what the hell is wrong with these people?
On the October 26 edition of NBC's Today, co-host Matt Lauer suggested that when nationally syndicated radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh "said [that] perhaps [actor] Michael J. Fox was exaggerating or faking these effects of Parkinson's disease" in a recent campaign ad for Missouri Democratic Senate candidate Claire McCaskill, Limbaugh was "just say[ing] what a lot of people were privately thinking." Lauer added that "if Michael Fox goes out there politically and puts himself in the fray, he has to expect to be taken to account."
This evening, Katie Couric on the CBS Evening News, interviewing Michael J. Fox, asked (I'm paraphrasing): "Wouldn't it have been better to wait to shoot the ad when you weren't shaking so much?"
Gee, Katie, wouldn't it have been better for CBS to hire somebody with some simple human decency?
Update from the transcript:
KC: Could you have waited to do that ad when you had less dyskinesia, for example?
MF: Well, when do you know that’s going to be? You don’t know when that’s going to be….Funny, my mother was visiting that day, was in the backroom and she was saying throughout the filming of it -- and she was talking to my friends back there-- and she was saying "he's trying so hard to be still" and so she was the one actually when the comments were made, she was the only who was really angry and she said "I can’t even see straight." I said ‘Mom, just relax, it’s okay, don't worry about it. But, it’s just not that simple. That’s why we're doing this. Not only people with Parkinson’s. People who have spinal cord injuries. People who have the ticking clock of ALS, where they waste away, kids who are born with juvenile diabetes, I mean, potentially there’s answers for those people and we're not interested in being exhibitionists with our symptoms or asking for pity or anything else. We're just resolved to get moving with this science. It’s been a long time. It’s not a time neutral observation. It’s not something we can sit back and abstractly talk about. While people are talking about it, there are people attached to this issue, which is one of the reasons I did this. It’s not necessarily the most comfortable thing for me to do and necessarily what I want to be doing. I’ve got 4 kids. I like to be spending time with them, but if it takes seeing a face that people recognize and say ‘hey, I know that guy,’ maybe they'll realize that they know other people. There's 100 million Americans that are either touched by an incurable illness, or know somebody who has incurable illness, or love somebody who has incurable illness. There’s 100 million Americans and most of the American population -- 70 percent -- favor this research because they know what it means. But what happens is you get to an election time and things fall away. And what I hoped was by being that guy that people would say, ‘Hey, I know that guy,’ that we'd 14 days out from an election, be talking about stem cells. And we are. And I'm greatly gratified. And if that means taking a beating from that faction of the media, you know, that’s fine. If bringing the message means the messenger gets roughed up a little bit, I'm happy to be that guy.