Whereas black NFL players are saying they’d refuse to play for a team owned by Rush, and

Whereas Post-Dispatch columnist Kevin Horrigan explains that Limbaugh hates socialism and that the NFL is a highly socialistic organization, and

Whereas NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell believes that because of Rush’s racism, Limbaugh should not be allowed to buy an NFL team,

Be it resolved that we will all go over to St. Louis Democratic activist Peter Glickert’s new site, No Rush Limbaugh for the St. Louis Rams, and sign his petition. He aims to get 5,000 signatures by November 15th, and the site looks to be going viral. He got fifty signatures in less than a day, and the word is spreading. In fact, KSDK is covering it without Glickert even notifying them about it.

Of course, Glickert is also getting negative attention in the form of threatening e-mails. No surprise there. Rush is a purveyor of hate, and the dittoheads follow that lead.

Click here to sign the petition.

Update: Petitions on this one are the fad? Anyway, Brave New Films has one going as well. I signed both. Might as well.

Kevin Horrigan’s Sunday P-D column explains that there’s hardly a more socialistic organization than the NFL; his characterization of it is irrefutable. And Rush wants in on all this socialism? Brilliant column.

Black NFL players are saying that, considering Limbaugh’s history of racism, they would refuse to play for the Rams if he became an owner. Think Progress gives us a short history of his racist remarks, starting most notably with his comment about Donovan McNabb and including his opinions about two black kids beating up a white kid on a Belleville school bus:

Indeed, as CNN reported at the time, ESPN fired Limbaugh from Sunday NFL Countdown for “his statement that Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb was overrated because the media wanted to see a black quarterback succeed.” But, of course, Limbaugh has a long sordid history with making racist remarks. Some of his more recent lowlights:

• “Look, let me put it to you this way: The NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons. There, I said it.”
• “We need segregated buses. … This is Obama’s America.”
• “President Obama is black. And I think he’s got a chip on his shoulder.”
• Democrats are interested in Darfur to secure black “voting bloc.”
• “Minorities never do anything for which they have to apologize.”
• Obama’s nomination for president “goes back to the fact that nobody had the guts to stand up and say no to a black guy.”
• Obama is a “halfrican-American.”

Advising the NFL to block Limbaugh’s pursuit of an NFL franchise, St. Louis Dispatch sports columnist Bryan Burwell wrote recently, “Dancing with Limbaugh is like dancing with a snake. Eventually, the snake will bite you. That’s his nature.”

If you think the Rams are pitiful now, wait till you see what they’re like if Limbaugh buys in. He’ll do to them what dubya did to the whole country–except that shrub took over a reasonably healthy enterprise and ran it into the red.  

One of my political acquaintances shows more grit than I do. She listens to Rush Limbaugh. I lack the mettle for such cultural slumming.

We could have a contest: name one person or group that has ever dispensed more hocus pocus in high falutin’ terms to the already stupid masses than our own native son. Limbaugh founded the Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies. To use a term like Advanced Conservative Studies is as nonsensical as promoting Advanced Thumb Sucking.

What would you learn at the Institute? Gems like this one? “There are more acres of forestland in America today than when Columbus discovered the continent in 1492.”

Now we come to the dilemma always faced by progressives: how to deal with liars like Rush. Tell a few whoppers yourself? Nah, they got forty years practice on us. And anyway, it would be immoral.

But merely telling the truth doesn’t always get the job done. Truth lacks the drama of lies. Obama’s latest gambit at controlling Republican lies in Missouri is the Barack Obama Truth Squad. Obama has asked prominent Missouri Democrats to make it their business to publicly refute ads that lie or mislead people.  

RBH pointed out that Matt Blunt is moaning about the Big Brother state that Obama’s Truth Squad exemplifies:

The group includes prosecutors from St. Louis (Robert P. McCulloch), Dunklin (Steve Sokoloff), Lafayette (Page Bellamy), Cass (Teresa Hensley), Clay (Dan White), Ripley (Chris Miller), Audrain (Jason Lamb) and Jackson (Jim Kanatzar) counties volunteering to be surrogates for Obama on their own time.

Blunt’s accusation that the prosecutors will take Republican ad makers to court is itself a lie. Prominent Democrats on the squad are simply working on their own time to get the truth out there. And what’s more, that’s nothing more than what McCain’s campaign has done:

By the way, a quick surf of the Internet found a McCain Truth Squad in New Hampshire, formed last January, that included several public officials with prosecutorial powers, including the state attorney general.

Considering the number of lies Obama faces from Republicana (including Rush and McCain’s own “truth squads”), RBH summed it up: “[W]e need a lot of people to tell the truth.”

As Michael Bersin’s last posting points out, Ike Skelton refuses to be drawn into the game of He’s a hateful extremist/She’s a hateful extremist.  Skelton is trying to be a grownup, trying to avoid tit for tat childishness.  Good for him.  I guess.

Except that, much as yhe progressive community desires such adult behavior, it’s difficult for us to contain our outrage when MoveOn gets slapped in the face by our own people. 

Our adult patience has worn as thin as wet tissue because we know that if Congress started censuring Rush for his phony soldiers comment or Rep. Peter Stark (D-CA) for saying that our troops have been sent to Iraq for the president’s amusement, it wouldn’t be a matter of tit for tat.  If all the provocative statements from both sides were brought into the accounting, it would be tit for tat tat tat tat tat tat tat tat tat tat tat tat…. 

William Rivers Pitt took the trouble to list some of the right’s most egregious “tats”.  Here’s a sampling:

“I tell people don’t kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus – living fossils – so we will never forget what these people stood for.”

  – Rush Limbaugh, Denver Post, 12-29-95

“I would warn Orlando that you’re right in the way of some serious hurricanes, and I don’t think I’d be waving those flags in God’s face if I were you. This is not a message of hate; this is a message of redemption. But a condition like this will bring about the destruction of your nation. It’ll bring about terrorist bombs; it’ll bring earthquakes, tornadoes and possibly a meteor.”

  – Pat Robertson, speaking of organizers putting rainbow flags up around Orlando to support sexual diversity, Washington Post, 06-10-98. For the record, Orlando remains undestroyed by meteors.

“Environmentalists are a socialist group of individuals that are the tool of the Democrat Party. I’m proud to say that they are my enemy. They are not Americans, never have been Americans, never will be Americans.”

  – Rep. Don Young (R-AK), Alaska Public Radio, 08-19-96

  “Get rid of the guy. Impeach him, censure him, assassinate him.”

  – Rep. James Hansen (R-UT), talking about President Clinton, as reported by journalist Steve Miner of KSUB radio who overheard his conversation, 11-01-98

  “We’re going to keep building the party until we’re hunting Democrats with dogs.”

  – Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX), Mother Jones, 08-95

  “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building.”

  – Ann Coulter, New York Observer, 08-26-02

  “Chelsea is a Clinton. She bears the taint; and though not prosecutable in law, in custom and nature the taint cannot be ignored. All the great despotisms of the past – I’m not arguing for despotism as a principle, but they sure knew how to deal with potential trouble – recognized that the families of objectionable citizens were a continuing threat. In Stalin’s penal code it was a crime to be the wife or child of an ‘enemy of the people.’ The Nazis used the same principle, which they called Sippenhaft, ‘clan liability.’ In Imperial China, enemies of the state were punished ‘to the ninth degree’: that is, everyone in the offender’s own generation would be killed and everyone related via four generations up, to the great-great-grandparents, and four generations down, to the great-great-grandchildren, would also be killed.”

  – John Derbyshire, National Review, 02-15-01

  “I know this is painful for the ladies to hear, but if you get married, you have accepted the headship of a man, your husband. Christ is the head of the household and the husband is the head of the wife, and that’s the way it is, period.”

  – Pat Robertson again, The 700 Club, 01-08-92

This is a sampling of Pitts’ list, and his list is itself only a sampling.  I’d feel easier about Ike acting like a grownup if he would acknowledge that Democrats may not be sweetness and light every minute of the day, but that’s because they’re provoked beyond all reason by the outrages that the media winks at from Limbaugh, Coulter, Robertson, and the whole host of right wing hatefuls.