I never meant to be a voice of what some people call the "liberal left," and my colleague Frank Thomas Croisdale never meant to be "controversial." That's the last thing he would ever want to be. But the other week, we both became embroiled in a dispute that quickly took on a life of its own.
And it all started because of that damn column Croisdale wrote about Rush Limbaugh.
Around the Reporter office, Croisdale's known as the nice guy. He writes humorous, heartwarming pieces chock-full of cracker-barrel wisdom, and he does it better than a lot of well-known writers who earn 100 times his annual salary.
So, a couple of weeks ago, when Limbaugh was forced to resign from his job as an ESPN football commentator over some questionable remarks he made about Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb, Croisdale wrote a column about it.
And I didn't like it.
I sent him an e-mail which, in retrospect, was somewhat testy, asking him why of all the people who have problems in this world, he chose to stick up for a scumbag like Limbaugh. There was never any question about whether the column would run. The whole idea behind the Reporter was to put together the best group of writers we could find and let them say pretty much whatever they wanted.
In response, and perhaps to say, "Get off my back, Mike," Croisdale forwarded me an e-mail he had received from a Limbaugh fan named Blair Lovern, who took him to task for not defending Rush enough. Mr. Lovern was even harsher than I in criticizing the column, calling it a "piece of crap."
There's one thing I always do, and that's stick up for my writers. Hell, they make me look good. And they fill the Reporter's pages with copy that makes tens of thousands of people read it every week.
The long and the short of it is, I sent an e-mail to Mr. Lovern. I was really just defending Croisdale, but have to admit to referring to Limbaugh as a "drug-addled, gay-bashing, woman-hating, bigoted bag of pus." On a positive note, I said I hoped he would recover from his drug addiction.
So he could then go on to die a painful death from cancer of the testicles.
That's when everything went awry. A couple days later I got a call from Steve Malzberg, host of a talk-radio show on Limbaugh's flagship station, WABC in New York City. Apparently, this guy Lovern had forwarded my e-mail to him.
Malzberg asked me whether these were my true comments and I told him they were. We chatted amicably for a while, he told me that his wife had been a longtime staffer on Rush's show and asked me whether I would appear on his program. I told him I would and we worked out the details.
When I got on the show, I talked to a different Steve Malzberg. He was shouting at me. It was good, though, because I went from being nervous to being mad in about two seconds. I recounted what Rush had said about other drug addicts, and quoted his gleeful remarks on the deaths of Jerry Garcia and Kurt Cobain. Malzberg replied that a person says a lot of things when they're on the radio three hours a day, five days a week, for 15 years.
Well, yeah. Especially if they're high.
Malzberg called me a "hypocrite" -- which I think might be one crime I'm actually not guilty of -- and I told him I respected the fact that the Malzberg family owed Rush a big debt of gratitude for all he'd done for them.
That really set him off, and he began working with the modulation and the volume so that I got quieter and quieter as he got louder and louder. A couple of veteran Buffalo radio guys confirmed this.
Over the next few days, we received more than 250 e-mails from Limbaugh supporters, who call themselves "dittoheads." A majority hadn't heard the show, but read Malzberg's one-sided account of it later on a right-wing Web site.
They wanted bad things to happen to me, my mother, the Reporter and everyone associated with it. Some said I needed to get right with God, and others apparently thought I possessed a godlike power of my own in that, simply by saying it, I could in fact make Rush Limbaugh get cancer. One guy told Croisdale he'd better never come to Mississippi.
Here's a small sample of the printable ones:
"You are scum. You deserve to be buried on a yokel-local weekly in the land of ignorant tree-huggers. I bet the local overall-suspenders rubes think you are witty, urbane and so, so, so clever. I suggest you take a ride over the falls in a barrel."
"Have you ever thought of moving to Western Europe?"
"I wish you would get elaphantitus (sic) and die."
"Mike Hudson, owner of this backwater rag that no one outside of Niagara Falls would have ever heard of but for his insensitive remarks regarding Rush Limbaugh, takes the cake. Where'd his daddy put him through journalism school? Probably a low-ranked, Democrat brainwashing place that has no concept of objectivity."
"Hope you get accosted by a bunch of black, AIDS infected homosexual rapists and die ... you're a disgrace."
(Editors' note: The theme of black, AIDS-infected, homosexual rapists came up time and again in the letters. It is apparently a big concern among Limbaugh fans.)
"Hope you contract the ALZHIEMERS DISEASE (sic) so we all can watch you slowly fade away to where you would not be able to feed yourself nor wipe your butt nor remember anything not even your family."
"I'll bet you have done some real sordid things in your closet."
"I hope you get throat cancer and die."
"I hope your pecker falls off and you have to sit to pee."
Compassionate conservatives indeed. For the record, I've never done anything in my closet except store my clothes there, and my dad did a lot of nice things for me but never sent me to any low-ranked Democrat brainwashing place. And unlike, say, Rush Limbaugh, I haven't presented myself to the public as some kind of moral compass, presuming to tell other people how they should live their private lives.
I do have to confess, though, to having thought about moving to Western Europe, or even Eastern Europe.
Anyway, I answered each and every e-mail. It's an old trick I learned from Al Franken.
"Thank you for your kind e-mail regarding our editorial. As you can imagine, we received so many positive e-mails regarding our editorial that we cannot possibly answer them all. But once again, thank you for your kind remarks regarding our editorial."
This drove them right up the wall. Many responded furiously to say that their e-mails hadn't been kind at all, and I answered right back.
"Thank you for your kind e-mail regarding our editorial. As you can imagine, we received so many positive e-mails regarding our editorial that we cannot possibly answer them all. But once again, thank you for your kind remarks regarding our editorial."
It took some "dittoheads" five or six such exchanges before they realized they were being joshed.
A couple days after I went on the radio, Croisdale and Malzberg appeared on the MSNBC television show, "Scarborough Country," whose host, Joe Scarborough, was one of the weasels in Congress who led the charge in the failed Clinton impeachment. Croisdale had them on the run when Scarborough abruptly cut the segment short. At no point was it mentioned that Malzberg has a business relationship with both Scarborough and MSNBC, moonlighting as guest host on the show.
Limbaugh's a phony and a liar. A strong advocate for "family values," he's been married three times and doesn't have any kids. An admitted drug addict who's now in his third rehab and under criminal investigation, he has a long record of calling for stricter drug laws and harsher sentences for those who would break them. He targets the mythical "welfare mother" for not going out and getting a job when his alleged audience of 20 million apparently has nothing better to do than sit around and listen to him on weekday afternoons.
He deserves no more compassion than that he's shown to countless others, which is to say, none.
In the end, I guess I do regret saying I hoped that Rush would die of testicular cancer. Because I'm certain there must be a more painful way to die.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | October 28 2003 |