A crashing Boortz

Radio talk-show host Neal Boortz picked up a little press last week, and now he's complaining about it. So this week, he gave a big ol' non-apology. I'm going to reprint a big chunk of it here (interesting punctuation issues and all) to be sure I'm not taking him out of context.

As examples we'll use the Huffington post, a well known leftist website, and another named ournewsnow.com, a website with the slogan "The revolution will not be televised; whatever in the world that means, that titled their little bit about me thusly: "Atlanta Talk Show Host Codes Race Killings." Both of these websites printed the following quote from me:

"This town is starting to look like a garbage heap. And we got too damn many urban thugs, yo, ruining the quality of life for everybody. And I'll tell you what it's gonna take. You people, you are - you need to have a gun. You need to have training. You need to know how to use that gun. You need to get a permit to carry that gun. And you do in fact need to carry that gun and we need to see some dead thugs littering the landscape in Atlanta.

Well ... that wasn't exactly all I said. Here's the part they left off:

"We need to see the next guy that tries to carjack you shot dead right where he stands. We need more dead thugs in this city."

These websites, you see, wanted to portray me as having called for people to simply get guns and start killing blacks. They didn't include the beginning of my comments where I referenced two violent carjackings in Atlanta, nor did they see fit to include that part of my statement that related to self defense. No surprise. If you have an agenda to push, you do whatever editing is necessary to keep your message on point...

OK, so there's his basic message, or so he claims. It's all right to kill somebody, if you think they're robbing you. You know, basic libertarian, Second Amendment stuff. This isn't a healthy trend (ask Bernie Goetz), but I digress.)

Now Boortz takes a while complaining about his treatment by the "liberal media," until we get to this.

(Ed) Shultz picked up on my comments from Media Matters and then ... before he played it on his MSNBC show ... he did a little creative editing. My comments related to self defense, but Schultz, like other critics, needed to get the self defense aspect out of the way so that he could portray me as, in his words, as "reckless, stupid and racist" and to tell his audience that I had "advocated murder in the streets of Atlanta." You can't say that I was advocating murder if it's clear that I'm talking about defending yourself from a carjacker --- so that part was taken out. Here, again, is what I said:

You need to know how to use that gun. You need to get a permit to carry that gun. And you do in fact need to carry that gun and we need to see some dead thugs littering the landscape in Atlanta. "We need to see the next guy that tries to carjack you shot dead right where he stands. We need more dead thugs in this city."

See? That makes it all better.

He follows that with more whining about how badly he's mistreated by the "liberal media," and he'd like an apology. And he's not a racist, but he doesn't care if you call him one.

And then he says this.

Here's a nasty little secret for you. Pretty much every time the Atlanta media reports a violent crime in the city; whether it's a rape, an assault, a shooting, a carjacking or the murder of three people who worked in a car wash that doubles as a rap music recording studio, (no kidding this happened last week), one of the first thoughts that will cross most people's minds is that the perpetrators were young black males. I'm sure this is the case in most other large urban areas. Sometimes these initial impressions will be false, but not that often. Are these thoughts racist? Do these first impressions occur because of some deeply held belief that young black males are genetically predisposed to commit crimes? Hardly. These initial impressions are brought about by recognition of the fact that young black males are engaged in criminal activity in numbers way out of proportion to their percentage of the population - a recognition that there is a culture of crime and violence in the urban community. Yes, I can give you some statistics. You might not like them, but they're there for you to develop on your own, if you care to, using FBI crime data.

See? He's not racist! Everybody is, and he's just saying it for them!

And then he abuses statistics for a while, to show that most crime is committed by blacks and hispanics. Now, it would be rude of me to point out that these are the same statistics used by Klansmen to show that they aren't racist, they're only protecting their own kind!

And burning crosses (but that's just a hobby).

Instead, I'm just going to ponder the statistics he didn't use. The one from the Atlanta police, that shows that crime in Atlanta has been dropping steadily. In fact, crime in all of Georgia has been dropping for the last 30 years (a few indicators spiked in the early 90s, probably due to the influence of Vanilla Ice).

What other statistics does he ignore? Well, how about the fact that two-thirds of the population of Atlanta is black. So, just off the top of my head, I'd say that there's a good chance that two-thirds of the criminals are black. But that's just me.

And the rest of his statistics are equally idiotic. They're debunked or explained on a regular basis, but they're still quoted. By racists, who refuse to admit that their statistics are crap.

Nor is this the first time Boortz showed his racist side (and again, nice long quotes to let you get everything in context).

So, yeah, I think I'm more than happy to label him as a useless, bigoted fucknozzle, and racist to his evil little core.