"I made a stupid gaffe on the radio last week. While hosting a national radio show, I said that, in general, the liberal professors who have turned higher education into the toxic stew that produced porn star "Belle Knox" needed to be "taken out and shot." This was a figure of speech; I certainly did not mean it literally. It is a figure of speech, I suspect, that everyone reading this has used, and everyone who clamored for my ruination has used also."

Personally, I never said anyone should be ruined. I have also have never said that anyone should be taken out and shot. But in those rare times I have heard anyone else use the phrase -- it was stated with the certainty of the angry zealot who thinks it is a Truth that Must be Told. Mature people of conscience do not make such reckless statements in public. Not even in jest. Austin Ruse should have have known better.

But of course, violence was not the only issue in his remarkable outburst, and he has not retreated from those problems either. Ruse is still saying -- with zero evidence to support his claim that

"so-called higher education massively failed and created a Belle Knox, poor girl, the Duke University porn star."

As I previously observed, there is no more evidence for this than that Knox's first semester at college had made her a libertarian or a College Republican -- although those are also part of her identity.

Ruse also went on to blame liberals and bloggers for his plight, but Dave Neiwert reports at Hate Watch that Ruse is finding himself isolated -- and not just from bloggers and liberals. Ruse fails to mention that conservatives are also repulsed. "The American Family Association - on whose program he made the rant - severed all ties with him, saying:

"AFR condemns such comments, no matter who makes them." One of C-FAM's board members, Monsignor Anthony Frontiero, resigned from the board after Faithful America petitioned him to do so. And C-FAM may lose its status at the United Nations."

Frontiero, a prelate from New Hampshire has served the Holy See in a variety of capacities in the past, including as a member of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.

Hate Watch also notes that this is not the first time that Ruse cloaked a threat of violence inside an attempt at humor. Nor is a college kid the only target of his verbal thuggery. Catholics for Choice reported in 2000 that when Ruse addressed the conspiracist, anti-communist and anti-Obama Cardinal Mindzenty Foundation he told a story about talking to a Catholic priest about killing Hillary Clinton. "Hillary [Clinton] is the `conquering queen' at the United Nations," Ruse said. "I was standing on the floor of the UN a couple of months ago, when she was thinking about running, and I was talking to a priest from the Holy See delegation and -- I shouldn't tell you this but he offered me guaranteed absolution if I just took her out -- and not on a date."

Ruse would no doubt be the first to say he didn't really mean it and blame it all on bloggers, liberals and feminists.

