The indispensable Dave provides a post called: Limbaugh, conservatives and the 'bloody shirt': The right has a long history of turning bullies into victims
Starts with discussion about Rush's failed NFL bid, proceeds to explain a few cases of conservatives turning their attacks into attacks on them:
To Bill O'Reilly and Juan Williams and the rest of the Fox crew, the outrage is never the atrocities they actually uttered, only the effrontery of having those atrocities held against them. They all want to make a victim of the bully and a bully of the victim. Their narrative is that the real story is not the atrocities that Rush Limbaugh utters but only the attempt by his political enemies to make political hay out of it.Very good source cited: Stephen Budiansky's The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War, (excerpted in the New York Times). Describes the origin of the phrase in the Reconstruction era -- and it turns out to be a myth!!!
