If Rush Limbaugh and his pals in the media still think that Michael J. Fox is acting, they should check out this video clip from ABC News from last July. The guy is so clearly trying to do something good here. It just kills me that these heartless bastards are attacking him and saying that it’s exploitive for him to be an activist for a disease that’s killing him.
Actors are vain people. It cannot be easy for him to expose himself in public knowing that when the public sees him in this condition they are uncomfortable and pitying. He is rich enough to live out his days in in comfortable privacy, getting the best of care and giving money for the cause. But he’s put together a very serious and productive foundation that has funded 70 million dollars in Parkinson’s research and he works constantly on the issue.
This transcends politics and it’s beyond petty partisanship. (After all, Fox did a very similar commercial for Arlen Specter in 2004.) Stem cell research has the support of the vast majority of this country of all political persuasions but it’s being held hostage by the same minority group of religious extremists who staged that sideshow over terry Schiavo. There you had a woman with no brain and no hope who the extremists were willing to go to the ends of the earth to “save.” Here we have a 45 year old man who is fully funtional intellectually but whose body is beginning to fail him because of a terrible disease and they are rudely dismissing him as a fake and saying that his life is no more important than a smear in a petrie dish.
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The portion of the interview they broadcast was quite decent. But you can see the whole interview here — and listen to Katie Couric push him over and over again on the burning question of whether he manipulated his medication and ask him whether he should have re-scheduled the shoot when his symptoms were manifested as they were. And she does it while she’s sitting directly across from him watching him shake like crazy. Her questions imply that it was in poor taste or manipulative as if he can magically conjure a film crew to catch him in on of the fleeting moments where he doesn’t appear too symptomatic. The press seems to truly believe that it is reasonable to be suspicious of him showing symptoms of a disease that has him so severely in its clutches that if he doesn’t take his medication his face becomes a frozen mask and he cannot even talk.
The depravity of conservatives, and the willingness of the media to indulge it, never ceases to amaze me. In a rational society, when a drug-addled gasbag radio host mocks an actor with a debilitating disease, the ensuing discussion would revolve around said drug-addled gasbag’s many, many faults as a human being, not least of which being his ready willingness to mock the handicapped. Rather than treating his uninformed speculation as beneath contempt, however, people are actually discussing whether Michael J. Fox’s symptoms are as bad as they look in these campaign commercials. I know that the media are amoral predators, constantly alert for any hint of blood in the water, but I guess I’m still naive enough to wish that occasionally Keith Olbermann wouldn’t be the only person in the entire industry willing to call bullshit when the odor is rank enough to make you gag.
But I’m also naive enough to imagine that this will backfire as spectacularly as the Terry Schiavo circus did. Seriously, Republicans — you want to rally around the drug-addled gasbag hatemonger in his war against the beloved actor with the debilitating disease — please, by all means, go for it.
Digby points out a good contradiction in the GOP’s stance on stem cell research :
The Republicans are taking a new tack on stem cells. In response to the Michael J. Fox “backlash” Ken Mehlman just said on CNN that Jim Talent supports stem cell research but he just doesn’t think the government should pay for it. He pointed out that nobody says that the private sector shouldn’t pursue stem cell research. What’s the problem?
. . .
This argument worked back in the day with the Hyde Amendment banning public money for abortion because some people object to the expenditure on moral grounds. Maybe it will work again. But I don’t think stem cell research has ever had the kind of visceral punch that abortion has and the benefits to everyone are far more obvious.
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Mostly, though, it undercuts the moral argument the Republicans have been making about their (phony) “culture of life.” Back in the 70’s, when the Hyde Amendment was passed, Republicans could get away with making practical arguments like “people shouldn’t have to pay for things that morally offend them.” But this isn’t the “me decade” anymore. The Republicans are no longer supposed to be just the defenders of traditional values — they are supposed to be true believers. I don’t see how the religious right could support such a “split-the-difference” strategy.
The “culture of life” warriors have been making similar arguments recently in regards to the (imminent) overturning of Roe vs. Wade. Rather than look like the religious extremists that they are, they do their best to assure the mushy middle that repealing Roe won’t outlaw abortion, it’ll just make abortion laws “revert to the states”. Y’know, so Alabama rape victims will be forced to have their babies, but women in California and New York will still have control of their bodies.
Of course these are the same people who insist abortion and embryonic stem cell research are “murder“. Here’s what Tony Snow said in regards to the President’s feelings about stem cells :
Q Can you remind us why the President believes that it is not appropriate to use — that it is more appropriate for stem cells to be thrown away than to be used, in this case, for medical research?
MR. SNOW: The President — I don’t think that’s the choice that the President has presented. What the President has said is that he doesn’t want human life destroyed. Now, you may consider that insignificant, but the President has said — and you have had in a number of cases the Snowflake babies, where some of those fetuses have, in fact, been brought to term and have become human beings. The President believes strongly that for the purpose of research it’s inappropriate for the federal government to finance something that many people consider murder; he’s one of them.
Personally, I think the insistence among conservatives that stem cell research and abortion are murder is completely absurd, but that’s not half as troubling as the thought that there are conservatives who think an act of “murder” is perfectly acceptable as long as it’s decided by the states and isn’t funded with tax dollars. Which reminds me of this great quote that sums up conservatism in a nutshell :
“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy: that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
-John Kenneth Galbraith
And with the abortion and stem cell debates, we’ve seen this hypocrisy reach to it’s limit. The GOP stance on “murder” is that it’s fine with them as long as it doesn’t happen in their back yard and they don’t have to pay for it. That’s not a defensible position, it’s insanity.
Because, well, you heard what Rush said about Michael J. Fox, so obviously:
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (he had Lucy Mercer!). Max Cleland. Michael Moore (the fat’s just to make him seem lovable!). Steve Biko (the police said those head wounds were the result of a hunger strike!). Helen Keller.
Regarding the imminent legalization of gay marriage in New Jersey, it’s probably worth pointing out that gay people have been getting hitched in Massachusetts for two and a half years now and the gates of Hell haven’t opened up and swallowed the entire country. The right wing’s Chicken Little crap was proven wrong a few years ago and it’s still wrong. The only thing that gay marriages have really changed is that gay people are getting married now. Big deal.
In a sane world, Rush Limbaugh would spend every morning telling fart jokes as part of the “Morning Zoo” crew at a tiny Top40 station in the middle of nowhere, but for some absurd reason, the gatekeepers of the pundit world take this asshole seriously. So here we go with yet another reason to dismiss everything that comes out of the mouth of this overrated shock jock :
Possibly worse than making fun of someone’s disability is saying that it’s imaginary. That is not to mock someone’s body, but to challenge a person’s guts, integrity, sanity.
To Rush Limbaugh on Monday, Michael J. Fox looked like a faker. The actor, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease, has done a series of political ads supporting candidates who favor stem cell research, including Maryland Democrat Ben Cardin, who is running against Republican Michael Steele for the Senate seat being vacated by Paul Sarbanes.
“He is exaggerating the effects of the disease,” Limbaugh told listeners. “He’s moving all around and shaking and it’s purely an act. . . . This is really shameless of Michael J. Fox. Either he didn’t take his medication or he’s acting.”
Classy guy, that Limbaugh. I’d be willing to bet Rush wouldn’t be so nasty if stem cell research showed promise in curing pill addiction and impotence. Like the rest of his selfish ilk, the only problems Rush ever cares about are his own.
I haven’t even seen it, but I have a feeling the Iraqi hit comedy “Hurry Up, He’s Dead” might be the best TV show ever (via BoingBoing) :
Nearly every night here for the past month, Iraqis weary of the tumult around them have been turning on the television to watch a wacky-looking man with a giant Afro wig and star-shaped glasses deliver the grim news of the day.
In a recent episode, the host, Saad Khalifa, reported that Iraq’s Ministry of Water and Sewage had decided to change its name to simply the Ministry of Sewage — because it had given up on the water part.
In another episode, he jubilantly declared that “Rums bin Feld” had announced American troops were leaving the country on 1/1, in other words, on Jan. 1. His face crumpled when he realized he had made a mistake. The troops were not actually departing on any specific date, he clarified, but instead leaving one by one. At that rate, it would take more than 600 years for them to be gone.
. . .
The newscast opens with an explanation of the show’s underlying premise: it is the year 2017 and the main character, Saaed, is the last Iraqi alive. He is lying face down on a beach with a red suitcase next to him. When he comes to, he is quickly encircled by beautiful women.
Cut to a scene of Saaed clad in a black T-shirt imprinted with “2PAC,” showboating in front of a white stretch Humvee limousine with dancers cavorting all around.
The show’s raucous theme song, which has become a popular cellphone ring tone here and is sung by children in schoolyards, laments that it would be better to be a lowly cat on the street than an Iraqi: “No one asks the cat where you are from, which party you’re from, whether you are an Arab, a Kurd, a Sunni or a Shiite.”
He sings on, “I am the last Iraqi alive, but I still do not own a house,” a reference to the country’s acute housing shortage.
