Rush Limbaugh Professes Racist Hate, Declares War on American Values
 Printer-friendly
|
 Email article |
Related subjects: J.E. Robertson, Media, Opinion, Transparency Yield, U.S. Law, U.S. Politics Comments (6)
Rush Limbaugh, who likes to tout himself as a “conservative” and a defender of “American values”, is descending into a downward spiral of hysterical rantings that seem to be either: a psychotic break in which “American values” means anyone not white is a racist, or the revelation of a deep-seated racist hatred that quite simply runs contrary to the real ideals of American democracy.
Having openly committed himself to such a vitriolic defamation of the Constitutional ideal of equality of diverse groups and individuals, Limbaugh seems to have declared war on American values. He is very deliberately trying to whip up racist anger and hostility, but why? For ratings? Or because he personally cannot countenance anyone whose background is not identical to his own succeeding in the United States of America?
He went as far as to say that the only way to be promoted in the Obama administration —Mr. Limbaugh does not seem to understand that in American government, the Supreme Court is not part of the executive branch— is to “hate white people”. All of this, Limbaugh derives from one speech in which the words he chooses to use to call Judge Sotomayor a racist were part of an argument she made in favor of working against racial, ethnic or even personal bias.
But what is more frightening than Limbaugh’s bizarre descent into an entirely fictional universe —where up is down, democracy is evil, racist is not-racist and anti-bias is a form of racism— is the apparent unwillingness of any prominent Republican members of Congress to call on Limbaugh to cease his racist ranting and cease associating his dangerous ideas with the Republican party and its conservative cause.
That prominent conservative members of Congress are either unable to understand the sinister nature of Limbaugh’s rantings, or are in fact perverse enough in their interpretation of American values so as to view Limbaugh as representing anything other than a dangerous fringe politic of bias, division and paranoia, is quite really shocking.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) has criticized Limbaugh and figures who have followed his flippant, racist line of attack, like Newt Gingrich, accusing Sotomayor herself of racism. Cornyn told NPR it is “terrible” and implied that these spurious accusations are an abdication of Constitutional responsibility to provide informed advice and consent. Cornyn, like other Republicans from states with a high demographic of Hispanic voters, has been cautious not to align himself with his party’s radical fringe.
But we also have the example of Kevin Stevenson, a local Republican party official in Marathon County, Wisconsin, who says he was removed when he wrote an article criticizing Rush Limbaugh. He was removed when the local party changed its rules about residency (he lives in neighboring Lincoln County), but he says that was an excuse. Stevenson owns land in Marathon County, and it is not clear that only local residents can serve anyway.
Stevenson alleges that there is a worrying radicalization of the Republican party, which has underinformed ideologues like Rush Limbaugh attacking tested and principled Republicans like John McCain or Colin Powell as “traitors” or as somehow not “real Republicans”, despite their many years of service. His ouster occurred, he believes, in the same climate which led Arlen Specter to abandon the party, saying it had become too radical and that its primary electorate (in Pennsylvania) was all but unfit to choose candidates of national relevance.
Rush says —when the heat gets too intense— that he’s just an entertainer, and that he should have total freedom to make whatever claims he wants. But he presides over a radio audience that he and the Republican party both know listens to him for political guidance. He has set himself up not as an entertainer, but as a conservative demigod whose every word is gospel and whose enemies are enemies of the state (in the view of his audience).
[ad#cafsen-intext]
He could, if he were an entertainer, take stock of the political winds and change his marketing strategy, and become inexplicably moderate and even left-of-center, overnight. But Limbaugh is not interested in making such a switch to expand his market base. He is interested in projecting the image of hard-bitten radical engaged in a fight against unmitigated evil, which he invariably finds a way to labal as “socialist”.
In fact, Limbaugh is not pure entertainer whose views are unimportant, nor is he a values conservative at all; he is a wealthy man whose political views are engineered to allow him to surreptitiously support all the candidates who would invariably defend his right to hoard as much wealth as possible, regardless of what else is going on in the world, and Limbaugh has continued enriching himself as monopoly consolidation and financial manipulations in the radio business have allowed his empire to expand.
And, in order to serve his private interests, he not only launches into unfounded character assassination of accomplished moderate jurists like Sonia Sotomayor, or attacks the president as “socialist” for willingness to pay the 3% more per year he (and Limbaugh) will have to pay, when Bush’s tax cuts for the rich expire, to fund the nation’s government and protect the American experiment in democracy, but he routinely attacks and even sabotages the careers of principled conservatives who do not defend and elevate him personally, or his radical and logically incoherent agenda.
Limbaugh has “descended into insanity”, according to commentators like Keith Olbermann, or is guilty of “overreaching”, in the more diplomatic language of Republicans who want to distance themselves from him without offending him. But if we take stock of Limbaugh’s specific claims, his total lack of interest in evidence or fact, his avowed opposition to anything that might resemble charity or good will to one’s fellow citizens, and inexplicable hatred of the ACLU (which came to his defense when he was to be charged with illegal drug trafficking, and whose mission is to defend Constitutional freedoms), and learn to see his amazing distortions of reality, we can see Limbaugh’s work is a committed war on American values.
In fact, Limbaugh uses terms like “conservative” or “American values” or “the Constitution”, only in order to gain rhetorical capital with which to launch one after another attack on the real values of conservatism, or American democracy as such, or the Constitution. His thought and his rhetoric are reflexive and hostile to otherness. The American Constitution was formulated in order to craft a system of deliberative government, in which ideas are examined and debated, a system of compromise in the interest of people’s government, a system in which origin, birthright, wealth and ideology, do not trump basic human equality before the law.
Rush Limbaugh has long since declared war on those American values, and is steadfastly opposing the right of conservatives (be they moderate or not) to have opinions of their own or to think for themselves; he is demonstrating an incredible determination to rip the Republican party apart from the base to the top of the pyramid; he is, shockingly, willing to stoke racist hate in order to oppose a woman whose record he clearly does not understand and has not studied, solely in a quest to promote his own radio program.
The Republican party should as a whole disavow the maniacal rantings of Mr. Limbaugh and urge its membership, its leadership, its electoral base and even its friends in the American media, to marginalize Limbaugh for his selfish opposition to all things decent in politics or truly rooted in American values.
It is the nation’s biggest open secret that Limbaugh’s radio show is of zero value in understanding politics in any way, except for understanding what the most unthinking segments of the electorate might think in response to hearing it from him. But what Rush Limbaugh is currently doing, stepping so far out of the bounds of reality and so far into the realm of incendiary rhetoric verging on incitement, is to undermine any chance the Republican party has of being taken seriously, so long as they remain beholden to his extortionate manipulations of political reality.
Will the Republican party have the courage to be part of this transformative moment in American political history? Will the Republican party understand that Obama’s message of change is not about ideology or affirmative action or establishing a “socialist” state or shortening adjectives in uncomfortable ways (like ‘Democratic party’ to ‘Democrat party’), but rather about meeting the incomparable array of challenges facing the nation, its people, its economy and its system in which the law rules, and meeting them in a way that makes us better than we were before? Only if it learns that Mr. Limbaugh does not have the answers.
| Printer-friendly
|
Email article |
CafeSentido Partner Sites:
Why would anyone listen to Rush Limbaugh? He went on the radio and said that “anyone who uses drugs illegally should be dragged onto the street and shot”. And then he was busted for using illegal drugs. Enough said. Why would anyone listen to him?
What a pack of lies! You should be ashamed of yourself.
From the LA Times:
“Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker who has called Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor a racist, backed away from those comments Wednesday but continued to question whether her philosophy qualified her to become the first Latino on the high court.”
From Politico:
“When asked later on MSNBC about Gingrich’s change of heart, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty said his fellow Republicans ‘shouldn’t jump to conclusions, particularly with, you know, overheated rhetoric.’
‘Judge Sotomayor has got a compelling life story. She’s been accomplished in her legal career, in her career as a judge and as a jurist,’ Pawlenty said. ‘And we need to get the rest of the story in terms of her testimony before the Congress and vet her.’”
E.J. Dionne, writing for the Washington Post:
“Yes, you read that correctly: If you doubt that there is a conservative inclination in the media, consider which arguments you hear regularly and which you don’t. When Rush Limbaugh sneezes or Newt Gingrich tweets, their views ricochet from the Internet to cable television and into the traditional media. It is remarkable how successful they are in setting what passes for the news agenda.
The power of the Limbaugh-Gingrich axis means that Obama is regularly cast as somewhere on the far left end of a truncated political spectrum. He’s the guy who nominates a “racist” to the Supreme Court (though Gingrich retreated from the word yesterday), wants to weaken America’s defenses against terrorism and is proposing a massive government takeover of the private economy. Steve Forbes, writing for his magazine, recently went so far as to compare Obama’s economic policies to those of Juan Peron’s Argentina.”
From CNN Political Ticker: “A week after calling Sonia Sotomayor a ‘racist’ in reference to her 2001 “wise Latina” remarks, conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh said Wednesday he’s now open to supporting President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee.
‘I can see a possibility of supporting this nomination if I can be convinced that she does have a sensibility toward life in a legal sense,’ Limbaugh said on his radio program.
Limbaugh’s statement comes the same day former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who himself derided Sotomayor as a ‘racist’ last week, wrote in an op-ed that he regretted his choice of words.”