I had fun sampling Rush Limbaugh in the latest Point of Inquiry (around minute 3:30), as he stunningly suggests to Andy Revkin: "Why don't you just go kill yourself, and help the planet by dying?" First, for the original clip of Rush's extremism in all its glory, listen here:
I couldn't resist asking for Revkin's response to Limbaugh, which came at around minute 13:00 of the show. Revkin first set the stage for Rush's performance as follows:
I was speaking about three very tricky things: population growth, United States consumer habits, and climate--in one riff. I was participating via video hookup with a Wilson Center event, and basically I said, "Look, if you're going to go with the whole carbon-centric meme, and we'll have carbon credits for this, that, and the other, and you live in America, where we're heading from 300 million to 400 million people in the next 30 or 40 years, why shouldn't a family get carbon credits for having fewer kids?"
It was what I would call a thought experiment. And that got picked up by some right wing blog, and that got picked up by Rush Limbaugh, who I'm sure never saw the original video thing....Just hearing the audio [of Limbaugh] is amazing. And of course I wrote a thorough critique of what he had said on DotEarth, and then he spent the next week nibbling, almost apologizing. Suicide is a realm you don't go into, without having to draw a lot of ire from a lot of people who have actually experienced the loss of family members. So he almost apologized, but not quite.
Hey, why apologize when you're Rush Limbaugh? [For more Point of Inquiry, listen here
, or subscribe here
via iTunes.]
