Today, Fox News' America's Newsroom hosted a segment highlighting Rush Limbaugh's latest attack on Sandra Fluke. The theory behind the attack was so hard to believe that two of the three panelists, including a former spokeswoman for the House Republican Conference, called it “ridiculous” and “utterly absurd.”
On Tuesday's edition of his radio show, Limbaugh returned to attacking Fluke, the Georgetown law student whom he infamously described as a “slut” and “prostitute,” this time for supposedly “coordinating” with President Obama to scare students about their student loans.
Fluke responded to Limbaugh's attack later that night on MSNBC's The Last Word, pointing out the importance of affordable student loans and contradicting the notion that she is coordinating with Obama on the issue of student loans.
During a panel discussion of Limbaugh's attack on America's Newsroom today, panelists Gretchen Hamel and Judy Miller agreed that Limbaugh's theory that Fluke and Obama are coordinating is completely bogus. Hamel, a former spokeswoman for the House Republican Conference, said that Fluke's tweet “was a message being tweeted out by a number of people.” Hamel also said: “I think this is just a coincidence. It's the White House having a simple message that is resonating.” Miller, a Fox News contributor, called Limbaugh's theory “ridiculous” and said that “all it does is call attention to his previous faux pas.”
Nevertheless, supposedly “straight news” Fox anchor Martha MacCallum pushed the idea that “there are some, you know, ancillary connections between [Fluke] and the White House,” without noting that Fluke said she had not coordinated her message with the White House.
Following MacCallum's comments, the third panelist, conservative author Jedediah Bila, suggested that Limbaugh was right “to go there” because Fluke “is represented by Anita Dunn” and “is out there echoing talking points of the administration, not just on this issue but on the contraception issue.” Bila also said that Fluke is “sort of representing unofficially the Obama administration.”
Hamel and Miller responded to Bila's comments by saying, respectively, that “it's a far stretch to say that [Fluke is] a White House spokesperson, basically” and that Limbaugh's attack is “just utterly absurd.”