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Some provocative online ads promoting Obamacare, including one with an image of actor Ryan Gosling, encouraged Rush Limbaugh to declare Wednesday that he was correct to disparage Sandra Fluke last year with controversial remarks that led to a media firestorm and advertiser defections.
The ads, which have been criticized on Fox News and dozens of conservative websites, suggest that women love Obamacare because it gives them access to free contraception. One features a woman next to a cardboard cutout of Gosling with the text: “Hey girl, you’re excited about easy access to birth control and I’m excited about getting to know you.” Another ad has a woman showing off her birth-control pills while standing next to man and saying: “OMG, he’s hot! Let’s hope he’s as easy to get as this birth control.”
Last year, Limbaugh called Fluke a “slut” after she told members of Congress that she wanted subsidized birth control. On his nationally syndicated radio show Wednesday, Limbaugh joked about “some guy” who got in trouble because “he used a word he didn’t mean to use.”
STORY: Rush Limbaugh Strikes Three-Year Deal With Cumulus
Limbaugh also claimed not to remember Fluke’s name, though it was clear he was revisiting the controversy, which erupted in March 2012.
“There was this student, this 35-year-old student from Georgetown, who was complaining that, for as often as she had sex, birth control pills were costing her like, what was it, $3,000 a month?” Limbaugh said Wednesday. “She wanted Obamacare to pay for her contraception.”
He told his 12 million or so listeners Wednesday that he didn’t mean to use a slur last year when describing Fluke, he meant to say “promiscuity.”
“Lo and behold, folks, even when I screw up I get it right,” Limbaugh said Wednesday.
“This ad is associating promiscuity with Obamacare,” Limbaugh said. “I think back, ladies and gentlemen, when I predicted, I warned everybody that’s where this was headed. I forget that woman’s name now … she was sitting there, and she was basically saying, ‘Look, I want to have limitless, endless sex, I want you to pay for it’ … and I was like any normal, responsible person — I was insulted by this.”
The ads, which were aimed at young adults in Colorado but have gone viral on the Internet, were unveiled at DoYouGotInsuance.com and are a collaboration between Colorado Consumer Health Initiative and ProgressNow Colorado Education. In a bit of irony, ProgressNow was one of the left-leaning groups that attacked Limbaugh last year and accused him of waging a “war on women.”
Email: Paul.Bond@THR.com
Email: Paul.Bond@THR.com
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