is beyond inflammatory rhetoric, gratuitous insults, racism, and misogyny escapes me completely.
While I understand the concept of free speech and expression, there’s nothing wrong with expecting, or even merely hoping for, a modicum of respect and common decency. Good people can and will disagree, but then no one with a shred of decency would use the words “good people” and “Rush Limbaugh” in the same sentence.
Frankly, Al Franken was right- Limbaugh is a big, fat idiot (and I would HIGHLY recommend Franken’s book Rush Limbaugh is a Big, Fat Idiot…it’s amazing what you can accomplish with a little bit of fact checking, eh?). While Limbaugh will no doubt use this incident for his own self-aggrandizement (when you possess and ego the size of Rhode Island, what else could one expect?) and to rally his knuckle-dragging, foaming-at-the-mouth “Dittoheads”, I’m going to be laughing at him. I’m also hoping that someday I’ll have the privilege of buying the unidentified vandal a beer or six.
So when does vandalism become a public service? Right about now, actually….
