Surliness has always paid off handsomely for radio's mouthy Rush Limbaugh, who thrives on pushing around presidents and browbeating the Republican Party into submission. Incivility earned him an 8-year contract for $400 million, which subsidizes a regal lifestyle including three former wives, a Palm Beach mansion with butlers, the best cigars and his own large Gulfstream jet.
To his surprise, however, Limbaugh ran into one immovable object that stood up to him—the National Football League.
When word seeped out Limbaugh was among investors trying to buy the St. Louis Rams football team, words Limbaugh uttered on TV in 2003 returned to haunt him and his fellow investors and forced him out of the deal.
The man who slimed women as "femi-Nazis" and environmentalists as "wackos" and reduced Democrats to the equivalent of unpatriotic nincompoops made enemies among pro football players and team owners when he asserted that Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb was the overrated darling of media that wanted him to succeed because he's black.
Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell acidly doomed Limbaugh's high hopes. They denounced him as unacceptable and divisive. Rush thereupon was dropped from the bidders' syndicate.
It's a mystery why Limbaugh would want to buy into a NFL team with such a huge roster of black players, whose popularity he might equate to race, rather than gridiron performance. Was this his idea of adding the equivalent of his own Old South plantation to his treasures?
Whatever it was, the big block from the NFL was on target and richly deserved.
