Consider the word “hate”: I really, really have to hate someone, hate everything they represent, say, and do, before I can say it out loud, let alone, in public or to their face. It’s easy to say you hate Rush Limbaugh in private - there’s so much to hate - but it’s kind of like flipping someone off in the car: when there are no repercussions, like the person who cut you off actually engaging you in a debate on driving etiquette, you can go around hating all you want. It’s impotent hate, rhetorical hate, stage hate. Real hate comes from a place where repercussions are immaterial. So I could say, “I hate Rush” to you, but could I say it to Rush if he showed up at a family gathering as my niece’s date? There’s big fat cigar-chomping Rush, playing with babies, petting the dog, and helping my sister load the dishwasher. Could I at that moment walk up to him, yank the stogie from his porcine jowls, and pointedly utter the H-word?
Probably not. So I leave it to the good folks at ASSME to write clever, biting blog posts like this one, “correcting” Rush’s assumption that owning the Rams would be like owning slaves. Sharp, perhaps unfair, blatantly slanted, but … funny.
