After 10 years of being held against their will Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight were rescued by good Samaritan Charles Ramsey. After a colorful post-rescue interview another meme is born, much to the delight of the internet. Of course not everyone is inspired by this story.
Now I don’t know what happened in Cleveland, but I couldn’t help but make the connection. I mean, if everybody else in the low-information crowd is going to use what happens on TV for reality, why can’t I? – Rush Limbaugh
Of course, with the Hawaii Five-0 plot and Cleveland leaning Democrat, clearly this was a welfare scam all thanks to Obama. Limbaugh is some kind of bullshit alchemist. He takes nothing and makes it into droll anti-Obama rhetoric.
Also, on today’s #TWiBRadio we discuss Charles Ramsey rescue of 3 kidnapped women, rape pamphlets are completely useless, and a Harvard Professor says economic philosophy isn’t for the Gays. Listen here:
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And on #amTWiB, political strategist L. Joy Williams and the morning crew cover Fox Broadcasting’s cancelation of ‘Cops’ after 25 years, Grammy award winner Lauryn Hill’s tax evasion conviction, and over 5,000 children products contain carcinogens.
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the Conster
Charles Ramsey hero:
Autotune treatment: check
Obama conspiracy theory: check
All that’s missing now is the LOLCAT poster and a gif.
BGinCHI
Countdown till Limbaugh comes out as pro-human trafficking.
Keith
On Limbaugh, just more demented thoughts from a drug-addled mind.
pokeyblow
Hey, there was an American flag hanging outside Ariel Castro’s house. That means he’s a patriot; it’s natural no one would suspect anything amiss inside.
TR
Christ, what an asshole.
Todd
Given what Ramsey said, it is not a proud day for white folks in America.
Fact is, he’s right.
Pretty white girls are very likely to have been told to trust men who look like the abductor as opposed to men who look like Charles Ramsey. How else would Ted Bundy have found his victims?
gravie
Rush is like a garden slug with human accoutrements and a public forum. I can’t stand to listen to anything he says or watch anything he does.
kerFuFFler
How could one even use kidnapped kids to receive additional welfare bennies? And the women who were kidnapped were basically older teens, not young kids, so Limbaugh’s theory of the motivation does not make any sense.
The lurid nature of this crime will guarantee enough coverage that Limbaugh listeners will get a chance to notice just how much stuff he makes up. The only fact he got right was that there were 3 women who were rescued.
Keith G
Like who should care what Rush dribbles out. Why fucking mention “them” when “we” still have to successfully market our message.
Well, as if we had one.
AA+ Bonds
@kerFuFFler:
He doesn’t even allow them to use Google . . . true story.
JoyceH
…. Good grief.
Rush hears that one of the victims has a baby, and he still doesn’t know what the issue is? Where does his mind immediately go? Not sexual slavery, but ‘double welfare benefits’.
What is it going to TAKE to get this toxic bag of lunatic hatred off the air?!
jl
The senseless ravings of a broken man who will soon lose his big time radio racket because more and more people can see it is garbage. He will go to Beckland soon, running some penny ante internet scheme.
Not even enough gas left in him to do straight out hate speech or racism.
You can think what you want about these people caught up in a bad situation and who did the right thing: Kai the homeless hitchiker, Dotson, Mr. Ramsey, and others. Some of them seem odd, others, like Ramsey just seem like regular people who do the right thing.
What would Rush have done?
I heard Limbaugh say one thing in the clip that was a true and valuable thing, perhaps he had an insight, an epiphany: “I don’t know”. Truer words never spoken.
lamh35
h/t to commenter BettyPageisaBlonde in the autotune thread for linking to this slate article.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/05/07/charles_ramsey_amanda_berry_rescuer_becomes_internet_meme_video.html
Forkbeard
Bah. Rush’s job (and the entire right wing media) is to take EVERY situation and make it Obama’s fault. Or proof of his perfidy. Somehow.
Mostly what I’m saying is that this kind of crap is pretty normal. Not shocked at all.
lamh35
@JoyceH: not just that. Reports are saying that the women were continually raped resulting in 5 pregnancies!!!! None of the babies survived!!!
Rush can DIAF!
http://www.wkyc.com/news/article/298544/33/Investigator-Women-raped-resulting-in-up-to-5-pregnancies
jl
@lamh35:
Thanks for the link. I would feel safer with any of those people in the Slate post than with Rush Limbaugh. That is for sure.
jl
@lamh35:
This might be another ‘Flukey’ moment for Rush, once the horror of the story gets around? Who will look like a clown then? The women, or Ramsey? Or even the police (who, if what neighbors claim is true, might have some explaining to do)? I don’t think so.
pinacacci
I can’t even…I don’t even…I just don’t understand why some people are like that. I cannot find the empathy that will allow me to understand that.
gcwall
We toss around the word hero quite a bit these days. Hero is supposed to apply to those acts that the ordinary person would not do. Not every soldier in a war zone is a hero, not every cop on the beat is a hero and not every citizen who does the right thing when called upon is a hero.
In some sense one might say that getting up every morning and facing the day with one’s head held high, a decent outlook and determination to accomplish something is heroic, when one considers the many slights, pains and sorrows human being face, but that is heroic in a philosophical sense, not in the meaning of acting above and beyond what an ordinary person might do.
Roger Moore
@JoyceH:
The grim reaper.
TooManyJens
Here’s another link, from NPR’s new “Code Switch” blog:
Are We Laughing With Charles Ramsey?
Spaghetti Lee
Like this living bullshit geyser has the right to call anyone else ‘low-information.’ If Limbaugh listeners were any more ‘low-information’ they’d be tree stumps.
Edit: So the kidnapper is named Castro? (I haven’t been following the story, as you can tell). Surprised shitballs up there didn’t take the chance to spin an OMG KAMUNIST CUBA!!!1!!1! story. His dumbfuck fans would have lapped it up.
lamh35
@TooManyJens:
From that article:
pokeyblow
I suspect that, had the girl encountered Limbaugh outside the house instead of Ramsey, she might have gone back inside.
Onkel Fritze
Of course, why can’t he? He might even condone the use of torture because of all those ticking time-bombs. Next thing you know, that stuff gets discussed in presidential debates or something.
jl
@TooManyJens:
from your link:
” They’re actually not the type of people we’re used to seeing or hearing at all, which might explain why we get so silly when they make one of their infrequent forays into our national consciousness. ”
And who the hell is this fancy and oh so knowing GENE DEMBY? What has he/she done? Ramsey did something. Even crazy Kai the hatchet wielding hitch hiker did something. Would Demby do the right thing?
I know Limbaugh wouldn’t. He might have one of his ‘people’ do it for him, if it wasn’t too much trouble.
Hell with that garbage.
But thanks for the link. Nice that people notice the classism and racism that stinks up the country once in awhile.
Narcissus
Well c’mon, the women Rush has locked up in his basement don’t complain. This thing is all just so overblown.
Darkrose
@gcwall: I’d say that going into a situation that you think might be domestic violence and intervening without stopping to ask questions is going above and beyond what most people would do.
Maybe you don’t live in an urban area. I do, and my immediate reaction to hearing screaming and yelling is to think, “Hopefully it’ll stop and I won’t have to do anything.” I’ve heard too many stories about helpful neighbors and police getting killed trying to intervene in domestic disputes–not to mention the fact that random screaming in my neighborhood could be mentally ill homeless people, drunken hipsters, or the nice guy next door who turned out to be dealing meth–that I’m not going to rush into anything until I know what’s going on. Charles Ramsey apparently didn’t stop to think about all of that, or that a screaming white girl running towards a black man sounds disturbingly like the plot of a movie that doesn’t end well for anybody.
You may not think he’s a hero, but I bet those young women do.
Spaghetti Lee
@the Conster:
All that’s missing now is the LOLCAT poster and a gif.
And may they stay missing.
I’m half-kidding, but it doesn’t fill me with hope to read about three women kidnapped and held for ten years and raped by their captor and see so much of the internet react like it’s some new dumb meme.
Keith G
@JoyceH:
We can’t do anything about that except give him more attention (and thus more power) than he deserves.
The real power for us is if we can develop a strong counter marketing message. I once heard Bill Clinton say something to the effect:
Limbaugh deals in negativity. With the right effort, he can be marginalized.
Spaghetti Lee
@JoyceH:
A sniper.
jl
Ramsey could have ‘phoned it in’ like the other neighbors. By the time the cops got the house, maybe one of the kidnappers would have gotten back, or realized what had happened, and beat the crap out of the girl. And the cops would have knocked on the door, maybe walked around the side yard. And walked off.
But Ramsey didn’t phone it in. He went over. And looks like his example inspired a few others to go over with him.
Who the hell doesn’t want a guy in the neighborhood like Ramsey? Who the hell knows what type he is. Maybe some goofballs will start poking into Ramsey’s granite countertops and we will hear some dirt. Who cares? The hell with them.
Edit: Though Rush may (edit: is obviously) be sending a little hint that this incident just has a little too much good feeling “we’re all in this together”, “judge people by their character not their color or income” to it, and the toxic reactionary opinion leaders need to stir up hate suspicion and cynicism.
Darkrose
The thing that struck me most what Ramsey’s 911 call, when he told the dispatcher, “She’s been abducted! Put yourself in her shoes.” That’s a big part of why I think hero is appropriate in this instance: in the middle of all of this, he didn’t lose sight of the most basic, important issue at hand.
Calouste
@lamh35:
Hardly surprising that. Guys who kidnap young girls and keep them alive use them as sexslaves. Guys who use sexslaves are not going to use condoms.
Mandalay
@the Conster:
Can you explain why the autotuning is automatically fair game for derision? It doesn’t seem to be related to the quality of the work (which I thought was awesome in this case), but just the fact that it has been done at all.
Several others have made a similar point, but you generally talk more sense than most, so maybe you can enlighten me?
JPL
If Limbaugh took a drug overdose and passed to a better place, I wouldn’t weep. Of course, by a better place, I mean six feet under.
Eric U.
@JoyceH: that is really a shocking response. When I heard about the child, I had to fight back nausea about how sick these bastards were. And now we find out they were even worse than that would suggest. How you could possible imagine a connection to welfare is sick beyond my capability to comprehend.
It does seem like the fallout from the Fluke kerfuffle has cost him quite a bit of money and there is a good chance he’s going to lose some stations in large listening areas soon. So there is that. I think we should make a fuss about this too.
pokeyblow
Damned good thing that Ramsey went into that house. Remember when two Milwaukee cops sent Jeffrey Dahmer home with his “boyfriend?” Then chuckled about it over the radio, while Dahmer proceeded with the killing?
Sick fact: Those two cops were fired, then re-instated. One of them was elected to be president of the Milwaukee Police Association.
Sadly, it’s reasonable to fear that, had Ramsey simply called 911, those girls might not have gotten out.
Mandalay
@lamh35:
WTF??? The comment “a little pretty white girl ran into a black man’s arms” is – quite rightly – the epicenter of all the attention.
That Slate article is so fucked up it isn’t even wrong. It’s swill.
Roger Moore
@JPL:
So you’re thinking of him in a better place for the rest of society, not a better place for him personally.
Mandalay
@jl:
This.
I notice the media and BJ posters weren’t sneering, pearl clutching and fainting about autotunes when this black autotune went viral.
Of course that one had lots of pretty white faces in it as well.
Omnes Omnibus
@Roger Moore:
I am seeing it as a twofer. The man can’t really like being like that, right?
lamh35
Charles Ramsey tells how he rescued missing women
ETA: Linked to original piece instead of Mediate. I fuckin’ hate that site!
YellowJournalism
Dammit. I watched that episode last night, and when the reason for the kidnapping was revealed, I turned to Hubby and said, “Oh, great! Now some conservative asshole on the radio is going to jump on this as the new welfare scam.”
I should have replaced “asshole” with “Rush.”
That episode was very irresponsible, IMO, in its depiction of welfare. I doubt very highly that the biggest issues related to child abduction have anything to do with people keeping a child for welfare. I understand they were going for a shocking twist, but it was so filled with stereotypes (guy sat on his ass watching TV and drinking beer while holding a child for ten years to collect $500/month welfare benefits), that I found myself getting angry.
Bubblegum Tate
@AA+ Bonds:
Wait, what?
Gravenstone
Edited for accuracy.
Paula
@lamh35:
Well, to be fair, “laughing at poor people and how they don’t talk right” is a long-popular amusement for most human societies.
nellcote
Anybody watch Justified? Thinking of Limehouse here.
Bubblegum Tate
@Paula:
Or, as Jerri Blank put it, “Poor southerners are hi-LAAAR-ious!”
YellowJournalism
@nellcote: Yup. Also dealt with domestic violence issues.
Hungry Joe
Good god, it’s like Ramsey can’t help himself — the warmth and humanity just keeps pouring out of him. Hard to fathom that he and Limbaugh are the same species.
Paula
@Bubblegum Tate:
Well, it’s one thing to laugh at people because they have stupid, bigoted opinions about welfare, medicare, guns, and the like. Unfortunately, certain parts of the country have done nothing to help their reputation on that score.
But Charles Ramsey and Sweet Brown weren’t doing anything but talking about what happened to them, in a less than finessed way.
Why are they so viral?
Key & Peele’s skit about the Pegasus sighting was totally on point.
Maude
@YellowJournalism:
Ronald Reagan 2.0
Mnemosyne
@Paula:
It’s tricky, because I think Ramsey went viral for multiple reasons. I know a lot of people here loved that he was so matter-of-fact and to the point about the whole thing — like, of course I helped, wouldn’t anyone? But I’m sure there are people watching the same clip who are mocking him for being black and working class.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Hungry Joe: If Ramsey were truly cynical, he could claim they aren’t. “Hey, I’m just repeating what Rush says.”
I, on the other hand, could not claim that.
MoeLarryAndJesus
@lamh35:
Just think how long that fire would burn.
jl
@Mnemosyne:
I watched the Ramsey interview linked to above. I also listened to Ramsey’s and Berry’s 911 calls.
Seems to me, after looking at a much calmer Ramsey in the link above, what was so ‘colorful’ and ‘folkloric’ about Ramsey in the first interview was that he was in shock. Just as Berry was in shock.
Maybe if Ramsey were a middle class white person, people just might be able to figure that out. But, Ramsey is working class and black, so looks like that they can’t.
But I suppose no high toned whiter person of means would be shocked in the moments after they found out that a next-door neighbor acquaintance was running a sex-slave operation in the cellar or attic right next door.
Ramsey starts the interview talking about how he hasn’t been able to sleep because he lived next door to this outrage for a year and did not suspect anything.
muddy
@YellowJournalism:
It’s so stupid – they would have to have a birth certificate for the person, and they can’t use a real one because she is kidnapped. If you are going to use fake papers, why do you have to bother feeding a kid for 10 years? Don’t they want to know why the kid is not in school? Was there a sexual thing in the show too, or was it just the stupid $500 (that won’t go far in HI)?
Darkrose
Yay! My pie filter is working correctly now!
Steeplejack
@nellcote:
True dat.
Also, every time I see Limehouse I have to remind myself that Mykelti Williamson is not Denzel Washington’s younger brother. It would be awesome to see them actually play brothers in a movie.
Mnemosyne
@jl:
Exactly — Ramsey was obviously full of adrenaline during that first interview on the scene because, let’s face it, it’s pretty goddamned shocking to find out that your neighbor was hiding a houseful of abducted girls whose parents hold public vigils in your city every year. It’s like interviewing someone who just ran out of a burning building after saving a baby and then complaining that the person seemed excited about this thing they just finished doing 15 minutes ago.
Angela
@lamh35: Thanks for these links. What a great interview.
Jebediah
@jl:
I’m a white, educated middle-class male. If I were in this situation, I really wouldn’t be surprised if I babbled total nonsense into the camera. I’d be pleased with myself if I did as well as Ramsey did.
ETA: Not to mention that I would also be pleased with myself if I acted as he did.
TS
@lamh35:
Charles lived there for 1 year – wonder when those living nearby for much longer will make the same comment.
JoyfulA
@jl: But they are the people I’m used to seeing and hearing each day. To me, he sounded sincere and intelligent and perfectly normal.
Some people must hang out with a lot of stiffs and suits.
jl
@JoyfulA:
Ha! I grew up working with those ‘folkloric’ and ‘wild and crazy’ characters on the news videos.
The stiffs and suits I see on TV and reluctantly have to deal with in career scare me, and I am careful.
rikyrah
He’s totally a hero.
And that fat racist dopehead can go fuck himself.
YellowJournalism
@muddy: It was so, so stupid. It was only about the money, and they made a point of making sure the couple who took the girl had purchased fake papers and had used a professional child trafficker to obtain the girl. They fed her, clothed her, and the sympathetic wife bought the girl gifts. Then they purchased a second child when the first got too old. Overall, I say they lost money. Lazy fucking writing.
Petorado
This was Charles Ramsey’s Kitty Genovese moment: he could have pretended it wasn’t his problem and walked away, but instead he instinctually responded to help. The world is a better place for what he did.
His comments and responses in that video just illustrates he knows prejudice and he knows how unforgiving life can be.
Wally Ballou
So, now Limbaugh’s weighed in on this story, what’s next? The Westboro crowd g@lamh35: I wonder if any funerals are planned for the rape babies? Might as well let the Westboro crowd get in on the act, too.
Nina
Can Charles Ramsey run for something? I’d love to donate to his campaign.
lojasmo
@MoeLarryAndJesus:
That made me LOL.
But I still think you are a worthless fuckstick.
Tone In DC
Rush needs to fly back to the DR after he gets more narcotics from his housekeeper. You know, stick to what he’s good at.
priscianus jr
Curious thing. The NY times lead story today,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/08/us/cleveland-kidnapping.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
mentions that “two neighbors” rescued her and called 911, and the name of the Hispanic guy is given, but nowhere is Charles Ramsey’s name mentioned, or anything specific about him.
I wonder if this was at his own request. Although if it was, I’m surprised it was honored.
Mr_Gravity
@MoeLarryAndJesus: …with so little light and so much toxic smoke.
Applejinx
A black man chose to kick in the door of a house to do his rescue. Plenty of black men and KIDS have been gunned down like dogs for less. Plenty of white people are saying ‘of course I would have done likewise’ without considering for a moment that fact. Ramsay is indeed a big damn hero, braver than he’s being given credit for, and no fool.
As for Limbaugh: funny, I watched ‘Buffy’. There was a guy who looked a lot like Rush, and then he ate a young girl’s FACE and turned out to be a demon from the pit of hell. I’M JUST SAYIN’
Can we at least check Limbaugh’s back teeth for traces of face? Now that this is a thing?
I saw once that Bugs Bunny fought this bull that was nearly as fat as Limbaugh, and it ate a rifle and became able to thwack it on the ground and SHOOT at Bugs! Being able to fire bullets from your horns can be extremely dangerous. Given that Buffy proves Limbaugh is a demon from Hell or could be, I demand he be searched to prove he doesn’t have an entire rifle stuck up his ass.
>:(
Jebediah
@Applejinx:
Are you referring to the demon that had to sit in a big tub of water, and constantly have water dripped over its body to keep cool? I think that one had a strong resemblance to that fat junkie.
MoeLarryAndJesus
@lojasmo:
Okay. But at least I’m not a wifebeater, unlike your hero Charles Ramsey.