William Raspberry: One of the Last Reasonable Liberals

Rush Limbaugh.com ^ | July 18, 2012 | Rush Limbaugh

[Kaslin]

>BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, a friend of this program passed away, William Raspberry. He was a longtime columnist for the Washington Post. He passed away at age 76, and he's survived by his mother, who is 104. He also has a couple kids and his wife of 45 years. But he's survived by his mother, 104 years old. William Raspberry in 1993, very famous columnist for the Washington Post and very famous, highly respected liberal, he was one of the last of the breed of liberals that could still be reasoned with. You can't reason with liberals. They're revolutionary radicals. They don't have a moral core today. They have no belief except in their own indignant righteousness. You can't reason with 'em. The same reason you don't negotiate with Al-Qaeda.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Bill Raspberry was the last of a breed of liberal who could still be reasoned with. He was one of the last of the liberals with an open mind. I don't say that just because way back in 1993 he admitted that he was wrong about me. We even created a term to describe it. It's called the Raspberry Effect. But it's a good example.

He's probably the last liberal who would ever admit being wrong about anything. Back in 1993. I think he was probably the last liberal to admit ever having been wrong. Now, he wrote a column back in 1993 in which he implied that I was a bigot. He had not listened to me. He had heard comments. Well, he said he had heard snippets when he was driving around in other people's cars, but he had not sat down and actually listened. Instead, his buddies had told him that I was a bigot.

This served to rile up a lot of his regular readers around the fruited plain who actually listened to the show, and they knew better. They knew that I wasn't a bigot, and they wrote him. A number of his regular readers wrote him mail, letters, to tell him that he was wrong. So, to his credit, Raspberry wrote another column where he admitted he had never heard the program, except accidentally. He had based his column on what other people had told him about me.

And to his infinite credit, he decided to listen to the show and decide for himself. Naturally enough, after listening awhile, he realized he'd been misinformed. And he even apologized. Now, he didn't say he liked me, and he didn't say he was a fan. He accurately described me. He said (paraphrased), "This sounds to me more like a guy having fun on the radio that's poking holes in sacred cows that nobody else pokes holes at." He never admitted that he would be a fan.

He didn't say that he agreed with me or anything. But he had to conclude that I wasn't a bigot. I wasn't a racist. I wasn't any of these rotten things that were being said about me. Now, this phenomenon -- having your mind changed by actually listening to the show -- is what we have called ever since the Raspberry Effect, in honor of William Raspberry. So maybe today might be a good day for people in the audience who know people who think they hate me to ask them to listen to the show for a week or so.

So they can make up their own minds and give the Raspberry Effect an opportunity to work on these otherwise closed-minded, ignorantly righteous, revolutionary radicals who cannot be reasoned with. It's worth a try anyway. I would like to think that Bill Raspberry was not the last (and his friends called him "Bill"). I like to think that Bill Raspberry was not the last liberal who was willing to open his mind and admit that he could be wrong, but maybe he was. It was in 1993, almost 20 years ago.

That's right. We may have to go back 20 years to find the last liberal who could admit that he was wrong. In any case, the world of politics is a worse place without him. I think what we'll do is we'll probably post his column that led to us calling it the Raspberry Effect. We'll post it at RushLimbaugh.com. (interruption) Raspberry's mom is 106? I thought I read yesterday that she was 104. Anyway, he's survived by his mother.

So our condolences to the family of William Raspberry.

END TRANSCRIPT

[Clintonfatigued]

There aren’t that many left, perhaps Juan Williams.

[Wise Hectare]

Rest In Peace

[SoKatt]

I have a good friend who I’ve known for 30 years. She is literally the only liberal who has ever said to me, “I would be a hypocrite if I said that I was open-minded and tolerant without hearing you out”. We can discuss and disagree, but she doesn’t get all screechy-preachy on me, she doesn’t hurl insults, she doesn’t get nasty. We agree on some issues, disagree on others, but she means well. I adore her; she’s so atypical.

[mjp]

He's probably the last liberal who would ever admit being wrong about anything.

It takes courage and high self esteem for a libtard to admit that he was wrong. And courage and high self esteem is something most libtards lack.Most libtards are social metaphysicians who don't have enough courage and self esteem to form their own independent rational judgments and opinions. In order to fit in and be accepted by other libtards, their reality becomes the judgments and opinions of other libtards.

[hampdenkid]

I knew William Raspberry, and believe me, Williams couldn’t hold a candle to him. Bill was a gentleman and a scholar first and foremost. Juan is a racist suck-up first, last, and always. Bill based his beliefs on the content of his character; Juan on the color of his skin.

May God bless William Raspberry’s wonderful soul to His bosom.

[Kaslin]

Now wait a minute. Do you honestly believe a libtard would ever admit he or she is wrong, and since William Raspberry admitted he was wrong means he was not a libtard

[Our man in washington]

A sad loss. I always liked reading Raspberry. I usually disagreed, but he was honest. When he had a conservative arugment, he wouldn’t try to spin it, but would honestly state the argument and then say why he agreed or disagreed.

He once wrote a column about black professional organizations, like organizations for black police officers. He said he supported the existence of these organizations, but wrote that he understood the criticisms.

Raspberry was born in Mississippi in 1935 and said he grew up under Apartheid-like conditions. If you spent your life watching talented black people being denied opportunities, I can see why you might think the Federal government was the best solution for the nation’s problems.

I bet if Raspberry was born in the sixties (as I was) he would have been a conservative.

[Kaslin]

That would not surprise me

[Kaslin]

Juan Williams used to be reasonable when Fox News hired him full time after NPR fired him, but I have found my self lately to mute him when he is on.

[RobbyS]

Raspberry was like my professors in the history/government departments at the University if Texas back around 1960. They actually liked an argument. Many of my fellow students, however, were the kind of liberal that we associated with the “free speech” guys at Berkeley. They are just now retiring and, boy, did they leave us with a tribe of ideologues.

[RobbyS]

Well, the purpose of the 14th Amendment was to override the Dred Scot decision of the Supreme Court, and the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments did make the Federal Government the guardians of the black people of the South. The white people of the South blamed them for putting them under military rule and corrupt, Chicago-style government for almost ten years. Instead of co-opting the many decent black people in the South, we did create a kind of apartheid state and gave them no share at all in the governmental and economic affairs on the state, except as a kind of helot. On the other hand, Booker Washington tried to make lemonade out of lemons by blacks in the skills of they needed to prosper economically, and a large number of black folk did manage to create a life parallel to that of the whites. But the general effect was to make them a sub-culture who as a rule simply did not have the opportunities they needed to prosper. Of course, neither did most white Southerners. The South did not really recover substantially from the aftereffects of the Civil War until after WWII.

[ripley]

Is there really such a thing?

Just asking.

[Wise Hectare]

Actually, the notion that Reconstruction governments were particularly corrupt is mostly BS spun by pro-Confederate “Lost Cause” apologists. It would be more accurate to say that Gilded Age governments generally were rather corrupt by modern standards, whether North, South, East, or West.

[RobbyS]

Corrupt/incompetent. The ex-confederates were barred from office., which meant that the natural leaders of the community were frozen out. There simply weren’t enough southern Unionist leaders to take over, and of course their authority was undercut by their association with the Army. The Carpetbaggers were a mixed lot. Lots of idealists mixed with lots of opportunists. Many ex-Union officers who thought of the South as their chance to get ahead. I guess you can say that the average Carpetbagger government was no more corrupt than the Tammany machines. The difference being that in the South pawns were the ex-slaves and in the North, the immigrants. Nor were they any more competent. People forget that the war may look in retrospect like a moral crusade, but it unleased great disorder and unrest in Noerth as well as South. Ruthless men like Rockefeller and Carnegie built their fortunes on federal contracts. A major between North and South is that in the South all the great fortunes were swept away. The Redeemer governments were no better than the ones they replaced, but at least they weren’t the puppets of the North.