No love on the Sunday morning television talk shows for Rush Limbaugh, not even a mild defense as the unifying theme was disappointment in Mitt Romney for not denouncing the leading national conservative talk radio host. “The problem with Rush Limbaugh,” NBC News White House correspondent Savannah Guthrie complained in pretending to care about the fate of Republicans, “is that he re-framed the debate on Democrat’s terms” and “Romney lost an opportunity there to speak out forcefully against” Limbaugh which “would have shown some political courage, some backbone and ultimately,” she argued, “that would help him with conservatives.”
Meet the Press host David Gregory jumped in to assert “Sister Souljah’s not just a rap reference, it’s a political reference.” He cued up Republican strategist/Romney backer Mike Murphy: “Was this a ‘Sister Souljah Moment’ that Romney missed?” Murphy, naturally, agreed as he added in a snarky shot at Limbaugh: “It could have been and it should have been. The big myth about Rush Limbaugh is he can’t deliver a pizza let alone a vote.”
Murphy, however, also pointed out the media’s double standard, alluding, without naming him, to Bill Maher: “There are folks on the left throwing the same kind of language around, even giving a million dollars to Democratic – I don’t hear about them. That said, this was an opportunity for Mitt to push back...”
Limbaugh didn’t have any defenders either on ABC’s This Week, not even amongst the conservatives, where Wall Street Journal columnist and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan declared: "What Rush Limbaugh said was crude, rude, even piggish.” She lamented that “what he said was also destructive. It confused the issue, it played into this trope that the Republicans have a war on women. No, they don’t, but he made it look they that way. It confused the larger issue which is the real issue, which is ObamaCare and its incursions against religious freedom...."
More in the cross-post on the MRC's NewsBusters blog.