Sharpton v. Limbaugh, round five
It's the Rev vs. the Rush in a battle over NFL dreams denied
“You’re saying I’m being racist because I’m saying blacks can’t swim.”
– Rush Limbaugh on why the African-American team on CBS’ “Survivor”
show will lose to the white team. “The Rush Limbaugh Show,” Aug. 23, 2006
In Round One of our battle royal, the Rev. Al Sharpton attempted to pull a Don Imus on Rush Limbaugh, the race-baiting radio blabbermouth who thought it wisdom to try and buy into a professional football team in a league where two-thirds of the players are black, and which he has described on the air as “like the Crips vs. the Bloods without the weapons.” In Round Two, El Rushbo declared, for the umpteenth time, Sharpton to be a “race hustler.” In Round Three, Dave Checketts thought it wisdom to drop Limbaugh from a bid it was stupid to include him in in the first place, vindicating the Rev. In Round Four, a dejected Rush declared his ouster to be the beginning of the End of All Things (and the Dittoheads said, “pass the Kool-Aid…”) and then, a still-dejected Rush, stripped of his lifelong dream of being a part of the National Football League, rather than a grown-up, angry, rich version of the fat, pimply kid the jocks in school used to lock in his locker, pending rescue by a kindly science teacher who happened to be walking by, wrote this in the Wall Street Journal:
David Checketts, an investor and owner of sports teams, approached me in late May about investing in the St. Louis Rams football franchise. As a football fan, I was intrigued. I invited him to my home where we discussed it further. Even after informing him that some people might try to make an issue of my participation, Mr. Checketts said he didn’t much care. I accepted his offer.
It didn’t take long before my name was selectively leaked to the media as part of the Checketts investment group. Shortly thereafter, the media elicited comments from the likes of Al Sharpton. In 1998 Mr. Sharpton was found guilty of defamation and ordered to pay $65,000 for falsely accusing a New York prosecutor of rape in the 1987 Tawana Brawley case. He also played a leading role in the 1991 Crown Heights riot (he called neighborhood Jews “diamond merchants”) and 1995 Freddie’s Fashion Mart riot.
In Round Five, Reverend Al is threatening to sue:
The civil rights leader, typically impervious to insults, said Saturday that he will sue Rush Limbaugh for defamation unless he gets an apology from the right-wing radio host.
Sharpton was outraged by a Limbaugh op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal that blamed him for the 1991 Crown Heights riot and a 1995 killing spree at a Harlem store.
“I am definitely going to prove he makes reckless, unaccountable statements,” Sharpton said. “Which is why he was forced out of buying an NFL team in the first place.”
Of course, the “fair and balanced” folks at Fox Noise, never ones to miss a chance to take a shot at Sharpton, have pounced:
ow, if you were born in the 1980s, you probably never heard about Tawana Brawley, a 15-year-old black girl who went missing for four days back in 1987, but then turned up covered in dog poop and racial slurs. She claimed she was repeatedly raped by up to six white men in the woods. One of them even had a badge.
The then unknown and obese Al Sharpton saw an opportunity for quick fame and became her adviser. Sharpton and his pals manipulated the event to horrific, freakish proportions, claiming Brawley had been raped 33 times by a prosecutor. Al also helped conjure up a fake police cult that helped cause the gang rape.
But there was never any evidence, and a grand jury called it a hoax. Sharpton was ordered to pay roughly $70,000 to the real victims. Others paid it for him.
So that concludes our “Al Sharpton History Minute.”
That was written by some guy named Greg. Well Greg, I WAS in New York during the Tawana Brawley episode. I had moved back to Brooklyn at age 17 after my mom passed away and I started college (in Boston.) I was home for a holiday break when the Brawley incident happened, and I, like Sharpton, believed her. As a matter of fact, everyone I knew believed her. If you lived in Brooklyn during the 1980s and 90s, a period when black kids were routinely chased out of neighborhoods like Bensonhurst and Crown Heights by bat-wielding white kids with baseball bats, including two fatal chases, followed by a brief oasis of hope during the David Dinkins administration, which was then followed by “Giuliani Time,” when it was literally hazardous to your health to be a black man in New York City, you can understand why so many black people believed Ms. Brawley. And since I was in Brooklyn during the period of the riots, and you probably weren’t, let me remind you that the Crown Heights riots began when the lead car in the entourage of a Jewish messiah-like figure ran over a little kid on his bike, killed him, and then was treated by a private ambulance that drove away, leaving the child to die. Al Sharpton wasn’t even in Brooklyn until the family called him in, after the riots. Sharpton didn’t cause the riots, nor did he encourage them. I’m not a total Sharpton fan, and disagreed sharply with him when we both worked for Radio One, including regarding Barack Obama. And I am one of those people who is glad to see his public role reduced (and even more so, Jesse Jackson’s) in the Age of Obama. But on this one, Sharpton is right. The fiction that Rush is peddling about his role in the riots is just that.
Meanwhile, Rush also said this in his op-ed:
The sports media elicited comments from a handful of players, none of whom I can recall ever meeting. Among other things, at least one said he would never play for a team I was involved in given my racial views. My racial views? You mean, my belief in a colorblind society where every individual is treated as a precious human being without regard to his race? Where football players should earn as much as they can and keep as much as they can, regardless of race? Those controversial racial views?
And after I was done throwing up from laughing so hard, I seriously thought about suing Rush myself, for felonious assault on my intelligence. “Precious human beings?” Really? You mean all the precious human beings, or just the “magic negroes” who need to “take the bone out of their nose” and call you back?” (Two comments NOT made up on Wikipedia, but admitted to, even boasted about, by Rush Limbaugh..)
Rush Limbaugh is a lot of things, but colorblind clearly isn’t one of them. He’s also not self-aware enough to admit, that it wasn’t Al Sharpton who prevented him from becoming an NFL owner, any more than it was Sharpton who cost Don Imus his job. (In that case, the tipping point came when another Al — Al Roker — threw his considerable (moral) weight into the situation, siding with the National Association of Black Journalists in demanding Imus be booted from MSNBC. Once that happened, sponsors were scared shitless. When you’ve lost Al Roker…) But it’s always convenient for the aggrieved to pin their pain on Sharpton, rather than on their own big mouths. Rush: you sunk your own chances of being a part of the NFL when you attacked its front line: the players. Disparaging the guys responsible for putting the butts in the stadium seats and selling the jerseys is a hell of a way to show how much you “love the NFL.” And why would any organization want someone in its ranks who very well might continue to disparage those players on the air, day after day, including with racial insults, AFTER he becomes several of those players’ boss? As I wrote in my comment on Limbaugh’s Journal op-ed, part of the job of an NFL owner is to promote the team, the players, and the NFL. The other NFL owners, who would have had to vote on Limbaugh’s participation as part of the Checketts group, had every right to consider whether Rush would continue disparaging Black players on the air after becoming a team owner, damaging both his team, and the League. That was a reasonable assumption given the outcry over his potential inclusion in the Rams bid.
If Limbaugh truly believed in capitalism, and not in some special right to own an NFL team just because you can financially, he’d man up and admit that the Checketts group had a right to boot him. He can whine about it all he wants, but Rush can’t hide from the fact that his own words brought him here, and he should grow up and live with it.
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