Conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh wanted to become one of the owners of an NFL football team, the St. Louis Rams. It didn’t work out — he’s just too controversial, said league pooh-bahs. Bosh!, said Rush, blaming an “on-going effort by the left in this country — to destroy conservatism, to prevent the mainstreaming of anyone who is prominent as a conservative.”
Blackballing a prominent — much loved in some quarters, much despised in others — media figure is an especially interesting step, to say the least, in light of some of the unsavory characters to whom the NFL establishment has not objected — the worst of whom was undoubtedly the notorious George Preston Marshall, the virulently racist owner of the (you guessed it) Washington Redskins. Anyway, into the fray has jumped, of all sources, the Wall Street Journal, to refute Limbaugh’s talking point: “In truth,” notes Steve Kornacki in the October 16 issue of the Journal, “if prominent conservatives were barred from owning NFL teams, about a dozen franchises would be for sale.” Here are the particulars. Anyway, to sort everything out properly, we’d need a experimental design in which some left-wing mirror image of Rush Limbaugh tried to buy into an NFL franchise.