Rush-Ried

After Harry Reid and forty-one prominent Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, signed a letter falsely attacking Rush Limbaugh, Limbaugh put the document on eBay with the proceeds going to the Marine Corps -- Law Enforcement Foundation.  The winning bid by philanthropist Betty Casey was $2,100,100, which Limbaugh has promised to match.  We now have Harry Reid trying to put the best possible spin on the letter.  I await to see if any of these Senate Democrats respond to Rush's challenge, as Mark Hemingway noted:

Limbaugh issued a public challenge to all of the senators involved to join him in matching the winning bid. “I would like to issue this challenge to Senator Reid and the 41 senators who signed his letter. You say you support the military. You say you’re big, and you think it’s patriotic, and that I was unpatriotic. Well, I would like for each of you, Senator Reid, and the 40 senators who signed, to match whatever the winning bid is. Show us your support for the U.S. military by all 41 of you pro-military people, Democrats in the Senate, match whatever the winning bid is and send that amount to the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation,” he said.

Given the huge bids on the eBay sale, I didn’t suspect that too many of the 41 senators’ offices would have that much cash lying around. But I called all of them to ask anyway. As long as the mood in Washington is a spitting contest over who’s more patriotic, maybe I could get some agreement over Limbaugh’s publicity stunt. Or, failing that, maybe a divisive partisan comment might drive the story back on to the front page, with the goal of further publicizing the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation.

No such luck. I called all 41 senators involved, and I spoke to press secretaries or left messages with 33 Senate offices (I tried repeatedly, and you’d be surprised at how many busy signals you get trying to get ahold of senators.) I told dozens of press secretaries all about the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation and Rush’s challenge. I got only two responses, and of those, only Senator Ken Salazar of Colorado proved himself above the recent pettiness. He issued a terse statement: “The Senator supports their [the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation] work and is pleased to hear that Rush does as well.”