NATE SILVER
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Rush Got Bum Rap on Racist Slurs
Face it, liberal media: Claims he said that stuff look pretty bogus
By Kevin Spak
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Posted Oct 15, 09 11:19 AM CDT
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(Newser)
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Rush Limbaugh is getting such a raw deal in the media that even Nate Silver—who got his start on the Daily Kos—has come to his defense. Lately CNN and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch have repeated racist statements that appear to be "completely made up," Silver writes. Rush denies saying them, and though the quotes appear in a book and on wikipedia, there are no recordings or transcripts suggesting he did.
“Given that Rush is one of the most listened-to and tape-recorded people in the history of the world, you'd certainly think that there would be,” Silver reasons. “There's not even some kind of half-assed backstory—‘Oh, he said these off the record at a fundraiser.’” Besides, as Rush himself has argued, if he had really said slavery “had its merits” or that MLK’s assassin deserved a medal of honor, there’d have been a “Don-Imus-to-the-nth-power-sized blowup.”