On the other hand, it quickly becomes clear just how full of shit these people are when Rush Limbaugh says something incredibly stupid. Then you see these assholes employ precisely the same defense of him that they attack Stewart for using himself. It's deeply amusing to watch and I'm actually surprised that no one's called them on it before.
Most Tea Partiers don't just view Limbaugh as a deep political thinker, they see him as something as a spiritual forefather. And god knows that elected Republicans don't dare cross him. The second that they do, the fat man goes on a tirade and within 24 hours the politician is calling in to grovel at Rush's feet.
But the second that Limbaugh goes over the line - and the Sandra Fluke tirade is as good an example as any - the party line becomes "Rush is just an entertainer. He's not a spokesman for the Republican party." Except, y'know, for the rest of the time when he is. Limbaugh certainly brings them to heel in ways that the RNC Chairman, the House speaker or the Senate minority leader can't. You tell me what that says about his power, or if there's a Democratic equivalent to it.
In my opinion, there's been such a lack of principled leadership in the GOP for so long that a collection of goddamn deejays have taken over. Limbaugh just happens to be the most prominent and powerful of them, but you've also got raving dickheads like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Mark Levin following up the rear. And these people aren't the spineless shills they used to be. They actually set the agenda these days, and they will forcibly de-ball any supposed "leader" that crosses them.
Look, it's easy to brook no dissent when you're a glorified deejay because you have nothing to lose. As a matter of fact, it's often professionally better for afternoon radio types and Fox News talking heads when Republicans lose elections. As you might imagine, it's easier (to say nothing of more entertaining) to oppose than propose. There's a considerably higher level of difficulty in going on 45 minute long lunatic tirades about Marxist and Alinskyite conspiracies when the GOP is in charge without sounding like the late Robert Welch.
But for weapons-grade stupidity, obliviousness and outright hypocrisy, this is tough to beat.
RUSH: We got this piece in The Daily Beast: "A Scarlet Letter -- the Monica Lewinsky-ing of Paula Broadwell -- When powerful men stray, the press continues to ogle, and shame, the women they do it with, writes Allison Yarrow." And this whole story got me to thinking about how the country's changed in terms of simple things like humor. What used to be harmless, clever humor, today is heard by the people who've been educated the last 30, 35 years, today causes legitimate anger and indignation and charges of cruelty and insensitivity and bigotry or sexism or what have you. I've been doing a lot of thinking about this.
(...)
You could say cool versus uncool, hip versus unhip. But they've been brainwashed. I don't mean that in a communist way. I'm just saying they have been indoctrinated. And you can find evidence of it everywhere. I mean, for example, one of the things that I get in the most trouble on this show for is that what I say is really controversial? No. It is they haven't the slightest understanding of a traditional sense of humor. You see, you don't laugh at what they believe. It's just not done. And people who do that are considered reprobates or what have you. But most of the things that I get in, quote, unquote, trouble for, you know, I'll say something here, it gets all over the media and people, "You need to apologize, that's outrageous. You mean-spirited..." And you who listen every day know full well all we're doing here is entertaining, we're just having fun.
They don't get it. I'll give you one of my favorite examples. I love stereotypical humor. But you can't do that anymore. Stereotypical humor, top of my head, mother-in-law joke. You know what a real dichotomy is? Your new Cadillac you see driving off the cliff, but your mother-in-law's in it, so jeez, is it good or bad? You tell that joke today seriously, and these people are going to be out of their gourd. They don't see one thing stereotypically humorous about it. They just think it's entirely insensitive and mean-spirited and anti-woman. And that's cultural, not political. You couple this with the fact that they're preternaturally arrogant and cocky with what they think, so it's gonna be a daunting task.Oh, good! Rush is thinking! And in a single monologue, he's already been able to completely misrepresent the way the conservative movement has acted over the last five years.
Limbaugh is right when he suggests that you couldn't tell a joke around liberals without being subjected to indignant, politically correct, endlessly boring lectures and wildly annoying indignation. But that's every bit as true of modern conservatives today as it was of liberals.
Try telling a joke about Sarah Palin's stupidity, Allen West's mental illness, Chris Christie's weight or Limbaugh's attempt a decade ago to transform himself into a wealthier version of Keith Richards. You'll immediately learn that shithead conservatives have bought into political correctness and identity politics every bit as much as shithead liberals have. Conservatives are actually even more insufferable about it because they're pretending that they're not doing it. Both sides have their golden calfs and they're all too often created on racial and gender lines. Yes, liberals are assholes about it, but conservatives are assholes and hypocrites.
I really think that we've gotta adopt a very, very long game if we're going to recapture the country, and we have to do what the left did. And I don't know how yet. But we are going to have to recapture the public education of this country, because that, folks, is where decent, honorable, really good, normal people like Mitt Romney end up being thought of as despicable human beings. It is through 30 or more years of public education run totally by liberals and the way they have characterized their opponents. I see it every day.Please.
This idea that the left indoctrinates people to think of Republicans as assholes is true, but Republicans are hardly innocents. The right has been painting Democrats as traitors for 80 years now. The few Republicans that survived the 1932 election spent the following twelve years declaring that FDR was establishing an unconstitutional dictatorship. Then the Truman administration, which established the very policies that won the Cold War, was painted as willing dupes of the Soviet Union and a den of spies, to boot. As recently as this spring, Allen West said that 80 members of the Democratic caucus (or fully 50% of it) were members of the Communist Party.
And when the average Republican isn't trying to convince you that the Democrats are selling out the country, he'll have you believe that they're determined to destroy the family and even Jesus his own self!
Look at the nonsense issues that the GOP have run on the last 25 years. These include the death penalty, Willie Horton, the Pledge of Allegiance in schools and school prayer - none of which involve the federal government, let alone the executive office of the president.
And then there are the perennial issues of abortion and gay marriage. This year, Rick Santorum, along with any number of Republicans in Congress and the state legislatures made birth control - which was settled all the way back in 1965 - a wedge issue, only to be stopped by Democrats doing a better job of it first.
The fact is that Republicans have been running on little other than cultural issues for decades now. "Gays, Guns and God" has been their boilerplate platform since at least Nixon. And for a good long time, it worked for them, if only because Democrats were ideologically divided among themselves, and weak demographically and geographically.
As you might have noticed, that's no longer true. Not only were Bill Clinton and Barack Obama able to still win, they won in large part by turning those issues against the GOP. Worse, the demographics and geography have caught up and now strongly favor the Democrats, which I've only been warning about for five years now.
Republicans went so far on abortion and birth control in the last 12 months, that a new Rasmussen poll shows that the percentage of pro-choice voters has gone up during the campaign.That's all the evidence you should need that it's backfiring in a significant way. Remember, the GOP has won the popular vote exactly once since 1992 and they increasingly face annihilation in the Electoral College. If Texas so much as turns purple, it becomes mathematically impossible for Republicans to win the presidency.
Unfortunately, cultural campaigning is all the Republicans have left. The sad legacy of the second President Bush is that he single-handedly destroyed his party's natural advantage on foreign policy and the economy.
But let's go back to Limbaugh because he's hilarious.
As you know, I'm a big technophile, and I read every tech blog there is, particularly those related to Apple. And all of these people contributing and writing and posting these blogs are under 30. And they live in a different world than I do and they live in a different world than I grew up in. The things that they just assume are true, like there is no doubt whatsoever that we are destroying the planet with global warming, no doubt. They can't even conceive of what you and I both know to be the truth, and that is, the whole global warming thing is a hoax. They do not even think it's a political issue. They do not realize that everything they believe in has been totally corrupted by politics.
If Republicans believe this, they're fucked. It's all over. Look around the world. You will not find another major conservative party that engages climate change denialism as a part of its electoral platform. Not one.
Most of international conservatives take global warming positions that are variations of my own, which is as follows: "Is climate change real and man-made? Well, most of the really smart people who devote their careers to studying it seem to think so. So the balance of probabilities suggests that it is. Unfortunately, there realistically isn't a whole lot we can do about it without completely destroying the economy, which we sort of need right now."
What do the Republicans do? Why, they just deny that there's a problem at all and suggest an international conspiracy to undermine capitalism. The goofier ones say that they know that there isn't a problem because the Bible tells them so, which is amazingly funny when you realize that they're on the Energy and Commerce Committee.
Sure, they know that they sound like yokels when say shit like this, but they don't care because they're so afraid of their yokel primary voters that it doesn't matter if the rest of the country and world thinks that they might be retarded. But if this past election has taght them anything, it should be that the law of diminishing returns is kicking in.
What they think is science is nothing more than corruption by the left, but they don't know any better. It's what they've been exposed to from as early on in their lives as their brains were capable of learning anything. And that happens to be the kind of thinking that populates the entertainment culture and so forth. I really think that the solution to our problems are not really political. I think conservatives are seen by young people and the left and the pop culture the way they are not because of what these people have been taught about conservatism. It's purely cultural. They don't know ideology. They don't know liberal versus conservative. They've not been told, for example, that Romney is a skunk or whatever because he is a conservative. It goes far deeper than that.
So the battle that we face is not really an ideological one. I must confess, I think the solution will be found in ideology, but I must confess, I think I've been a little wrong. I have waxed eloquent here on this program. I have longed for the day where people understand what liberalism is ideologically. I have begged the Republican Party to campaign on ideology and to explain to people what liberalism is by pointing liberals out. You want to see liberalism, look at Detroit. You want to see liberalism, look at California. You want to see liberalism, look at Cuba. You want to see liberalism, look at Venezuela.
There's more than enough blame to go around regarding California. It managed to pay its bills just fine until Proposition 13 passed. And it still pays Washington more in taxes than it gets in services, thereby directly subsidizing any number of welfare case red states. As a rule of thumb, the redder the state, the more it receives from Washington. That's just a mathematical fact. If Alabama and Mississippi are so fucking fantastic, why aren't they keeping, say, Illinois afloat, instead of the other way around?
By the way, wasn't the Republican-driven embargo of the last 55 years supposed to have taken care of Cuba?
The Republicans haven't done it. I don't know why, don't care right now. But the young people do look at Cuba, and they lionize Che Guevara. They wear his T-shirts. They look at Cuba, they don't see any big problem there. They don't know. My only point here is I'm just scratching the surface on this, by the way, so I'm speaking off the top my head here, but I really think that the way this is going to have to be attacked and dealt with is not to set politics aside. I'm not saying that none of this is political, but it's a cultural problem we face. The reason conservatives have been so maligned and are so maligned, the reason people who don't know us think of us the way they do is not because they understand politics. It's a cultural thing.
Are you fucking kidding me? Americans of high school and college age aren't just bad at world history, they're spectacularly, blindingly so! I doubt that they know who Che Guevara even was. Christ, I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that they wear those t-shirts because they think Che's the guy in My Morning Jacket. News flash: Hipster assholes believe stupid shit because hipster assholes are stupid.
But maybe there is a Grand Cultural Conspiracy underway that I'm unaware of. Maybe, just maybe, Hot Topic is giving those Che t-shirts away as part of a plot instead of selling them for profit, like good capitalists. Who among us can really say?
But maybe, just maybe, young people see Republicans as preening assholes that want to use the force of the federal government to impose their own, wildly inconsistent, morality.
Anti-abortion Tea Party crusaders, like Scott DesJarlais - a former doctor - is found to have fucked vast numbers of his female patients and counseled them to get abortions when he knocked them up, a theme that's confirmed by his own first wife. Or Larry Craig, who castigated Bill Clinton's being "a bad, naughty boy" only to be found trying to get suck-started in a Minneapolis airport men's room. Guys like Joe Walsh, who can't pay their bills or child support, are going to lecture us on personal responsibility. Or Mark Foley ...
The "Party of Family Values" had a presidential primary debate in 2008 where the only guy onstage that was only married once was the Mormon. Leading Republicans like Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich and, yes, even Rush Limbaugh are on their third wives.
Oh, I'm sorry. I made a factual error there. Limbaugh is actually on his fourth wife. The infernal cultural distractions make it hard for me to keep track.
Yes, the same Rush Limbaugh that was dropping hundreds of OxyContins a month and trolling the Internet for wives sees the culture as a problem.
No one has a lower regard for the intelligence of young people than I do, but I do think that they have pretty good bullshit detectors. Maybe more than any generation before them, they know when they're getting played, especially by dickhead political advocates. I like to think that I'm a hero to the young because I make it clear that I love strange pussy, non-prescribed pharmaceuticals and balanced budgets.
Limbaugh never actually comes out and says what his point is, or how it can be addressed. But by the sounds of it, he sees the GOP's political problems as cultural, and that those cultural problems should be addressed politically, which is circular logic.
The whole point of politics is to form government and shape policy, which you decidedly can't do if you keep losing elections. So Limbaugh seems to want to use the power of the government to shape the culture in ways that would allow conservatives to win the elections that they're losing now. How he plans to do this without winning elections is something I've given up trying to figure out because the entire idea ( as much as there actually is one) is fucking insane.
More insane still is the fact that he wants to do this to further the idea of a smaller government.
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