When it comes to outrageous speech, the kind that should be ridiculed by a civilized society, the mainstream media is like Inspector Clouseau chastising an organ grinder and his monkey for operating without a license — “Does your minkey have a lee-SAHNCE?” — while bank robbers with automatic weapons operate unnoticed behind him.

Any utterance by Rush Limbaugh that can be taken out of context is immediately, well, taken out of context, not only by pundits in commentary but by supposedly “straight” reporters.

The left-wing media, which looks down its nose at those less-sophisticated rubes out in flyover country, seems to have lost its ability to discern parody and satire, at least where Limbaugh is concerned.

Take the most recent mainstream media Limbaugh feeding frenzy: Haiti. Limbaugh made the statement last week that there were better places to send your money for Haiti relief that to Barack Obama’s whitehouse.gov. Private charities would give your dollars a better chance of reaching actual needy Haitians, was his point.

That got morphed into “Limbaugh says don’t donate to Haitian relief” by one of the Huffington Post’s many professional out-of-context takers. The media quickly glommed onto that fiction, and anyone on network television, MSNBC or CNN felt they had to make a snarky remark about Limbaugh in order to keep their lefty-lib creds.

Meanwhile, two MSNBC pundits have said some really dreadful and anti-democratic things in the past few days that have gone unnoticed by all but righty bloggers.

Take Keith Olbermann, please (sorry, couldn’t resist). In one of his increasingly unhinged rants the other day, he called Massachusetts Republican senatorial candidate Scott Brown a homophobe and a racist. Just like that. You’d think that if this were true the MSM would have been deluging us with stories that evidence Browns homophobia and racism, but I’ve read nary a one.

But that didn’t stop Olbermann from doing his demagogic best to demonize a Republican threat to the ObamaCare juggernaut:

“[I]n Scott Brown we have an irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude-model, teabagging supporter of violence against woman and against politicians with whom he disagrees.”

The evidence for his slander is based on misinterpretations and outright misrepresentations. Here’s one:

“You have heard Scott Brown respond to the shout from a supporter that they should stick a curling iron into Ms. Coakley’s rectum with the answer, ‘We can do this.’”

Brown was moving along a rope line shaking hands with supporters when one person was overheard making the comment mentioned above. It was a reference to a controversial child sex-abuse case that Brown’s opponent, Democrat Martha Coakley, handled ineptly while serving as Massachusetts’s attorney general. It’s clear to any reasonable person that Brown’s comment 1) was not in response to the curling iron comment, and 2) was in reference to his underdog campaign against Coakley, the Massachusetts Democratic machine’s hand-picked successor to the late Ted Kennedy.

Olbermann’s evidence for Brown’s racism? His association with the national Tea Party movement:

“You may not have heard Scott Brown associating himself with the Tea Party movement, perhaps the saddest collection of people who don’t want to admit why they really hate since the racists of the South in the sixties insisted they were really just concerned about states’ rights.”

This is a tired trope of the left. Any opposition to the liberal agenda always brings out the “racism” card, no matter how lacking in any factual basis.

His evidence of Brown’s homophobia is a Brown statement that two women having a child is “just not normal.” I can’t even confirm Brown ever said that, but if he did I don’t see the controversy. Anyone who’s ever taken Biology 101 would have to agree with the statement.

It’s not only Olbermann’s outrageous lefty statements that are overlooked by the mainstream media. Take this outrageous statement by Ed Schultz, also an MSNBC host:

“I tell you what, if I lived in Massachusetts, I’d try to vote ten times. I don’t know if they’d let me or not, but I’d try to. Yeah, that’s right, I’d cheat to keep these bastards out. I would. ‘Cause that’s exactly what they are.

Nothing could be more outrageously antithetical to our traditional democratic values than this. If you think for a moment about the logical consequences of such a view, our notions of voting, ballot integrity and free elections fall by the wayside. These are not inconsequential things, but not one mainstream media outlet has examined Schultz’s statement and what it might mean if it is shared by a significant percentage of the left and Democrats.

They’re too busy attacking Rush Limbaugh’s parodies of Democratic excesses, and trying to make you believe those are his personal views.

Jon Ham is publisher of Carolina Journal.