Did Rush Limbaugh Endorse Segregation?

No, argues Adam Serwer, but that doesn't make what he said any less offensive to the left

Rush Limbaugh certainly jammed his fist into a hornet's nest this week by saying that "Obama's America" is irretrievably hostile to whites, but he did not, as Adam Serwer reports in the liberal American Prospect, call for bus segregation. As he explains, it was all meant as satire:

Limbaugh wasn't calling for segregated buses--he was suggesting that Obama wants segregated buses, that in "Obama's America", if a white kid doesn't want to get his butt kicked, he needs to find his own bus, because Obama won't stand up for white people. It's sick, but it's not a call for segregated school buses.

Who's still got it the wrong way around?

• Ben Cohen in the Daily Banter: "Rush Limbaugh Wants Racial Segregation"
  
• Politicol: "Rush Limbaugh shows his true 'white is right' colors in demanding out white children have their own 'whites only' buses to school."
• Zaid Jilani at ThinkProgress: "Yesterday, Limbaugh proposed a solution to this problem -- a return to segregated busing."
• Raw Story: "The right-wing radio heavyweight declared on his program Wednesday that the United States needed to return to racially segregated buses."

Serwer was not the only one who noticed that Rush was actually accusing the left of taking up the pro-segregationist mantle. But as Mark Thompson at the League of Ordinary Gentleman argued, that doesn't make what Limbaugh said any less objectionable:

This is yet another step down the Right's obsession with creating totally unsupportable claims of racial victimization of white people. This obsession may well be a form of racism in and of itself, but it takes a different form than "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!" The form instead is "Don't let TEH BROWN PEOPLE impose segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever on us decent and law-abiding whites!" And yes, it really is that deranged.