Amazing "vomits"

Anyone who hasn't been in a box the last couple of days knows there was a terrible earthquake in Haiti. Hundreds of thousands of people are in dire straits in that already poor country. While the devastation, death, and injury toll are immense, even worse are the probable longer-term effects of a vast increase in infectious diseases.

Haiti is a tropical island. We've long known tropical habitats are hot spots for diseases seriously affecting the human condition: yellow fever, malaria, cholera, typhus, and so on. With much of her infrastructure gone, finding clean water will be difficult and many of the destroyed areas will become breeding grounds for insects (particularly mosquitoes) which spread these and other dread diseases. It's going to be a long, hard road back for the Haitians.

I truly feel bad for the people of Haiti... and yet there are still people who can take a true tragedy and turn it into a circus to spread their particular brand of hate. I'm talking about Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh.

Robertson said, in effect, the earthquake in Haiti is the result of their "making a pact with Satan to remove the French." Limbaugh said the earthquake would let the Obama administration "use this to burnish their, shall we say, credibility with the black community, in both light-skinned and dark-skinned black community in this country. It's made to order for them. ... We've already donated to Haiti. It's called the U.S. income tax." (quotes from Zennie Abraham, Zennie62.com.)

While hate speech like this ought to be embarrassing to any Christian, at least most people agree Pat Robertson is a certifiable lunatic and genuinely believes what he says. Because of that I can somewhat tolerate his deplorable comments, at least relative to Limbaugh's (after all, aren't the ravings of the truly insane just empty words?). Further, Robertson has since backed away from his comments; Rush stands by his. Limbaugh says the things he does simply to inflame people and further his political agenda, so he doesn't even have the "excuse" of being insane; he does it deliberately. It's so disgustingly, disturbingly low I don't think English has a suitable word to describe it.

Why does the broadcast media pay these people to spew their hatred? I'm all for free speech but this isn't free; Limbaugh has a $400 million contract with ClearChannel Broadcasting. Stop paying him, put that money toward helping the people of Haiti, and let him scream from a soapbox like all the rest of us.