Rush Limbaugh Must Die

October 25, 2006

Rush Limbaugh Must Die

Posted at October 25, 2006 10:12 AM

I think I might just start a blog of people who need to die. I've joked about Stephen A. Smith and Katie Couric before. I even said I was serious about Katie Couric. But this time, I am literally serious. Rush Limbaugh must die.

Michael J. Fox has appeared in a political ad for Claire McCaskill in Missouri, and it made Rush a little mad. FIrst watch what ticked him off, then I'll go into what he said:

Now I understand that there are people who are for stem cell research and there are people who are strongly against it. Either way, Rush's reaction to this commercial was despicable:

from chicagotribune.com:

Limbaugh: Fox `shilling' in stem cell ad
A political ad in which a Parkinson's-afflicted Michael J. Fox talks about stem cell research was criticized Monday by conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, who asserted that Fox was "either off his medication or acting" while filming the commercial.

"Michael J. Fox is allowing his illness to be exploited and in the process is shilling for a Democrat politician," Limbaugh said of the ad for Senate candidate Claire McCaskill of Missouri.

Limbaugh later seemed to back off the idea that Fox was acting out symptoms, saying he didn't mean to imply "that one could easily act it out for the purposes of a commercial."

But he also said, "I have gotten a plethora of e-mails from people saying Michael J. Fox has admitted in interviews that he goes off his medication for Parkinson's disease when he appears before Congress or other groups as a means of illustrating the ravages of the disease."

Orac over at scienceblogs.com has a great commentary on this:

Such ignorance and spite are appalling. For one thing, the medications used to treat Parkinson's Disease become slowly less effective over time, requiring higher and higher doses. And these medications have side effects that are not trivial. For example, I'm not a neurologist, but to me it looked as though the movements that Fox was demonstrating were not due to his Parkinson's, but rather due to dyskinesia (a known side effect of the most common treatment for Parkinson's, L-Dopa). Parkinson's disease looks different, with tremor, rigidity, and bradykinesia, generally not dyskinesia as its key characteristics (think Pope John Paul II in the months before he died or Muhammed Ali). In any case, multiple Google searches failed to show any evidence that Fox ever said he went off his medications for dramatic effect when advocating for Parkinson's Disease research. The movements in the ad, which are tragic to look at, are almost certainly a consequence of the chronic use of dopamine agonists used to treat Fox's Parkinson's disease and stand as a visual testament that we truly do need better treatments for this disease, which in its later stages becomes a horrible choice between the symptoms of the disease itself or the consequences of chronic use of the drugs needed to control the disease.
Rush Limbaugh: Mocking and beating up on seriously ill people to make political hay. Ya gotta love it. Even if you are of the opinion that stem cell research has been overhyped and that claims have been made for it that it is unlikely to live up to, this is not the way to make that point.

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October 25, 2006