10 Years After: 2012 -- Still Not Over It

The 10th blogiversary fundraiser continues with the Presidential Election year of 2012.

So far I have tried keep this retrospective in more-or-less chronological order.  But seeing as how today is the 150th anniversary of General Robert E. Lee's surrender at the Appomattox Courthouse, it seemed more appropriate to jump straight to this post from March of 2012.

So let us ease into 2012 by admitting that it would be unfair to say that Rush Limbaugh has been a racist, hate-mongering thug since the day his mama squatted him into the whelping box.

Because that is unknowable.

However it would be eminently fair to say that Boss Limbaugh has been a racist, hate-mongering thug for the 27 years that he has been the king of Hate Radio.  And it would also be fair to say that he and Roger Ailes own the GOP -- own it because they understand exactly what the bigoted, paranoid base of the Party wants to hear and delivers it every day with a large-bore needle directly to their amygdalae.

Now every now and then, Boss Limbaugh saws off a gobbet of red meat for the Base that, even by Limbaugh's own debased standards, is bloody and grotesque that the mainstream media is momentarily forced to admit that Limbaugh exists and is an awful person.  This causes a temporary problem for both your Crazy Uncle Liberty -- into whose skull Boss Limbaugh has been shitting for a quarter of a century -- and the Both Sides Do It crowd, because it seems to suggest that, just maybe, Both Sides Don't Do It.

When this happens, they both leap for the same straw men: "Rush is just an entertainer!  What he says doesn't matter!"

Of course this is just as big a lie as all the others which keep the Insane Right and the Denialist Center propping each other us like a couple of drunks -- 

[Rush Limbaugh's] first national show was August 1, 1988, too late in that year’s presidential election cycle to have any say or sway. But the next time around was different. And Limbaugh wasn’t sold on Jeb Bush’s father. George H.W. Bush, he thought, was an unrugged Ivy League elite, and one who ran against Ronald Reagan in the primaries in 1980 and decried Reagan’s trickle-down economic philosophy as “voodoo economics.”  Limbaugh idolizes Reagan. He calls him Ronaldus Magnus. Early in 1992, Limbaugh took aim at a sitting Republican president, making it clear to his 13.5 million listeners that he preferred Pat Buchanan, Bush’s ultraconservative challenger in the primaries who said AIDS was “retribution for violating the laws of nature” and that he wanted Limbaugh to be his communications director.

The president’s response to this assault from his right flank was to make nice. He invited Limbaugh to the White House. Roger Ailes, a Bush adviser and a Limbaugh adviser, too, and now, of course, the boss of Fox News, played matchmaker. One night that June, Bush showed Limbaugh to the Lincoln Bedroom. He even toted his luggage.

“It was a thrill,” Limbaugh said the following week in an interview with The Associated Press. “The Lincoln Bedroom—that’s for people like Winston Churchill.”

Limbaugh insisted the visit wasn’t an effort to curry favor—“he never once asked about going on my show,” he said—but the courting of Limbaugh continued. He sat in the president’s box at the Astrodome in Houston at the Republican National Convention in August.

Limbaugh’s anti-Bush stance softened.

Bush lost, of course, and into the White House moved Bill and Hillary Clinton, whose power and shortcomings fueled Limbaugh’s ascent.

-- but it usually enough to make the mainstream media move onto something more important ("Benghaaaaaz!") so the Right can get back to destroying the country and the Center can go back to punching Imaginary Hippies.

Still Not Over It



Apparently the people who pay the Maximum Leader of All Conservatives enormous amounts of money to pander to bigots and imbeciles on the radio decided that, after 25 straight years of pandering to bigots and imbeciles on the radio, if he wanted them to continue giving him enormous amounts of money the Maximum Leader of All Conservatives was going to have to to issue a statement expressing regret if anyone was bothered by the order in which he strung together several English language words, several days in a row.

Reluctantly, Maximum Leader of All Conservatives did so.

If this is your first exposure to American Conservatism, what you must understand is that ever since they got bent over the barrel at Appomattox Courthouse


and forced to surrender on terms set by the Union devils, Southern White bigots have made it a point of honor never to apologize for any of the loathsome, depraved, anti-American things they say and do, but to instead stand proudly up for their heritage as inbred, rage-drunk, racist shitbags.

On the upside, they pay really, really well.