Michael Faulkner

Hear the song now.

I’m a big fan of reading and occasionally commenting over at Daily Kos. Recently a kind of uproar resulted in the blogosphere when Rush kept playing a so-called parody song, “Barack the Magic Nego” over and over again on his radio program. It struck me that Rush was almost asking for attention in the wake of the Don Imus scandal - that Rush, at some level, was actually jealous of the attention Mr. Imus’ ill-themed remark brought him. It’s no secret that Rush has seen his ratings tank recently, especially in markets where he went head-to-head against Al Franken and Air America.

If you were a drug-addicted ratings-losing obese talk show host, what would you do? You’d find something to be outrageous about to get your name back out there. After all, no publicity is bad publicity. But free speech works both ways. If you were an out-of-work actor, singer and songwriter, who has heard outrageous thing after outrageous thing drop out of Rush’s mouth over the last 20 or so years, what would you do? If you could appreciate the artistic merit of some so-called “shock-jocks,” but not those who pretended to have a level of intelligence above that of the average snail?

I give you the song, “Rush, the Racist Bigot.” Please do not hotlink directly to the song, but direct all links to this post. Thank you.

If you like this, check out my political/media satire podcast site, The Hawke and Dove Political Punditry Podcast, where both right and left are skewered with equal aplomb. If you’re so inclined, you can also check out Amanda Pajer (singing the female part in Rush the Racist Bigot) over at Amanda Banana, The Obsessive Dogwalker.

FYI, I tried to pick audio snippets from Rush where I wasn’t taking him out of context. There are a lot of audio segments floating around on the net that use his “sarcastic” statements and turn them around to make it sound like he really meant what he said. I haven’t done that. The statements you hear in the song are pure Rush. Still, being sarcastic is not a cover when you’re saying something innately offensive. And Rush has been at this long enough to know that when he says something like, “his race is not the issue” he’s still bringing up “race” in the context of it being an issue, and those for whom it IS an issue will hear him and feel their viewpoint is legitimized. If race truly was not an issue for Rush, he’d never mention it at all. I believe the record shows, on the other hand, that he’s quite obsessed with it. Now, I believe in free speech, implicitly. And outrageous free speech should be met with coherent free speech, so to comply with that meme, I’ll let the song do the rest of the talking…

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 1:18 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.