Limbaugh’s Boot-lickers
The literal translation of “Fuhrer” is “guide” and the Conservative’s Guide, Rush Limbaugh, applied his iron handed discipline to yet another wayward Republican. In January it was Georgia’s weasel, Rep. Phil Gingrey. Now the new RNC Chairman is forced into the Limbaugh Bootlicking routine.
The new chairman of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele, apologized to Rush Limbaugh on Monday after describing him in a television interview over the weekend as an “entertainer” who made incendiary and sometimes ugly remarks, party officials said.
I know many of you, like Steele before his forced “reeducation”, think that Limbaugh is merely an entertainer. But I think he is more dangerous than that–a demagogue of the kind that H.L. Menken defined as “one who will preach doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.”
Like all demagogues, there could come a point in the next few years, if unemployment had climbed to 12%, when Rush’s search for scapegoats to satisfy the bloodlust of his brownshirt dittoheads could be truly dangerous. Until then, he is just the Fuhrer–the guide–and Republican politicians ignore his guidance at their peril.
Every time I hear a Republican use the word “pork”, I think of Rush Limbaugh.
TennesseeWilliamsShakespeare
March 3, 2009 at 8:46 am
I completely agree that limbaugh is dangerous and I love watching the repubs. implode BUT let us not take our eye off the ball… karl rove and his criminal minions are rewriting history and the national media is letting them get away with it…another bait and switch…the only thing I can think of right now that repubs. do well. We must demand an investigation, while we enjoy watching repubs. be devoured by the monster they created…right wing radio!!!
Sharon
March 3, 2009 at 9:17 am
Limbaugh lacked the elemental fiber to serve in a war he fervently supported. He’s a cowardly, ignorant, bullying tool of concentrated power, willfully self-delusional about himself and his adversaries. He’ll capitulate to determined, informed and prepared resistance.
Pvt. Keepout
March 3, 2009 at 10:43 am
What is it about overweight, unattractive, under -educated white guys that “conservatives” find so irresistible? It’s astounding.
Mason Dixon
March 3, 2009 at 11:25 am
I agree Jon–he is dangerous —but entertaining–a lethal combination
doug
March 3, 2009 at 11:33 am
And Mr. Taplin,
You are absolutely correct. There are too many born followers to make him anything but dangerous. Bill Moyers Journal did a piece on right-wing hate radio that is bone chilling.
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/09122008/watch.html
Mason Dixon
March 3, 2009 at 11:33 am
The trouble with wishing these guys would go away is that they are like Pac-man, you get ride of one and another pops up. I remember in California there was a guy named Joe Pine who was rabid like our current batch. Another California wonder was Wally George. Of our current batch, Glen Beck never went to college, Hanity was a college drop out and Limbaugh is another educational loser. Maybe they have something we cannot see that links them to the part of our population who lack any ability to think or reason. But they sure have their followings. I don’t like all the media attention they are getting. Just ignore them. They will not go away, but at least they will not gain in their listener base.
Jim Ramsey
March 3, 2009 at 1:02 pm
Why doesn’t some wealthy liberal start having Limbaugh investigated. Then take every piece of dirt they find and spread it all over the news.
Give this guy a taste of his own medicine, so to speak.
Mark Morris
March 3, 2009 at 1:15 pm
Because someone has. There are numerous founded and unfounded allegations regarding the Girthy One. It weakens him but doesn’t take him out.
Humans take strange salads with their meat to paraphrase a poet. Consider the number of people who keep up active correspondence with convicted killers and other psychopaths in prison in hopes of a marriage, or have consensual relations with them. The reasons are varied, but some are really attracted to this man’s spiels and then there are danger rangers (say, endorphin addiction, the same brain farts that cause flame wars).
So attack as you will, the bad boy effect ensures he has an audience. The best offense is to change the zeitgeist such that it is no longer trendy to tout his spiel. His rants have to be seen as distasteful, vindictive, and harming the common man. That is what is happening and the massive hemoraghing of the Republican Party is proof.
The counter to that bleeding is for conservatives to reclaim their ideology and to separate themselves from those who hijacked it. So again, a strong attractive conservative leader will emerge and whether he or she becomes a Republican or Democratic avatar depends on how well that person can defeat Rush. One can decide to support that person if their goals are not dishonorable. Again, ArloRules: you have more in common with those who really do give a damm than those on your side of an issue who don’t. “One can agree to disagree without being disagreeable.”
Someone always loves Rome more than Caesar. Rush will meet his Brutus as soon as Cassius can arrange it.
len
March 3, 2009 at 1:46 pm
MD – I think you’ve put your finger on it. It’s the people who have no time for – or interest in – critical thought that provide the raw material for demagogues everywhere.
Rush happens to be the king of the heap right now.
As Plato observed, the basic problem with democracy is that government of the people, by the people, and for the people only works is the people themselves are capable of self-governance.
And by that, he didn’t mean as a collective. Rather, a serious majority of individuals need to be self-possessed, of sound mind and body, and unwilling to exchange their own liberty for promises about the end of existential angst – if only they follow along mindlessly right now.
There was a well-circulated piece that the Times ran about a week ago, asking how, in ‘tough times’, the humanities can ‘justify their worth’.
Um, by being the backbone of democracy, you morons. That’s how. Instead, we get this:
One of my concerns about ‘education reform’ is that so few people who insist on it even seem to know what an education really is, why it matters, or how much trouble a democracy can get itself into if education gets short-changed.
Right now, it seems to have been reduced to purely economic terms – “how much more can I make if I have (x) degree or certification?” and “do the costs of (x) degree or certification justify its acquisition?”
Questions like “what do I need to know in order to participate constructively in a free and self-governing society” are met with blank stares.
The depressing irony of a self-destructive focus on short-term economics is that it produces a society of people incapable of creating and sustaining economically viable conditions – because they have absolutely no clue about concerns bigger than their immediate and personal economic advantage.
Let’s be clear here – we’re not talking about people in raw starvation / survival mode. There’s no real parallel between American’s working for SUVs in the driveways of McMansions and the lives chronicled by Primo Levi in Auschwitz when he formulated his theory of The Drowned & The Saved.
In fact, it’s been a very long time since we had to contend with Hobbsian lives of nasty, cold, short, brutality. If you’ve seen Slumdog Millionaire you can understand exactly how astonishingly rich we are as a country. And still, in spite of unparalleled wealth and security, we find ourselves unable to tear ourselves away from ‘more, More, MORE’ – pursued to the point where someone can safely say ‘now I’ve got mine’.
Are we really still that close to the tenement living of the first Gilded Age? And if so, how did we spend the last 100 years missing the point of what real wealth can offer?
What I’m not seeing in the Rushbo legions is any sense of the basic dignity that the humanities are supposed to instill. Consequently, we’ve seen the rise of institutions that treat dignity as an economic externality. It’s toxic. And we end up with the grotesque specter of people scrambling as though they still lived in slums, even though they’ve got driveways with Lexus’ and living rooms with very widescreen TV’s. Something is missing.
So, I’m not in favor of ‘education reform’. I’m in favor of education, period.
And how do you justify it? You can start by pointing to the fact that asshats like Glen Beck are on the national news as moderators, that’s how.
Jon’s absolutely right – these guys are dangerous. And in a country where free speech is the law of the land, you can’t hit them at the top, and hope that the ‘message’ will trickle down. Instead, you’ve got to go from the bottom up, and make sure that these louts don’t have any dry tinder to work with in the first place.
Alex Bowles
March 3, 2009 at 2:22 pm
To bring it closer to home – isn’t it just a rework of the Joe McCarthy bullying tactic? On a smaller scale, with less artifice?
But there aren’t analogues for CBS & Morrow these days.
Fuhrer = leader = guide was the National Socialist (Nazi) appropriation of a term that described worthwhile jobs. Likewise, “journalist” has been appropriated by folks who think their opinion should dominate over the facts.
Mozzie
March 3, 2009 at 2:31 pm
Limbaugh’s resemblance to my grandmother grows stronger every day. Put that man in a floral housecoat and I’d be hard-pressed to tell them apart.
Dan
March 3, 2009 at 2:32 pm
If you don’t understand the phenomenon of those like Rush, read this
http://blog.ihobo.com/2009/02/why-you-play-games.html
and extrapolate. Skinner told you how. This tells you why.
In easy terms: because they enjoy it.
Alex, you don’t need a catastrophe of the economy. For all the angst, things aren’t that bad. You need a catastrophe of entertainment: people turning to other games because of *boredom*. It is an incredibly effective and insidious insight: he admitted his crime when he said “I’m just an entertainer.” Don’t gloss past that with economic theory. That is ALL he has to be to do the damage.
The point is it works because the audience is ‘prepared’ for it to work and he took advantage of unidirectional media. He is losing because the definition of entertainment is changing and the dominant media are now multi-cast and feedback-mediated.
Who are the experts in these media?
We are. Pick up your prize.
len
March 3, 2009 at 2:49 pm
The ugly American ?
bernard
March 3, 2009 at 6:58 pm
it’s a cluster-rush
billy-bob
March 3, 2009 at 7:48 pm
Someone should run a radio soap opera opposite Limbaugh. Something about a sheriff in some podunk town in Texas who discovers a terror cell preparing for something big out in the desert. A sort of redneck “24.” That’d pull some of his audience — advertisers — away.
gage
March 3, 2009 at 8:52 pm
Just finished Jon Ronson’s “Them” which sat on my bookshelf for a long time. What it confirms to me is that Rush’s audience is self referential, self reinforcing, and just enough right in that (there is a conspiracy against them, with many of the bad guys being the ones we pillory here on a daily basis, but the neo-con noise machine makes its living by the magician’s trick of misdirection. Given that there was/is a cabal of people out to impoverish and enslave them (unregulated global financiers, and the MIC), it’s easy to provide them with plausible sounding labels for these evils and have them believe.
Do what you will, the Rushes will be forever with us. Senator Macarthy was an enduring model not a moment.
The trick is try to find ways to keep the true believers to just the fringe element. And pray for the moment when a Southern congressman loses his seat because he kowtows to the fool.
Ken Ballweg
March 4, 2009 at 7:25 am
good perspective len,
This is a slight departure from the topic, but I’m starting to think of all operations as falling along a spectrum.
On one end, you have organizations that create value for themselves by creating more value for others. On the other, you have organizations that extract the maximum amount of value from existing resources, while contributing the bare minimum needed to stay in operation.
I’ve come to see the Republican’s ‘pro-business / pro-free market’ stance as cover for operations that had all gravitated towards the unfortunate end of that spectrum.
The irony is that it’s virtually impossible to be on this end of things and maintain a competitive position in the world, unless you manage to carve out some sort of special dispensation from the government (exactly the sort of patronage-based arrangement that’s one of the biggest strikes against monarchies).
Here’s a perfect example of that sort of thing in action. The salient point is that, under neutral government, folks on the ‘create value for yourself by creating more value for others’ end of the spectrum will almost always eclipse the more predatory model. However, once you start corrupting government, and devolving back to the monarchist’s model, this socially beneficial approach becomes a liability, and rewards accrue to those who can do the most harm to the public by turning their own responsibilities into economic externalities that have no effect on their balance sheets.
Again, this doesn’t happen without collusion from the government, and that doesn’t happen unless there’s a political movement generating cover and making threats on behalf of those who are busy de-neutralizing government.
Alex Bowles
March 4, 2009 at 12:22 pm
Oh damn, neglected the example link. It’s here, and it’s shockingly bad. It’s also completely typical. And it’s worth noting that the acceptability of this kind of thing is the one point on which there’s complete bi-partisan agreement in Washington.
Alex Bowles
March 4, 2009 at 12:25 pm
@alex:
Arlo tells a story his father, Woody Guthrie, told him about a pair of rabbits munching grass in the middle of a field who hear the dogs approaching. At first they ignore it and keep on munching, but then the dogs come closer and they realize they have to run but the dogs are too close so they hide in an old log.
The girl rabbit looks at the boy rabbit and says, “Husband I’m afraid we aren’t getting out of here alive.” The boy rabbit says, “Wife, that’s ok. We’ll stay in here until we outnumber them.”
Breed innovation in whatever situation you are in using your natural talents. They are inexhaustible.
Don’t worship their God. Bring your own God to the church. If more people do, the church may get crowded but no one gets hurt. That’s Amazing Grace.
Obama is not above the nation. We aren’t either. We are the nation.
len
March 4, 2009 at 12:37 pm
From Timothy Egan
http://egan.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/04/fears-of-a-clown/?pagemode=print
David Frum said recently, “If you’re a talk radio host and you have five million who listen and there are 50 million who hate you, you make a nice living. If you’re a Republican party, you’re marginalized.”
TennesseeWilliamsShakespeare
March 4, 2009 at 10:32 pm