Limbaugh Rushed To Honolulu Hospital That Gave Rise To ?Birther? Conspiracy
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on January 1st, 2010 5:35 am by HL
Limbaugh Rushed To Honolulu Hospital That Gave Rise To ?Birther? Conspiracy
Conservative radio shock jock Rush Limbaugh was rushed to a Honolulu hospital yesterday with chest pains. After paramedics arrived and treated him at the Kahala Hotel and Resort, Limbaugh was transferred to Queen’s Medical Center where he reportedly arrived in “serious condition.” KHON2 reports: Sources say the 58 year old [Limbaugh] was suffering chest […]
Conservative radio shock jock Rush Limbaugh was rushed to a Honolulu hospital yesterday with chest pains. After paramedics arrived and treated him at the Kahala Hotel and Resort, Limbaugh was transferred to Queen’s Medical Center where he reportedly arrived in “serious condition.” KHON2 reports:
Sources say the 58 year old [Limbaugh] was suffering chest pains before an ambulance arrived at the hotel.
Honolulu’s Emergency Services Department confirmed a male fitting Limbaugh’s description was taken from the hotel in serious condition.
As an avid golfer Limbaugh travels to Hawaii just about every year and earlier this week was seen in Kona on the Big Island and at the Waialae Country Club on Oahu.
While unfortunate, Limbaugh’s hospital visit is rife with irony. The ailing radio show host was sent to the same medical center that a United Press International reporter misidentified in an article published in 2008 as the facility in which President Obama was born. Though the error was corrected to accurately indicate that Obama was born in the Kapi’olani Medical Center, the mistake fueled “birther” conspiracy theories that Limbaugh then dedicated significant airtime to promoting. Since then, Limbaugh has gone as far to state that Hawaii “morphed into Kenya one day in 1961 [the year Obama was born] and reverted back to Hawaii the next day.”
Meanwhile, some of Limbaugh’s right-wing colleagues have spent the past week slamming Obama for vacationing in Hawaii over the holidays, which “to many Americans seems like a foreign place.” Last month, Limbaugh was voted the nation’s “most influential conservative voice.”
Fox News Host Promotes Newt?s Call For Profiling: ?Profile Them! What?s Wrong With That??
Yesterday, Newt Gingrich joined the right wing’s hysteric attacks on President Obama regarding Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s failed attempted to blow up a U.S. airliner over Detroit, calling for more “profiling” and “discrimination” and saying that the Obama administration is more interested in “protecting the rights of terrorists” than “protecting the lives of Americans.” This morning […]
Yesterday, Newt Gingrich joined the right wing’s hysteric attacks on President Obama regarding Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s failed attempted to blow up a U.S. airliner over Detroit, calling for more “profiling” and “discrimination” and saying that the Obama administration is more interested in “protecting the rights of terrorists” than “protecting the lives of Americans.”
This morning on Fox News, Gingrich tried to clarify his comments. “We have to be prepared to profile based on behavior, not ethnic profiling, not racial profiling but look at people’s behavior,” he said. Later, host Alisyn Camerota signed on to and promoted Gingrich’s plan:
CAMEROTA: I haven’t heard a single person talking about any kind of racial profiling. It doesn’t say “Muslim” on a passport. […] But anybody who travels all the time recognizes how ludicrous it is to frisk your grandmother. She’s not the risk. But somebody who’s let say been in Yemen in the past year. I’d say profile them. Profile them! What’s wrong with that?
Co-host Dave Briggs asked, “Should we body scan everyone at the airports?” “I’d say yes,” he said answering his own question, adding, “If it keeps me and my family safe, go ahead an invade their privacy.” Watch it:
Yesterday on NPR, even former Bush Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said profiling is a bad idea, calling it foolish, particularly in Abdulmutallab’s case:
CHERTOFF: I’m going to argue that this case illustrates the danger and the foolishness of profiling because people’s conception of what a potential terrorist looks like often doesn’t match reality. In this case we had a Nigerian, for example, not a person from the Middle East or from South Asia. If you look at the airline plot of 2006, two of the plotters were a married couple that were going to get on a plane with a young baby. The terrorists understand that the more they vary the kind of operative they use, the more likely they’re going to be able to exploit prejudices if we allow those prejudices to guide the way we conduct our investigation.
“I think it’s not only problematic from civil rights’ standpoint, but frankly,” Chertoff said, “I think it winds up not being terribly effective.”
