California State Senator Leland Yee, who in addition to having his beady little eyes on the mayorship of San Francisco, has his panties all up in a wad over Rush Limbaugh's recent on-air mimicking of the Chinese language. Limbaugh did the act in relation to a complaint he had about nobody at the White House translating the speech that the president of China, Hu Jintao, had given. Not knowing or understanding Chinese, Mandarin specifically, Limbaugh proceeded to make a bunch of meaningless noises of what Hu's speech sounded like to him.
Obviously not one to pass up an opportunity to mindlessly play the race card, Yee suggested he was deeply hurt by Limbaugh's "comments" because they hearkened him "back to when [Yee] was a little boy growing up in San Francisco and those were hard days, rather insensitive days." Yee, accordingly, demanded Limbaugh apologize, which Rush has rightly refused by omission to do. Again, all Limbaugh did was express what someone who is speaking Chinese sounds like to him when there's no one around to translate.
Instead of letting it go, however, Yee has doubled down on his tenuous position by making the outrageous suggestion that Limbaugh has caused him to receive racist messages and threats. Personally, I tend to doubt Yee is telling the truth about getting these messages, but even if he is, he can't prove Limbaugh caused them to be sent. For Yee to make this suggestion without direct proof is a testament to his total lack of character and integrity. Which is to say Leland Yee is a perfect match for most of the voters of San Francisco.
This is just speculation on my part, but I think if Hu Jintao had given his speech in, say, German and Limbaugh had done the same mimicking of it that he did with the Chinese language, there would not have been any sort of uproar by Leland Yee and his fellow travelers on the Asian-American liberal left. Indeed, I don't think there would have been an uproar if Limbaugh had been politically liberal like, oh, most of the writers and cast of Saturday Night Live.
Update: I wrote this blog post after seeing the story posted by a "friend" in my Facebook news feed. A commenter there, who has expressed his abject hatred for Rush, attempted to dismiss my point about the hypocritical lack of uproar among liberals to the above SNL skit by saying that unlike Rush's radio show, which is serious news commentary, SNL is a comedy. In other words, comedy is an apparent exception to the otherwise unsubstantiated presumption that it is racist for a white person to mimic a Chinese speaking person of East Asian descent. Yeah, it's stupid logic, but seeing as how there was probably nothing I could say to change this Facebook commenter's hostility to Rush, I didn't bother posting a response there. Better, I thought, to expose this self-admitted Rush hater's lunacy here.
