Once you've picked yourself up from the floor, keep in mind that it is most likely a temporary situation--surely he'll say something to slide back up the chart. Before you think I've gone mad or have made some gross error, let me elaborate a bit as to how he managed this remarkable feat.
As mentioned yesterday, jackasses tend to prominently exhibit their jackass-ness within short proximity to most major calamities or tragedies. Rush surprisingly demonstrated a bit of restraint and--gasp--even logic, rather than simply throw banal rhetoric and blame to politicize the Virginia Tech shooting. Let me provide some brief excerpts from the conversation between Rush and a caller (or check out the full transcript for yourself here):
Caller: "... What I really think is an issue is video violence, video gaming. I will guarantee you, I'll bet my last dollar in my pocket, that this shooter will be found to have been a compulsive video gamer, and when people are living that kind of lifestyle--and college students do this a lot."
Rush: "Not every video gamer goes out and murders 33 people on the college campus, though. There's more to this than that...In this case, let's not jump the gun on this guy and make him a video gamer. We'll find out soon enough everything we want to know about this guy, and I guarantee you that much of what we find out will be America's fault. Just be patient. This stuff will come out."
Rush, continuing a bit later: "How many millions of people play video games, and how many millions of people have guns? If you start blaming the video games, you may as well demand video game control because it's the same thing when you start trying to blame guns for this. You have here a sick individual, an evil individual who committed a random act. But if you want to start blaming the video games, this guy was this or that, weeeeell, then you've gotta maybe talk about banning them because that's the same tack that's taken with guns."
Okay...so it wasn't a perfect display of logic or a total failure to start loading his cannons in preparation for blaming something. What it wasn't, however, was some knee-jerk commentary that blamed someone or something external for the tragedy when, as he acknowledges, no one has the first inkling what influenced the killer, so far.
As an additional note unrelated to Limbaugh and in reference to the possibility of Scientology weighing in on the Virginia Tech shooting; I have so far been unable to dig up anything concrete establishing that they have, indeed, blamed psychiatric drugs (or psychiatry itself) as a factor. This is not to say that they haven't--I just don't know for certain--but so far I've not heard or seen anything beyond the source highlighted yesterday. One way or another, the jackass meter is going off, and the jackass may be the site acting as source for the claim rather than Scientology. Go figure!
I did, however, come across this amusing commentary--in the form of a comic strip--expressing how the media as a whole can set off our jackass detectors. This should be a given, as the mass media will happily insinuate and lay blame in any number of ways, before uncovering the true source or cause for an event such as the Virginia Tech shooting. Naturally, this means that virtually everyone in the mass media is a jackass, but you probably knew that already.
No comments:
Post a Comment