Rush Limbaugh laid into Brian Ross on Monday for incorrectly suggesting that James Holmes, the alleged Aurora, CO shooter, was affiliated with the Tea Party.
Holmes shot over 70 people at a showing of "Dark Knight Rises" early Friday morning, killing twelve of them. After federal officials released the shooter's name, Ross told George Stephanopoulos that there was a Jim Holmes of Aurora with a page on the Colorado Tea Party's website. Both Ross and the network later revealed that the shooter was in fact a different person, and apologized for the mistake.
"Why do you go on the air with it if you don't know?" Limbaugh thundered on Monday. "You're journalists... well, both of you are political acts disguised as journalists, but at least play the game."
He alleged that journalists' top priority when covering the shooting was to make President Obama look good, according to Politico. "Here we have an unspeakable human tragedy, and people who tell us that they are the last reservoirs of compassion in America, that they are the truly sensitive, caring, thoughtful ones, the first instinct they had was to what?” he asked. "Try to find a way to help Barack Obama with this unspeakable tragedy."
He said that Ross and Stephanopoulos "didn't care" whether the link was actually true because "all they wanted to do, is somehow find some way is associate the Tea Party, where you have no acts of violence on record."
He went on to call liberals "politically ill" and "demented," charging that the link between the shooter and the Tea Party was simply what they wanted to believe.
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