The Crush Rush Award for Loathing Limbaugh

“What was the more likely cause of the Oklahoma City bombing: talk radio or Bill Clinton and Janet Reno’s hands-on management of Waco, the Branch Davidian compound?...Obviously, the answer is talk radio. Specifically Rush Limbaugh’s hate radio....Frankly, Rush, you have that blood on your hands now and you have had it for 15 years.”

“Laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out.”

“Words have consequences. You can not call a President’s policies ‘un-American,’ as Sarah Palin has done; or refer to the elected government as a ‘regime,’ as Rush Limbaugh persists in doing; or the President as a foreign usurper, as the birthers do; without giving license on some day to real trouble. This April was the 15th anniversary of [the] Oklahoma City [bombing]. It is well to consider what happens when people act on what they hear, when the hatred of our own elected government becomes explosive.”

“These are not proud moments in my heritage. But now, I’m genuinely ashamed of us. How sad this whole mosque business is. It doesn’t take much, it seems, to lift the lid and let our home-grown racism and bigotry overflow. We have collectively taken a pratfall on a moral whoopee cushion....A heyday is being had by a posse of the cheesiest Republican politicos (Lazio, Palin, quick-change artist John McCain and, of course, the self-anointed St. Joan of 9/11, R. Giuliani). Balanced, of course by plenty of cheesy Democrats. And of course Rush L. dependably pollutes the atmosphere with his particular brand of airborne sludge.”

Anchor David Shuster: “Many conservatives today reacted harshly to the action in Congress. But nobody on the right produced as much controversial venom this afternoon as Rush Limbaugh....”

Georgetown University’s Michael Eric Dyson: “If anybody is fomenting dissent, it is Rush Limbaugh, the politics of division, the cruel denial of the utter humanity of Mr. Obama....”

Shuster: “Rush Limbaugh creates this picture of fascism and Nazism on the march. And you then start to have people going out of control acting crazily on Capitol Hill, yelling all kinds of racist things at members of the Congressional Black Caucus, yelling hateful things at Barney Frank....”

Dyson: “This is a bigotocracy. I think Rush Limbaugh is trying to foment a universe of bigotocracy.”

“You started the year with this huge festival of hope and renewal and everything is going to be so different now, and then, like the bad fairy at Sleeping Beauty’s christening, Rush Limbaugh utters the words, ‘I hope you fail.’ ‘I hope he fails,’ he said, and from that moment, the sort of the Pandora’s box opened, and the rest of the year has been just this big discord and toxic atmosphere in politics and partisan divide and people shouting at each other and the Tea Parties and death panels.”