It’s turning out to be a bad, bad week for talk show host Rush Limbaugh. Ten advertisers have pulled their ads from his show after the provocateur called Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown University law student who was famously denied an opportunity to testify on an all-male panel at a House hearing on the health care law’s contraception mandate, a “slut” and a “prostitute” who is “having so much sex she can’t afford” to pay for birth control. She later was the sole witness at a hearing called by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

Limbaugh had a rather laissez-fair response.

“They've decided they don't want you or your business anymore. So be it,” he told listeners Monday, before delivering a third and what he says is a final apology for “using inappropriate words” to describe Fluke.

Limbaugh issued his first apology Saturday, when advertisers initially began to bail, in which he said his “choice of words was not the best, and in the attempt to be humorous, I created a national stir." But on Monday, he said the “leftists” made him do it.

“Against my own instincts, against my own knowledge, against everything I know to be right and wrong I descended to their level when I used those two words to describe Sandra Fluke,” he said.  “That was my error.  I became like them, and I feel very badly about that.”

Limbaugh says that the advertisers who’ve turned their back on him will be replaced. But that’s not certain. Remember Don Imus. The firebrand radio host, who lost his show in 2007 for calling members of the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy headed hos,” called Limbaugh’s apology “lame” and said he should apologize to Fluke in person.

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