The Media Research Center’s Tim Graham and Brent Bozell spent their Aug. 14 column outraged that the New York Times pointed out how the anti-immigration language of the El Paso massacre shooter’s manifesto echoed that of prominent right-wing pundits including Rush Limbaugh. They even defended the inflammatory (and mutually used) word “invasion” to describe undocumented immigrants and refugees trying to cross the southern border:
The Times brigade was especially appalled by conservative media stars’ using the term “invasion” to describe the influx at the southern border. Limbaugh explained that “invasion” describes the left’s strategy to import new voters who don’t share any particular affection for America’s founding principles.
“Invasion” is the correct word. It didn’t matter to The Times that each month from March till June, we were faced with over 100,000 border apprehensions of immigrants surging into our country.
The two followed that with another kneejerk defense of their buddy Limbaugh:
Would Limbaugh be more politically correct if he were to categorize this more gently, perhaps as “increased travel”?
This is the kind of “news” story that the left has been uncorking for decades. Limbaugh was blunt: “It’s been a constant attempt by the left since I started this program to discredit me, to impugn me. And their purpose has been to make sure I don’t acquire an even larger audience.”
Limbaugh has every right to be furious. When white supremacist Timothy McVeigh drove up to a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 and blew it up with an ammonium nitrate bomb, killing 168 people, the “news” media energetically connected it to the rhetoric of Limbaugh and the new Republican House Speaker, Newt Gingrich.
(Remember, the MRC even found a way to defend Limbaugh after his vicious misogynist attack on Sandra Fluke.)
Of course, Graham and Bozell never actually disproved the idea that the extreme rhetoric of right-wing jocks like Limbaugh had an effect on McVeigh.
Graham and Bozell concluded by whining, “The liberal media are becoming increasingly more comfortable with impugning every reporter and commentator in conservative media as a poisonous instigator of violence.” Say the operators of an organizaton that was eager to play whataboutism in blaming Rachel Maddow for a deranged man who tried to kill Rep. Steve Scalise despite there being no evidence Maddow ever advocated violence against anyone.