Posted on 03/02/2009 3:20:29 PM PST by Dan Nunn
Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele says he has reached out to Rush Limbaugh to tell him he meant no offense when he referred to the popular conservative radio host as an “entertainer” whose show can be “incendiary.”
“My intent was not to go after Rush – I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh,” Steele said in a telephone interview. “I was maybe a little bit inarticulate. … There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership.”
The dust-up comes at a time when top Democrats are trying to make Limbaugh the face of the Republican Party, in part by using ads funded by labor. Americans United for Change sent a fund-raising e-mail Monday that begins: “The Republican Party has turned into the Rush Limbaugh Party.”
Steele told CNN host D.L. Hughley in an interview aired Saturday night: “Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer. Rush Limbaugh — his whole thing is entertainment. He has this incendiary — yes, it's ugly.”
Steele, who won a hard-fought chairman's race on Jan. 30, told Politico he telephoned Limbaugh after his show on Monday afternoon and hoped that they would connect soon.
“I went back at that tape and I realized words that I said weren’t what I was thinking,” Steele said. "It was one of those things where I thinking I was saying one thing, and it came out differently. What I was trying to say was a lot of people … want to make Rush the scapegoat, the bogeyman, and he’s not."
“I’m not going to engage these guys and sit back and provide them the popcorn for a fight between me and Rush Limbaugh,” Steele added. “No such thing is going to happen. … I wasn’t trying to slam him or anything.”
On Monday’s show, Limbaugh reacted both to the comment and to the assertion on CBS’s “Face the Nation” by White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel that the radio host is “the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party.”
Limbaugh said: “I'm not in charge of the Republican Party, and I don't want to be. I would be embarrassed to say that I'm in charge of the Republican Party in the sad-sack state that it's in. If I were chairman of the Republican Party, given the state that it's in, I would quit. I might get out the hari-kari knife because I would have presided over a failure that is embarrassing to the Republicans and conservatives who have supported it and invested in it all these years.”
On the RushLimbaugh.com home page, the transcript is labeled: “A Few Words for Michael Steele.”
In the interview with Politico, Steele called Limbaugh “a very valuable conservative voice for our party.”
“He brings a very important message to the American people to wake up and pay attention to what the administration is doing," Steele said. "Number two, there are those out there who want to look at what he’s saying as incendiary and divisive and ugly. That’s what I was trying to say. It didn’t come out that way. … He does what he does best, which is provoke: He provokes thought, he provokes the left. And they’re clearly the ones who are most excited about him.”
Asked if he planned to apologize, Steele said: “I wasn’t trying to offend anybody. So, yeah, if he’s offended, I’d say: Look, I’m not in the business of hurting people’s feelings here. … My job is to try to bring us all together.”
Let’s give him one more chance. But let’s try to encourage him to be more assertive and more conservative.
Let’s be nice and see if it helps.
Nothing wrong with that
He has this incendiary
Nothing wrong with that
— yes, it's ugly.”
There's the FUBAR.
Michael, words mean everything. Be careful what you say.
That only applied to fellow Republicans.
Steele isn’t a Republican.
steele should do what Rush said: go behind the scenes and get conservatives elected.
I agree... at least, Steele had the good sense to not let the sun set on his mistake.
Rush Limbaugh bores me at times... I KNOW what he will say, before he ever says it..
But, God Bless him... he was ON FIRE this weekend. RUSH is the last person left on earth that seems willing, and able to articulate a Conservative phiolsophy.
They use everything to tear us down—good, bad, and indifferent. I’m not going to use that as a basis on whom to criticize when they goof up. So we’ve got the left tearing us down and know we’ve got Michael Steele, head of the RNC, tearing us down too! That’s just terrific.
Steele to El Rushbo:
“grovelgrovelgrovelgrovelgrovelgrovelgrovelgrovelgrovelgrovel”
Rush needs to work on his Darth Vader fingertip strangle technique.
;^)
This is BS.
He read FR and got religion. Credibility gone.
I agree. I was listening to him today and thanking God that at least we had one person to stand up to Obama. I just pray that nothing happens to him. He really is our leader right now; I'm sure he'd be only too happy to give that role to a "highly qualified politician," but none of them seem to want it or have the courage to take it.
Steele has a lot to learn, and he better quit listening to the guys who got the Republican Party where it is today. For starters, he should forget his establishment intelligentsia drivel, and get behind the people who give the Republican Party its backbone and votes. Get behind State’s Rights movements, and dump the anti gun garbage. Dump all the RINO garbage.
He’s sorry, that’s for sure.
Republican leadership has been pretty sorry for a long time.
Steele should do the right thing and resign. He cannot be trusted.
Traslation: "I was a total ass and didn't expect the backlash."
Right, make him understand he better promote conservative values. He will never get any votes by catering to the hip hop crowd. The message to RNC, no money for hip hop pandering.
he needs to leave!!! The sooner the better
So, Steele shouldn’t be taken at his word? And how about the apparent lack of retort to a prior interviewer that the GOP convention was like “Nazi Germany?”
This is the kind of man you want leading the GOP? This is the kind of man you think proffered no “bait” worth commenting on?
Get real. It figures you have a screen name named after a liberal group.
Political pragmatism is most certainly not welcome here on FR. Read through this thread (and pretty much any thread with the name “Michael Steele” in it) and you will see that. The inability of conservatives to stop savaging those they disagree with on any one issue will lead to another electoral defeat regardless of how inept Obama is proving to be.
I don’t agree with Steele on all issues, but I think he’s a good man. I didn’t agree with any candidate we had on all issues (maybe Fred Thompson) but they’re still mostly in line with my views. To so many people here, that’s not acceptable. They didn’t even need to tear down any Republican candidates - we did that for them. It must be amusing for all the radical leftists in this country to watch us eat our own over and over.
One of the worst I caught was something on the terms of “we don’t buy the ivory soap party”, that was right after Steele made his Rush comment.
Yeah, Cantor.
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