From Monday's "Pearls of Wisdom" column (does he really publish one of these every day?) comes this flabbergasting quote from Rush Limbaugh:

"I've been here for 21 years, and for 21 years they have been trying to besmirch me and impugn my character by saying I'm a racist. Well, it doesn't work because A, I'm not one; and B, you who listen regularly know it. The media didn't make me, so they can't break me."

I use the term "flabbergasting" because it is so blatantly untrue.  If only I had known that bald face lies were the way to get ahead in life!  This is another great example of how Rush uses his audience's short attention span against them.  Because you see, Rush has frequently been put on record as being a racist.

Actually, I should qualify that: Rush has been put on record as saying racist things.  And I'm sure you can excuse me for assuming a big fat white guy from the South who says racist things IS racist.  But I don't know what is in Rush Limbaugh's heart, nor would I care to speculate, nor would I care to investigate.

At any rate, the ground is thick with racist Rush Limbaugh quotes.  One of the ones I like to mull over is his quote (as collected on the Top 10 Racist Limbaugh Quotes page) that the age of slavery in the American south had its benefits, "For one thing the streets were safer after dark."

Safer for WHITE PEOPLE, sure.

But it doesn't end there.  Rush has also gone on record as believing that James Earl Ray (Martin Luther King Jr's assassin) deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor.  He once said that "The NAACP should have riot rehearsal.  They should get a liquor store and practice robberies."  He told a female African American caller to "take that bone out of your nose and call me back."

But wait, there's more!  Skeptical about some quotes on the page by some person on the internet?  How about some actual recordings of Rush Limbaugh being a terrible racist?  Here he is talking about how racism doesn't exist, and that black people are angry and foolish for saying that it does.  Here he is defending the "Barack the Magic Negro" recording, which he played frequently on his radio show (before the rest of the world found out, and apparently he finally scuttled it).

(Bonus content: Rush mocks and vilifies Michael J. Fox for having Parkinson's disease.  Stay classy, Rush.)

Anyway what it comes down to is, this is how Rush's tricks work.  He's on record as having made tons of racist remarks over the years, and not just in his youth - the "Barack the Magic Negro" thing was just last March, for pity's sake.  Then he smugly smugifies on his show about how "They" try to smear him for being a racist but they can't because there's no proof.

The only problem being, durr there's tons of proof.  But Rush's avid listeners (all unknown-but-probably-small number of them) would never question anything Rush says, much less do any research on their own.  Sad, really.