Rush Limbaugh celebrates his lavish wedding by mocking hungry children

[and-justice-for-all]

This week marked the return of Rush Limbaugh from a short vacation, during which he celebrated his fourth traditional marriage.

Rush picked up on Tuesday where he left off before the hiatus: by politicizing the BP oil spill and absurdly suggesting Obama "want this disaster" so he can push cap and trade.

On Wednesday, in the wake of Obama's Oval Office address about the spill, Limbaugh followed Beck's lead by mocking Malia Obama. He imitated her voice and, foreshadowing Rep. Joe Barton's apology to BP, said things like "Daddy, did you shake down BP yet?" It takes a special kind of blowhard to manage to mock children more than once in a single show, but as he's proven time and again over the last couple of decades, it's a mistake to underestimate Rush Limbaugh's ability to be mind-bogglingly offensive.

Discussing an AOL News report that children "face a summer of hunger" because they had previously relied on "free or discount cafeteria meals," but will no longer be getting them because school is out of session, Limbaugh declared that "a summer off from government eating might be just the ticket" to curbing childhood obesity. Taking it further, he stated that children "starving to death out there because there's no school meal provided" is "one of the benefits of school being out."

Apparently unfamiliar with the idea of parents not being able to afford to stock kitchens with food, Limbaugh condescendingly told hungry children to "try your house" in order to find food, then suggested McDonald's food as an alternative. According to Limbaugh, if all those "options" fail, "there's always the neighborhood dumpster."

If Limbaugh ever addresses these comments, he'll say that he was either taken out of context or claim he was just tweaking the "drive-bys" with his "satire" about people relying on government assistance. He even punctuated the transcript of this segment on his website with the following image:



Haha -- stupid starving kids can't even find food in their kitchens! Good one, Rush.

As we documented, mocking hungry children was only the latest salvo in Limbaugh's ongoing war on the poor. In fact, Limbaugh frequently makes light of the plight of the poor and derides the programs designed to aid them.

During the health care reform debate, Limbaugh devoted several segments to ridiculing people who couldn't afford health care. For example, he called the story of a woman who wore her dead sister's dentures because she couldn't afford her own the "sob story of the day" and further mocked the woman's plight by saying, "So if you don't have any teeth, so what? What's applesauce for?"

And while Limbaugh spends much of his time attacking those less fortunate than he -- including hungry children -- he will always stick up for those he sees as the true victims in our society: huge, irresponsible corporations.

http://mediamatters.org/

[Octafish]

1. And people wonder why so many today lack empathy.

Compassion is contagious. Rush must neve have known love as a baby.

[Scuba]

2. Hard to imagine that any of his four wives loved him either.

[Stephanie]

3. To fix the HTML error

Go to this phrase: "want this disaster" and edit out the brackets around the S. DU's code is reading that as a strikethrough tag. You still have time to edit.