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There is "no real outrage" over Trayvon Martin's death, Rush Limbaugh declared on his radio show Thursday, just like there was no real outrage over the time he called Sandra Fluke a "slut" and demanded to see sex tapes of the Georgetown law student. Some conservatives, unsettled by the Martin case, have tried to deny racism is a problem by defining it out of existence -- racism can't be a problem if so few white people murder black people, they reason. Limbaugh is going a step further, arguing that public outrage over racism is fake too.
From the transcript at Limbaugh's site:
[T]he next time the media and the Democrat Party get all exercised about something happening in our country or in our culture or in our media, and when they're all in unity on it, the reaction ought to be they're lying. They're making it up. There's a political agenda here. There is no real outrage, for example.
All these people supposedly calling advertisers of this program. There was no angry consumer outrage. It was all trumped up. The same thing was attempted with the Trayvon Martin case. To create a false reality, to make it look like the country is as agitated as the left is, but it never is. The country is never as roiled and as agitated as the left is. They can succeed in upsetting people. But the object lesson here is to, from this point forward, just don't believe them.
It is surprising Limbaugh compares his sexist comments about Fluke to George Zimmerman's shooting of Martin, but it's not surprising that he thinks outrage over that event is fake. Several surveys contradict Limbaugh, such as a Pew Research Center poll released Tuesday showing 25 percent of Americans are following the Martin story more closely than any other story -- making it the top news Americans were interested in last week. It was also the top story Americans followed at all. A CNN poll this week showed 73 percent of Americans think Zimmerman should be arrested.