On the list of 'Why don't the Democrats do the easy stuff', driving a wedge between the finance and tin foil hat Rush types has always been at the top of my head scratching list.
From instance, not a peep from the Dems when Rush made that remark about poor (BLACK) people teaching their kids to eat from dumpsters.
The Dems just let slow balls over the center of plate go by, time after time.
I really don't get it.
If I had to guess, I'd guess that the value of running against Boss Limbaugh has already been priced into everyone's calculations. Remember that Limbaugh went national very shortly after Reagan, Scalia and Bork killed the Fairness Doctrine and never looked back, which means he has been on the air in syndication yapping about feminazis and welfare queens for a quarter of a century.
He is, in other words, already such a known quantity that whole books have been written about him by people like Senator Al Franken, so the breakdown of groups who are aware of Limbaugh's existence is roughly as follows:
- Liberals, who already know what a toxic shitbag he is.
- Conservative Limbaugh fans, who are no longer capable of being affected by any facts that conflict with their idolatry.
- Mainstream media clowns, who will use Limbaugh's comments as a goad to get the black and and red ants fighting on-camera, but don't really give a shit about him past that: after all, these are the same people who have let Newt Gingrich get away with verbal murder for decades and have never, ever called him on it on the air.
- Cringing Centrists, who deal with every critique of people like Rush by whining that "Both sides do it!" and stuffing their ears with old David Brooks columns.
- Finance and money people who, like German industrialists in the 1920s and 1930s, find Limbaugh's ability to motivate a crowd much more important than the fact that he is a hatemongering, racist thug.
Because they still think they can control him:
13 comments:
Drifty, just want to wish you and Blue Gal a very happy T-Day, thanks so much for what you do.
All true. And in addition: the Corpratists and "centrists" within the Democratic Party find the odious bastard to be useful, in that they can point to him as an excuse for their own failings: "See? SEE? Limbaugh proves that this is a centre-right nation! We have to treat him seriously because this is what the people want!"
The Dems just let slow balls over the center of plate go by, time after time.
I really don't get it.
Because the Dems and the Pukes work for the same corporatists, and their common enemy is The Left, not Pigbaugh.
P.S. AKA what John D. just said.
~
I would add that, at this point, staying out of the way, and letting Republicans beat on Limbaugh would probably be the best strategy. If Dems go after Limbaugh, Republicans might feel obligated to rally around him.
Why doesn't the Democratic wing of the ruling political duopoly in the United States go after the Republikkkan wing? Why doesn't your left hand grab a butcher knife and chop off your right hand when the right hand screws up and drops a wine glass?
The "let the slow balls go over the centre of the plate" dynamic makes perfect sense if you analyze it in terms of Sheldon Wolin's "Inverted Totalitarianism" zeitgeist. The 0.1% moneypowerpeople run the United States, but they need the red ants and blue ants to fight each other, so they given them this illusion of two competing teams, the Limpballs vs. the Madcows. But they can't let one team's official members strike too devastating a blow against another team's bellowing walrus, for fear of upsetting the power balance in the P.R. game. Just like Oceania could,never decisively defeat Eurasia on the Malabar Front...
I have no trouble comprehending why Preznit Hopey doesn't go all FDR on the Repugs' asses, or why realPresident Cheney didn't declare martial law and establish a dictatorship when it was clear that the "R" team was going to get swept away in 2008. Neither side wants to because neither side needs to because they know both sides are on the same side. The side that's going to keep channeling money to war corporations, and is going to approve the cross-country toxic oil sludge pipeline, and is going to whittle away social benefits so that old, sick and non-working untermenschen die faster.
Like I say, it's all clear when viewed through that lens. Admittedly, I'm paranoid as a motherfucker, but I'm a functional paranoid. And I realize that other paranoid mofos have their overriding theories through which they analyze all events, such as Glenn BecKKK seeing all through a "Cloward-Piven Strategy" telescope, or Birchers folding all events into a "U.N. Agenda 21" frame.
I suppose I could be as whacko as them. I don't believe there is a cabal of selected individuals sitting around a conference table at Bilderberg or Davos or somewhere mapping out every move. What I do believe is that there's a groupthink in the circles of power, where most people with any real clout have gone to the same set of schools, and absorbed the same ideology (Chicago School of Economics, anyone?) and younger members do not get selected to rise through the ranks if they think outside the orthodoxy.
The game can continue as long as there is a modicum of stability in the current pattern of civilization. Now that the leadership of the communist power bloc has been absorbed the thinking (and moneypower-making) of the dominant corpo-fascist way of doing business, it might seem that their grip will never loosen. However, forces beyond their control, like running out of the cheap, abundant energy needed to keep the current paradigm going, and climate change that will disrupt the food supply that provides bread to the hoi polloi circus-goers, is going to upend the game table.
There's not a damn thing TPTB can do to stop it (not that they would, because their moneypower depends on playing the game by the current set of rules.) There's not a thing that you or I can do to stop it either, because we are ants. All we can do is try to save ourselves, and with luck, lift up some of the people around us. That's why I opted out of the U.S. system instead of continuing to go to protest marches and participate in feckless party political groups. I'm working on how, and where, to live in a post-collapse environment. I've had a good life so far, and might reasonable expect another 20 years of it, but if 10 or 15 get cut off because shit gets THAT bad THAT fast, ah well, it was a great run while it lasted.
Bukko,
"and climate change that will disrupt the food supply that provides bread to the hoi polloi circus-goers, is going to upend the game table."
Many years ago when I was getting my BA in Geology, a friend's (conservative R) father asked me, "Are you going to be one of those scientists who just looks for problems to ask for money to throw at it, or are you going to be useful?" He actually used "global warming" as an example. When I pointed out that, yes, we've discussed the science behind that (this was in the early 90's), and that it's asinine to think ignorance somehow lets you avoid problems, his wife quickly changed the subject. When he brought it up again later and tried to pontificate on greedy navel-gazing scientists, I went on the offensive on how ignorance does not protect us from pneumonia or staff infections, antibiotics do. His answer was, "So. You're a liberal."
I think the lack of concern on global climate change for the money-power people is twofold. First, they will have walled enclaves stocked with food, and figure their money will always be good. Second, they know that the conservative base is so anti-intellectual that they just blame the "greedy navel-gazing scientists" for either not fixing the problem, or even causing it by describing it. There are enough paranoids that think the Medical-Industrial complex causes cancer and disease to ensure profit. Given most people's complete lack of what scientific knowledge *is* (as in, scientific method and truth vs. opinion), it would not be difficult to convince people that climatologists caused global climate change to ensure their wealth and power.
Mike.K.
The thing is, it doesn't take a towering intellect to be the king ring master of "orc think".
It's more a matter of timing.
A Lonesome Rhoads kind of moment in the zeitgeist.
Jabba is singularly lucky in that respect, and that he doesn't actually have to appear, on visible media...because that would end it...quick.
Remember Morton Downey..?
I'm not going to check, I am pretty sure he is dead now.
...but he soared, crashed and burned, as a mover of opinion before he passed on. His particular idiom was not too far removed from Rush and actually predates him..and to some extent, in far corners of the media circus, his direct progeny survive (Springer, Conny Chungs husband does he still have a show?..etc..)but very far corners they are.
Just because Rushbo is still around, and apparently not likely to go anywhere soon, lets not vest too much historical significance in him.
That's why nobody on the left swings at his every, head aimed pitch.
His most remarkable achievement, is that he was able to shift the narrative....downward,
There really was a day when one of his rage rants would have cost him his empire... immediately.
Sponsors would have dropped en masse. Phone calls would have been made, ad buys revised...and on Wednesday there would have been Rush, and on Thursday would have been...some other loud, vitriolic shouty moron.
Rush did build that..if you can call it a thing. He so coarsened the narrative, it allowed him to get worse..without consequence.
You could fill a book with Rush's "at long last have you no decency" moments because everybody knows by now that no: he has no decency....
McCarthy only got one. Timing is everything.
Ford's (gambit) pardon and the ensuing and continuing rebirth (you can set your calender to it) of the dichotomy of monotony reigns supreme.
Let us quibble over nibbles, shall we?
"A Lonesome Rhoads kind of moment in the zeitgeist. Jabba is singularly lucky in that respect, and that he doesn't actually have to appear, on visible media...because that would end it...quick."
That latter point is really on the nose. As some of you may remember, Fatso did indeed make a stab at doing a tv show some years back, which was a miserable, abject failure. Just like every other attempt he's made at branching out beyond the tightly controlled confines of his radio studio. Al Franken catalogues much of this in his book about the pig.
Limpballs isn't the only one this has happened to, either: When "Dr." Laura Schlessinger tried her hand at doing a television version of her radio program, it out-and-out bombed. Her personality was that repellent to casual viewers.
Faces made for radio, indeed. Heh, heh, heh!
Mike -- True dat, what you say. When people like your friend's conservative father talk about scientists who sell out for the big money, it's "projection" in the psychological sense of the word. No dedicated soul scientist, working on the thin gruel of a research grant lugging atmospheric sensing equipment across icy places frigid enough to freeze his fingers to the gauges, is getting Porsche-payment money for that. But the "biostitute" (h/t to left-wing radio talk show host Mike Papantonio for introducing me to that word) in a climate-controlled office at ExxonMobil HQ spinning sophistry to rebut that REAL scientist's work IS geting money thrown at him.
The kkkonservative mind overflows with projection. They attribute to others what THEY are thinking or doing. Because at some subconscious level, they know their thoughts and deeds are vile and self-destructive. They can feel better about their own evil if they say the other side is doing it. So it's OK for our side to engage in the same tactics.
I don't know what your friend's father did for a living. I bet he probably didn't even have a salary dog directly in the climate change ideological battle. But there's a sense of tribal identity with these people, a core part of their self-concept, that makes them reflexively adopt a "punch the dirty fucking hippie who exists in my imagination" when it comes to any issue.
My own mother is the same way. She's lived her life like a good liberal, working for charity, having lots of close gay, black and ethnic minority friends. The money that has kept her alive has all come from the federal government, via my late father's military career, and his second career as a FEMA bureaucrat, and my mom's work as an executive with a hospital run by a county government outside Washington D.C. She's living comfortably on an income stream from my deceased dad's two federal pensions, his Social Security survivor's benefits and my mom's Social Security. We're talking upwards of $50,000 a year from the government. And yet she hates her some government, spews Fux talking points about it, and talks about higher taxes like it was a colonoscopy without sedation. Just to be cruel, I throw back at her that every bit of food she eats was paid for by taxes, so she shouldn't bitch about kicking a little more back into the system. That's when she changes the subject with a non sequitur like your friend's dad did.
All that we reality-based community people can do is lead our lives in as honest a manner as possible. There is no chance of changing deeply held ignorance. The more ludicrous a belief is, the more mental energy the holder has invested in hanging onto it, so they won't let go easily. I do what good I can for the people around me, and talk sense with the people who are ready to hear it. As for the rest, I reckon that in whatever changes are coming, willful ignorance is going to be a non-survival behaviour, while those of us who are aware of what's going on for real are going to stand a better chance of coming through the Big Mess as best as we can.
Excellent Photoshop illustration. And one of the most poignant film scenes ever. Hitler was deeply evil. Limbaugh is a warped joke, a corrupt clown.
The excuse the MSM using again and again as to why they do not pursue certain issues is the Democracts are not pushing them.
So Rush should be ignored by the Democrats? There would be no mileage to be gained by a leading Democrat asking O'Conner or Boehner at the time Rush made that the poor should eat garbage if they support that policy by their REPUBLICAN LEADER? And a year later when the teabag house voted to cut foodstamps you couldn't then ask if this doesn't reflect Rush's leadership?
What, they would haved denied a year ago that Rush was their leader?
Something Republican's understand and Democrat's don't, is it's about working the refs. Could the Sunday morning empty heads have ignored Republican's 'want the poor to eat go garbage' if you got a couple of Democratic leaders to say it? Would they continue to let all the crap on FOX a pass?
Or perhaps it's a good idea and just let lay down to FOX and Clear Channel? No point in liberal internet?
And BTW, you think those Democratic 'loud mouths' in the pasted like FDR weren't facing a right of center media? Maybe FDR should just have piped down.
I disagree, go after him and then let the right defend him and his comments. I predict similar outcome to when they got questioned about their prolife/antichoice views and we were treated to all those wonderful opinions that defended rape and stripped women of the right to govern their own bodies.
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