Uncle Rush just can’t catch a break

You know you just said some morally questionable bullshit, when David Letterman, in the week we found out he fucks a lot of the girls on his staff, has to cut you off mid-sentence and be like, "Hold on a sec. That's some morally questionable bullshit right there!"

Honestly, I don't see the problem with David Letterman getting some stank in the workplace, even if it was women who worked under him, who thought they might get a raise out of it. (I guess there aren't any women who work over him.) I'd drop a load on a 60 year-old woman, if I thought there was money to be made. But the point remains.

Yesterday, a guy sent me a link to a post on a site I'd never heard of about how Russell Simmons has Kim Kardashian out shilling for the blood diamond industry. I'm not gonna lie - I just skimmed it. Some of us have to work for a living. It looks like most of it has to do with the fact that the blood diamond trade is bad news, mmkay? Which I was already aware of. The operative bit was the video, at the very end, of Kim Kardashian on Letterman the other day.

You might want to check out the video anyway, to see Kim K's cans jiggle, as she makes her way from backstage to Letterman's sofa. (If there isn't already a pr0n spoof of the Late Night with David Letterman, perhaps she can be incorporated. You know she does pr0n.) But it's a fascinated video. I had no idea celebrities and corporations were using these shows to shill like that. I haven't seen one of these late night talk shows since back when my parents used to drop me off at my grandparents' house to avoid having to raise me (they didn't have cable), and they've been dead for quite some time now.

I know, from having studied the incident when Bill Hicks was booted from his umpteenth and (as it turned out) final appearance on Letterman as if it was the goddamn Zapruder film, that these interviews are meticulously prearranged and vetted by the TIs and their lawyers. It's not like Letterman could have had Kim Kardashian on to talk about her latest interracial pr0n film, and she just launched into a spiel about how we should sweat the rape of Africa's precious natural resources, because she's been there and checked it all out. So Letterman had to be in on this as well, and honestly, I'm a lot more concerned with that than I am with him having sex with a woman from his job - one of the few places a man might be able to meet a decent woman.

Speaking of which, before I took off for work yesterday, I checked Rush's Global Grind, to see if they had anything on it, but instead I found a post by Rush himself going off on the New York Times, for doing yet another story on the predatory nature of the Rush Card. Like I said, the post on Kim Kardashian was on a site no one ever heard of - so it could be that it didn't pop up in their radar, or they figured it was so obscure they could just let it blow over without even addressing it. As long as none of these rap magazines decide to do a story on it. Honestly, I'm not even sure why he bothered to issue a response to the Times story. I can't imagine very many people who read Global Grind would have heard of it otherwise. Notice how hip-hop-related stories from the Times don't turn up until two or three days after they appear in the print version of the paper. And this site is updated by journalists who live in New York. No shots!

I was letting people know about the predatory nature of the Rush Card, before it was all trendy. I've written about it here as far back as the spring of '06, when I first started blogging for this site, and I've probably mentioned it on my own site as well. I first became aware of it back in like '03, when I was still in college. As business majors, we had to subscribe to Business Week, which we discussed in a class called Business Policy. The week Rush was on the cover of Business Week, we just so happened to be doing a unit on environmentalism, so we spent quite a bit of time discussing the so-called CEO of hip-hop. It was a trip watching my professor, a 70 year-old Mormon guy who would often go off on a jag about the antics of drunken Native American Indians, discuss Def Jam, Phat Farm and what have you. This wasn't the kind of school where you could take a class on 2Pac, as if he's worthy of that level of academic inquiry. Phyllis Schlafly perhaps.

Now, I'm not gonna sit here and pretend to be an expert on Russell Simmons' various business ventures. Lord knows if I paid more attention in college, I probably wouldn't be thinking about rap music at this point, let alone writing about it for a living. But one of the few things I do remember learning in college is that the Rush Card is some ol' bullshit right out of Superman III. It's not like my college business professor was pissed off that T La Rock wasn't invited to the VH1 Hip Hop Honors and hence had some sort of agenda. All he did was research how these cards work, which is obviously what the Times did. In his open letter to the Times, Rush called their story on the Rush Card and other such scams near slanderous. Which is hilarious to me. I've spent the last half a decade working on the Internets, where slander is the stock in trade, and I don't think I've ever heard the term near slanderous.

I guess Rush figured he's got this site, he might as well use it to push his agenda. But he probably would have been better off sending Kim Kardashian on another one of these shows, to talk about how she took a trip to the Rush Card offices, and everything looked on the up and up to her. It's not like Russell Simmons is about to out-fact check the New York Times. But if a woman has nice enough cans, I'll listen to pretty much anything she has to say, as will most people. And most people aren't like me, in that they're wise enough to know bullshit when they hear it.