Loudmouth Limbaugh given the bum's Rush

AMERICA AT LARGE/George Kimball: I believe it was my friend and former colleague, Charles P Pierce, who years ago first coined the faux riddle: what's the difference between Rush Limbaugh and the Hindenberg? The answer: one is a flaming Nazi gas-bag, the other a dirigible.

I'd remembered the joke before this football season, when ESPN, in an unabashed attempt to expand its audience, hired Limbaugh to participate on its NFL pre-game shows, and thought of it again last week, when he was (choose one) fired or resigned under pressure for race-baiting comments tendered in the guise of "expert" opinion.

L'affaire Limbaugh had barely subsided when Rush was followed out the door, albeit, at this point, temporarily, by John Dennis and Gerry Callahan, a pair of Boston radio talk-show hosts, who likened a gorilla recently escaped from a Massachusetts zoo to black schoolchildren.

Over the past two decades, Limbaugh has become one of America's most controversial - and popular - radio commentators, making his reputation through a daily barrage of ultra-right-wing, hate-fuelled invective and often thinly-veiled racism.

Even though his experience in the world of sports was limited to a few years spent working in the Kansas City Royals' ticket office back in the 1970s, ESPN (which, like ABC, is owned and operated by the Disney Corporation) signed Limbaugh to the cast of its pre-game show, and during his brief tenure there was rewarded by a 10 per cent boost in ratings.

Two Sundays ago, Limbaugh tore into Philadelphia Eagles' quarterback Donovan McNabb, who, along with his team, had stumbled getting out of the gate this season. Limbaugh claimed McNabb had always been "overrated" but had been championed by a liberal sports media so eager to see a black quarterback succeed that a blind eye was turned to his shortcomings. This was preposterous enough on its face: McNabb has taken his team to the NFC championship game two years in a row, and was selected to play in the Pro Bowl on three occasions. The media doesn't vote for the Pro Bowl: the players do.

Like many other aspects of Limbaugh's credo, this self-provoked controversy seemed not only hopelessly outdated, but in an age when eight of the league's 32 starting quarterbacks are African-Americans it just seemed silly.

ESPN initially attempted to defend Limbaugh, then distanced itself from the racial aspects of the issue, and finally, within a matter of days, amid a nationwide explosion of outrage, demanded and received his resignation.

Almost simultaneously, it came to light that Limbaugh was the subject of a criminal probe in Florida, where the apostle of anti-drug hysteria was himself being investigated for having illegally obtained, and presumably consumed, 4,350 tablets of the prescription painkiller Oxycontin.

Limbaugh's dismissal was still being debated when, in Boston, Dennis and Callahan dropped the other shoe. The morning drive-time show hosted by the pair airs on an all-sports station, WEEI, and while it nominally centres around the world of fun and games, the hosts are also encouraged to comment on the day's headlines.

Dennis is a former television sports anchor. Callahan, who continues to write a column for the Boston Herald, has developed a radio persona that marks him a Limbaugh acolyte.

Last week, while thumbing through the morning newspapers, Dennis and Callahan came across an item concerning the escape of a gorilla named Little Joe from a Boston zoo. Little Joe had eluded his captors long enough to make his way to the city streets before being tranquillised and captured, and, spotting a photograph of the ape in proximity to a bus stop, the pair had guffawed that he appeared to have been "waiting for the Metco bus to take him to Lexington".

The residue of Boston's troubled busing crisis three decades ago, the Metco programme was developed to allow promising inner-city pupils to escape the de facto integration of the city schools by attending classes in the systems of several dozen better-heeled suburbs - Lexington among them. The ultimate success of the programme came not because the suburbanites embraced it (which they initially did not), but rather when, over the years, it became evident that not only were the Metco students profiting from their educational opportunities, but the athletic programs of the bedroom community schools were being vastly enhanced by the participation of the transported (and mostly African-American) students.

As it was rapidly pointed out, the attempt at radio humour went well beyond being insulting: it was downright dangerous. Given the widespread circulation of the remarks, it was only a matter of time before a black child would step off a Metco bus to be greeted by taunts of "monkey" and worse by his fellow students.

Initially WEEI suspended Dennis, who had first introduced the "Metco" issue into the gorilla-escape repartee, for two days without pay, but as media outlets obtained tapes of the actual conversation it became clear that Callahan had been an equal participant, and beginning two days ago the pair were each suspended for another two weeks.

Our own feeling is that Dennis and Callahan should be punished by being force-fed part of Rush Limbaugh's stash. The federally-mandated cautions for Oxycontin warn that Rush's drug of choice may produce side-effects, including, in descending order of frequency, "anorexia, nervousness, insomnia, fever, confusion, diarrhoea, abdominal pain, dyspepsia, rash, anxiety, euphoria, dyspnoea, postural hypotension, chills, twitching, gastritis, abnormal dreams, thought abnormalities, and hiccups".