“You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray…” Quotation attributed to Rush Limbaugh is a damnable lie

This is news that you will not see anywhere else.

First, the quote and the date that it was supposedly made by Rush: “You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray. We miss you, James. Godspeed. [4/23/98]”  Rush never said it. It was made up back in about 2005 and this article proves it.

I am no computer research guru, but I was able to track down enough to prove that this quote first arose back in the fall of 2005, and there is no evidence of the quote before that date. Bottom line, it is inconceivable that such a quote was made by Rush Limbaugh back in 1998 and then never got any attention on the internet or elsewhere until 2005.

Here is what I found, taken directly from articles found on the internet, with citations so you can look it up if you want.

 The earliest mention of the alleged quote was on September 9th, 2005 by zedlappy  who wrote this about what Rush allegedly said:

“You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray. We miss you, James. Godspeed. [4/23/98]”

 “zedlappy” cited to a Wikipedia article as his source. For those newbys, Wikipedia is a cite that anybody can make shit up and it gets quoted as authority by idiots. Hereafter, every time I reference the Wikipedia article I am talking about this one. Unfortunately, it apparently has been edited many times since 2005, so we can’t know exactly what it said then. But now it attributes the quote to Rush Limbaugh, but lists it as “DISPUTED” because the article currently lists the source of the quote to a book “101 Persons who are really SCREWING up America” by (2006) by Jack Huberman.  Hereinafter I’ll call the book “101 Persons.”  But note, the book came out in 2006 so it could not possibly be the source of the original Wikipedia article! ALSO NOTE: The Huberman book does not list a source!

 

 On 9/22/05 [again before the book “101 Persons” was published] somebody calling himself “Cobra” lists the exact same quote and cited as his authority the exact same Wikipedia article!

 

 “You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray. We miss you, James. Godspeed. [4/23/98]”

 

 A few days later on 10/08/05, on another blog site, the same guy, “Cobra” made the same quote (hard to read because print is so small)! And guess what, he cited the same Wikipedia article that lists the quote as disputed! Again, this was before the book “101 People…” came out. 

 A week later, on a different blog, “Cobra” did the same thing!

On 11/12/05 [STILL before the book came out] someone calling themselves “Voter” wrote the exact same quote: “You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray. We miss you, James. Godspeed.? [The Rush Limbaugh Show 4/23/98] 

 Evidently, “Cobra” was still making this exact same claim in 2006 ON A STILL DIFFERENT blog site, when he was contemporaneously busted for making this shit all up! Pay attention, the following is taken directly from a comment back on 7/31/06:

 2/3 way down the site:

 [Cobra wrote:] “myself find it hard to have sympathy for a guy who makes quotes like:

““You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray. We miss you, James. Godspeed. [4/23/98]”

“Cobra

“It took me five minutes to research google on that quote and in several of the links on the very first google page it was cited by, guess who… Cobra himself. (And that is without adding “cobra” to the search terms.) And he’s been citing it going on a year now. If anyone is wondering why Cobra doesn’t provide a link, it’s not because he doesn’t want to. You see, he did often link, in the prior citations ( at LaShawn’s, for instance, on 10/08/06) to a Wikiquote article that now does not contain his cited quote. My guess is that someone edited a phony Limbaugh quote into Limbaugh’s entry and then Wikiquote removed it when they realized that it was a phony. No media source links. No transcript links.

“Limbaugh never said any such thing, obviously, or it would have been all over the media, and certainly I would not have found Cobra himself to be a main source on so many blogs if it was even considered a decent, if dishonest, slander against Limbaugh.”

 

“Limbaugh is a loud brash voice, one that I sometimes find myself in disagreement with, and one whose tone I quite often disagree with, but he would never falsely quote even his worst antagonist, especially with such ugly words. But such behavior seems to be within the bounds for Limbaugh’s critics.”

“I can’t say I’m surprised to see your fingerprints on something as despicable as this, Cobra. I’m not shaking off any sense of shock.

“I think that falsely quoting anyone, let alone a public figure, is scumbag behavior. And Cobra has been making a habit of doing it to Limbaugh for a year now.

 [Cobra tries to defend himself, saying he was citing Huber the author and an article on HuffPo discussing the book and which cited it, but the writer was relentless, saying it was Cobra who first made up the quote and the author then put it in his book. NOTE: Cobra was trying to attribute the quote to “101 Persons” and a HuffPo article about the book but both the book and HuffPo article came out in 2006! And Cobra had been repeating the quote since 2005.]

 “Cobra, I did a little search on that James Earl Ray quote from Limbaugh. What I see is you, over and over, quoting that temporary Wikipedia thing like it’s the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and spreading it all over the blogosphere.

Thou shalt not bear false witness.”

AND, as if that wasn’t enough, I found where two other people discredited the quote back in 2005!

First, one person did not believe the quote and did some research about it back on or before 10/13/05 (comment is not dated, but a comment about the comment is dated 10/13/05):

  Quote:

Originally Posted by Mike Smash! “You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray. We miss you, James. Godspeed.” [4/23/98] — Rush on Martin Luther King’s assassin.

“I’m with Samurai in calling BS on this quote.

“To begin with, it’s so insanely bigoted on its face that I can’t conceive that there wouldn’t have been an uproar at the time. And that it would then take seven years for us to hear of it.

It doesn’t appear anywhere in the Google Usenet archives. That’s automatically suspicious. A Google web search (my specific search was “we miss you james” + limbaugh) produced a whopping 10 results. All of which are dated within the last three months, and most of which credit WikiQuote as their source.

“I checked the history for the WikiQuote page. This quote was added on July 20, less than three months ago. Whoever inserted it originally gave the date as “2/21/03.” Then a couple of minutes later it was changed to “4/23/98

.” That’s the day Ray died. The user who contributed is this guy. His contributions are limited to really nasty quotes attributed to Rush, Hannity, and Karl Rove.

And surprise: just minutes before he posted the Ray quote to Wiki, he also posted this quote of yours:

“I mean, let’s face it, we didn’t have slavery in this country for over 100 years because it was a bad thing. Quite the opposite: slavery built the South. I’m not saying we should bring it back; I’m just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark.”[3/14/03] Rush on slavery.

AND

this one:

“I’ll tell you who should be tortured and killed at Guantanamo: every filthy Democrat in the U.S. Congress.” — Sean Hannity again…

“Both of which, like the Ray quote, appear nowhere in Google’s Usenet Archive. Each has even fewer hits on a Google web search than the Ray quote, and both only in posts made since July 20.” END OF QUOTE FROM THAT BLOG.

 

 “Well researched, Loren. I did Google searches too, and like you found that they only appear on Wikipedia. I didn’t know they were all from the same person, though… that pretty much clinches it IMO”

“All of those are fake.”

“Edit: Someone else has already removed the 2 Rush quotes and I just removed the Hannity one. I saw several others there that are highly suspicious, though I left them alone.”

 

 __________________
The new Axis of Evil: Obama, Pelosi, and Reid

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Last edited by Samurai : 10-13-2005 at 05:22 PM.

End of quotes.

 So, it appears to John Doe that this hullaballoo is all about a bogus quote that was made up back sometime in 2005, and has been repeated several times since then. It was recently quoted by Max Blumenthal thusly: he has called for a “posthumous Medal of Honor” for the assassin of Martin Luther King, Jr., James Earl Ray,  The Blumental article was then mindlessly picked up and passed off as the truth by RockDem today.

I told those people at RockDem that it was a fake quote, but they have yet to take it down. Because it was false, I made a later post about Bubby being a hillbilly pedophile, just to show him how easy it is to make stuff up on the internet.  

IMPORTANT UPDATE 5/12/09: Irish student intentionally made a false quote on Wikipedia and attributed it to a person who had just died. Newspapers around the world immediately began lifting the quote directly from Wikipedia and using it in the man’s obituary without in any way attempting to find if it was correct. 

 “I was really shocked at the results from the experiment,” Fitzgerald, 22, said Monday in an interview a week after one newspaper at fault, The Guardian of Britain, became the first to admit its obituarist lifted material straight from Wikipedia.

“I am 100 percent convinced that if I hadn’t come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up,” he said. “It would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact.”

 Wow. He just proved my point.