That’s my best guess as to why what’s coming out of Rush Limbaugh’s mouth bears absolutely no relationship to the reality that the rest of us citizens of the United States are currently living.
Jumping into the Wayback Machine–picture it: 1994. Yours Truly is a 21-year-old married mother of an eighteen-month-old, just about to start her first semester of college. She has no computer and only watches TV when forced to do so by either her equally young husband or small son (some things sure haven’t changed)–she gets all her information on what’s going on in the wide world outside her small apartment from, get this, newspapers and magazines! (Wow, does that seem Neolithic, though.) Anyway, one day she picks up one or the other of the latter, and sees a large, smirking, suited Conservadroid adorning the front with headlines screaming beneath–“Oh, That Rush Sensation!”
Mildly curious, she flips through the pages til she gets to the relevant article–”The new face of fear for liberals everywhere!” it breathlessly proclaims (or something like that–this was fifteen years ago, people). While she did not, at that time, particularly consider herself a “liberal,” she was interested to discover more about this man who supposedly had them all quaking in their boots–! Further perusal revealed that this Rush Limbaugh person had a radio talk show, so she resolved upon giving it a shot–she herself thought there were some real issues with the standard set of “liberal” beliefs as she knew them, and she wanted to hear somebody really tackle them in a populist fashion.
Heh. Well, she listened to him. And he was…well, stupid. As in, unintelligent. Clearly unintelligent. Objectionable too, yeah, sure–but she didn’t really care about that–she cared that he was D-U-M-B. This was the terror of the libs..? but he wasn’t even BRIGHT! Hadn’t stupid people opposed to liberal ideals already abounded for generations..? What was so special about THIS one..?
Jumping forward in time to the present day, no, I still haven’t figured out his peculiar draw. Much like with Ann Coulter, I admit I don’t and have not, since way back when, spent any real time trying to figure them out–lack of interest. It’s hard to respect an opponent, even one who clearly has a great deal of power and influence, who says things that really underscore the fact that the possessor, if not actually in the barely-100′s IQ range, is of an intellectual laziness that ends up producing the same result as if he or she were.
Mostly when I think of Rush Limbaugh (which as I said, is seldom), I remember something I saw him say on TV sometime during the nineties. He was looking at the camera–directly at it–and smiling; and he said, “I’m just a harmless, lovable little fuzzball!” (Now that I think of it, it might have been some kind of infomercial for a book or TV show or even his radio talk show. But I’m really can’t recall anymore.) I remember, though, listening to him say that, and watching his eyes as he said it–he had the smallest, deadest eyes–I’d seen plenty of eyes like that, growing up, on the most vicious of the wife-and-son-beating, daughter-raping backcountry crowd–the ones with fingernails black deep under the quick, years-old stench emanating from every possible bodily orifice, and always ready with a joke to underscore their hatred of women, minorities, gays, and God forbid, fuurreigners. I remember wondering if his devoted listeners actually felt that he WAS harmless and/or lovable, or if they got the joke–he was about as harmless and lovable as the men I described in the previous sentence, but also just as fuckin’ scary–the kind of man nobody messed with if they could avoid it.
But no matter how much I ignore him, Rush Limbaugh does not go away. Here he is again, happy to demonstrate as always that his perception of what’s really happening in the US is the same whether he is actually tripping on something at that particular moment or not.
Rush Limbaugh calls on conservatives to take back nation
Scary. They’ve had it for eight years, and we can all see what they’ve done with it. I mean, this is not me making some kind of brilliant and insightful point. This is common knowledge. This is a lot like the president of NAMBLA demanding that the cops give him back all the little boys they removed from his home.
Rush:
“We conservatives have not done a good enough job of just laying out basically who we are, because we make the mistake of assuming that people know. What they know is largely incorrect, based on the way we’re portrayed in pop culture, in the drive-by media, by the Democrat party,” the conservative talk show host told a mostly young crowd of energized supporters.
Again…what we know of who they are we have learned in the past eight years of watching our civil liberties gutted, our nation go to war and our economy collapse.
And another thing about that “mostly young” crowd. Was it, by any chance…a mostly male young crowd? The article doesn’t say, but I wonder.
Limbaugh’s impassioned keynote speech, punctuated by chest-thumping, fist-pumping and chants of “USA” from the crowd, capped off three days of talk at CPAC focusing on rebuilding the Republican Party.
“He played to his crowd here,” CNN political editor Mark Preston said. “And this crowd is now energized, something we haven’t seen from Republicans, certainly not conservatives, since the November election.”
Mmm…”Sarah Palin.” And we all saw how well that worked out for the Republican party, didn’t it? What is it about the Republican party that attracts these, well, televangelical showman types..?
Limbaugh used his self-described “first national address,” which ran more than an hour longer than his allotted 20 minutes,
These really massive and flamboyant egos…
to accuse President Obama of inspiring fear in Americans in order to push a liberal agenda of “big government.”
“He wants people in fear, angst and crisis, fearing the worst each and every day, because that clears the decks for President Obama and his pals to come in with the answers, which are abject failures, historically shown and demonstrated.
For the third time…the abject failure, historically–recent history, the past eight years!–shown and demonstrated, was the answers provided to us and implemented by the socially conservative, internationally Neocon, utterly unregulated “free market” government that I believe Rush Limbaugh has been masturbating to, loudly and on air, for the past eight years.
Well…if Rush Limbaugh really is the “new” face and leadership of the twenty-first century Republican party…one of two things will happen. His stupidity and insanity will come to its natural limits of a quarter or less of the population that are similarly stupid and/or insane enough to drink his up like Jonestown Kool-Aid, and that’ll be that–he’ll become yet another one of America’s quirky political sideshows that give the rest of the world so much fodder for their comedians. OR…he’ll galvanize a sufficient majority of the nation, the one that wholeheartedly embraced the “Patriot Act” and the war in Iraq, that we’ll find ourselves, in four years or so, tumbling back in the morass that was created by the Bush administration. If that occurs, certainly, the majority will get what they deserve. It will be rather hard on the minority that didn’t, but that’s one of the built-in flaws of a democracy.
As distasteful as it is, I suppose I had better keep an eye out…just so I’m not entirely taken by surprise however it turns out.
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