The producer of the show “Left, Right and Center”, writes: “Just a note to all of you who’ve been such loyal and engaged conversationalists and combatants on this comments engine: After 15 years of producing this show, your humble producer Sarah Spitz is officially signing off. This was a decision I came to on my own, no one is shoving me out the door…But between us, I’ll tell you in all sincerity, I hate the way politics is played now. I want our elected officials to do the business the people sent them to Washington, to city councils, to state legislatures, to do. That’s not the way they play and I no longer want to be part of the process that perpetuates a broken system. That goes for left, right AND center, I am an equal opportunity disillusionist.”
Is the name Sarah Spitz familiar to you? She’s the one who said she’d do nothing to help Rush Limbaugh if he was writhing on the ground dying.
And she says she “hates the way politics is played now.” Isn’t this a bit rich?
I’ve said a lot of shocking and vulgar things in my life but I have never spoken about refusing to help someone dying. I’ve never spoken about wishing a non-criminal dead, let alone go into such gruesome detail publicly. I would never in a million years speak as Sarah Spitz did about Rush Limbaugh.
And what was more incredible about her remarks was that nobody on Journolist raised an objection to them. I guess these types of remarks are standard among leftist elites such as Ezra Klein.
Sarah says nobody pushed her out the door. I am skeptical of this claim. Who would want to employ such a producer who books guests? What non-leftist guests would want to deal with her?
If you were in the presence of a man having a heart attack, how would you respond? As he clutched his chest in desperation and pain, would you call 911? Would you try to save him from dying? Of course you would.
But if that man was Rush Limbaugh, and you were Sarah Spitz, a producer for National Public Radio (update: Spitz was a producer for NPR affiliate KCRW for the show Left, Right & Center), that isn’t what you’d do at all.
In a post to the list-serv Journolist, an online meeting place for liberal journalists, Spitz wrote that she would “Laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out” as Limbaugh writhed in torment.
In boasting that she would gleefully watch a man die in front of her eyes, Spitz seemed to shock even herself. “I never knew I had this much hate in me,” she wrote. “But he deserves it.”
Spitz’s hatred for Limbaugh seems intemperate, even imbalanced. On Journolist, where conservatives are regarded not as opponents but as enemies, it barely raised an eyebrow.
Sarah Spitz corrects an earlier version of this post:
Your headline is wrong. I have not left KCRW. I have handed over my producing duties for Left, Right & Center, that’s all.
And by the way, your comment about “making comments publicly” is also inaccurate. My comments — made rashly in anger, emotionally, in a moment of weakness while taking 24/7 care of my mother, who passed away in September after 9 years of caring for her — were made on a discussion group e-list in private to its members. And I apologized for it.
I have no idea how many people were on the list. The list was private and comments made on it were never intended for publication. Clearly there is no such thing as privacy in the Internet era.
I emailed Sarah:
One heated comment made in what you thought was privacy suddenly becomes the primary way that thousands of us who have otherwise never thought about you see you. We still live in the age of Google.
What is it about Rush Limbaugh that you despise so much? Do you feel the same way about his equivalents on the left such as Frank Rich and Keith Olbermann?
I’ve always thought of Rush as primarily an entertainer, therefore he is either entertaining or not. Either way, no big deal.
I am right-wing but Michael Moore never upsets me because I look at him as an entertainer and judge him on that basis.
I did not get a reply for publication.
