I came across that remark with the bold part only, and I thought it so outrageous that I looked up the entire statement, context and all. Even with that I think the statement is a bad one, but not a crazy one. I also looked up Rush's complete comments, he posts transcripts, he has for a long time precisely because he runs a 3-hour long unscripted radio program everyday and people often yank his comments out of context. Now its too late for anyone to post that transcript and have anyone objectively say 'hmm... a bit offensive' or 'oh, yeah that was a pretty mean joke, he's making fun of Danny Glover and accusing environmentalists of seizing on natural disasters to push their agenda' because everyone read the quote, formed an opinion, and won't budge. Nobody here ever does. Someone posts some soundbite, and they all fall in on partisan lines and argue about it, and nobody ever bothers to look it up. Well I saw the EESC's comments another blog, and all the comments about it were outraged howling and crazed defenses, and I stopped and thought "Why isn't this guy being dragged through the proverbial streets to be tarred and feathered?" so I looked up what he said, and I still think his comments were shoe-horning in GW when it wasn't called for, but they're not really very outrageous, are they?

People on this board have a damned bad habit of posting soundbite crap they get from hyper-partisan websites then wrestling about it for days... we've got a thread still chugging along that revolves around a blatantly clipped up video and one of the subthreads has two guys screaming at each other about how comments were or weren't out of context and neither bothered to look them up, which took me about 10 seconds of googling, by the way.

And it doesn't matter if on looking them up the comments remain vicious -sometimes they do - what matters is that none of you ever bother to, and when someone posts up the whole context and it remains vile, or still pretty bad, it doesn't vindicate the people who were saying so before hand but were too lazy to look it up, and it doesn't excuse the wad of people who refuse to apologize or let it go when the context shows they were just wrong, because their egos and ideologies can't suffer just saying 'Yeah, I jumped the gun' and they lack the internal honesty to realize that the reason they were so happy to rip into the meat was because they already believe the opposition is evil and their own side virtuous and they don't really need or want evidence to support or contradict that.

And the fact of the matter is no one with any intellectual honesty has any business posting these kind of He/She crazy/evil soundbites without finding the entire statement first, and if they can't, they shouldn't post it at all.