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Addendum to the Legacy of Rush Limbaugh: The Cost of His Antics

20 Saturday Feb 2021

Posted by danielwalldammit in Politics

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Affordable Healthcare Act, Birth Control, GOP, Legacy, Obamacare, Politics, Rhetoric, Rush Limbaugh, Sandra Fluke

I’ve read a few things about Rush Limbaugh this last week or so. Of course, I shared my own thoughts on the man, and no, they were not be the kindest things you might read about Rush, but I meant every damned word of it. What I see in the way of praise for Limbaugh coming from the right wing blogosphere in the wake of his detah has me shaking me shaking my head and grumbling. No surprise there, of course, but it does bring to mind an extra thought on the matter of this awful man and his awful legacy.

I have often thought that people like Rush Limbaugh do more damage to conservatism than they will ever do to liberalism or progressivism. We still think what we think over on this side of the political spectrum. Professional bigots such as Rush Limbaugh may be able to drown out our voices from time to time, but they can’t force us to follow their own script, to think the way they pretend we do. Our politics remains what it is despite their best efforts to distort it.

The same cannot be said of conservatism.

More than any other right wing hack, Rush Limbaugh successfully redefined conservatism in American politics. He made it what it is today. This is what all the countless posthumous dittos written in remembrance of rush consistently amount to, a story about hoe he redefined conservatism and effectively made conservative politics the force that it is today. Throw in a couple gratuitous bits of pseudo-patrtiotism and some faux Christian sentiments, and you have the bulk of what is said to honor the man; he made conservatism what it is today.

Just think about what that means!

How it actually worked?

The Sandra Fluke debacle is a great example. It illustrates perfectly why Rush Limbaugh’s impact on conservatism is nothing to celebrate. Sandra Fluke’s testimony was about an aspect of Affordable Care Act, something conservatives generally opposed. There were plenty of things that could be said in response to Fluke’s testimony. People could have questioned her estimates of the cost. They could have pressed her to substantiate various anecdotes in her testimony. They could have argued any number of details, and at the end of the day, there would still have been one very serious question about whether or not a national policy mandating the details of insurance coverage for institutions like Georgetown is really the best way to handle any of America’s healthcare problems, let alone those that Fluke was talking about. That is the debate I would expect to have with conservatives on such a matter.

That debate did not happen.

Instead, we got a national dialogue about the sex life of a law student.

We got the debate about the sex life of Sandra Fluke, not because she invited it, but because Rush Limbaugh preferred that round of right wing gossip to the substantive debate we could have had – should have had! In dropping this gigantic red herring on the national stage, Rush Limbaugh did not merely silence Fluke, he also silenced the legitimate voices of conservatives who had something worthwhile to say about the matter. This was not the decision of a strong conservative voice; this was the preference of a cowardly man who had nothing to contribute on the topic hand. Limbaugh had to lie to get his version of the debate in the public sphere, and he did not hesitate, not this time or any other. That his intervention could be thought of as a strong expression of conservatism is damning praise for conservatives. A strong voice for any cause doesn’t start diverting attention from the real issues, which was always Limbaugh’s modus operandi.

In the end, we on the left still know why we support the ACA, some form of universal payer, or any other sweeping national reform, but the ranks of Republicans who can tell you anything more than sordid stories from the right wing gossip industry grow thinner with every passing year. They do so, because right wing media was remade in the image of Rush Limbaugh.

What Rush did for conservatives was to replace their best arguments with a range of cheap gotcha games like the one he played on Fluke. Of course, by the time of the Fluke affair, Rush already had countless allied pundits who desperately wanted to be him. Combined with Rush himself, their collective chorus of nonsense effectively drowned out any serious efforts to discuss healthcare. Instead we debated whether or not Obama was a socialist, a Muslim, or Kenyan. And then of course, there was talk of death panels. Don’t make the mistake of thinking this nonsense is merely a means to an end; it drives the public consciousness and narrows the options of those who rise to fame on the basis of such lies. To this day, countless Republicans think Barack Obama is a Muslim and that he is not a natural born citizen of the United States. I also hear talk of lizard-people, but anyway… This was the crap that filled our nations airwaves as some struggled to fix our very broken healthcare system.

This was also the crap that fed the imagination of the idiots who stormed our capital.

And the sleazy right wing pundits and politicians who spurred them on.

…and the idiots who don’t understand how the one led to the other.

We can lay this fact, the fact that conservatives all over America were so easily distracted then and now, directly at Limbaugh’s feet. It was Limbaugh who took diversions like the one he played on Fluke to the top of the media market and the stage for propaganda operations like Fox News. It was Limbaugh that crushed any hope that conservatives with anything substantive to say would find their way into the news cycle and replaced it with an endless supply of bobble-head pundits ready and willing to caricature themselves and their supposed politics.

The modern republican Party is an talent agency for right wing media. Folks run for office so they can command better speaker fees and maybe even land a spot on some cable television program pretending to be conservative. Thoughts of actual governance completely escape the modern Republican leadership. That’s why Ted Cruz ended up in Cancun while AOC and Beto went to work helping people through the crisis in Texas. Time was when we could have debated whose vision was better for America. Today, we are left with the simple fact that they tried and he didn’t. Hell, Cruz didn’t even come back to address the crisis killing people in his state; he came back to address his own PR crisis, no more and no less.

If you think that example an outlier in Republican politics, then you have not been paying attention.

Limbaugh certainly did redefine conservative politics; he transformed it into a form of low-grade pornography. It sells better than conservatism did before he came along, and it distracts voters and party officials alike from the real work that needs to be done in American government. But it does get ratings.

Our former President liked ratings.

He liked them a lot.

These priorities did not come from nowhere. They came from a right wing circus crafted in the image of Rush Limbaugh.

Once again, his legacy is nothing to be proud of.

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Mansplaining Hobby Lobby At the Silly Girls: Ain’t Free Exercise Fun!?!

25 Tuesday Mar 2014

Posted by danielwalldammit in Justice, Politics, Religion

≈ 24 Comments

Tags

Affordable Care Act, Birth Control, First Amendment, Free Exercise Clause, Hobby Lobby, Obamacare, religion, Supreme Court

Bjk4aOWIEAABqBXI understand the compulsion to wish that people would separate religion from politics, but you might as well tell the wind to stand in a corner and think about all the tall grass it pushes around. Religion IS politics. It always has been and it always will be. So, it really shouldn’t come as a surprise that the GOP has found Jesus again. The Prince of Peace showed them a little leg by means of Citizens United, and the good political Christians have been composing love poems ever since. Today it’s working on rhyme scheme full of obby, gobby, and a great big bibilo-bobby.

It’s moments like these when the distinction between religion and politics simply vanishes. Both embrace visions of a moral order; both anchor that order in some vision of the world at large, and both impose that order on real people. So, it shouldn’t come as any surprise when Jesus turns out to want the same things Uncle Sam does (especially when he’s talking out the right side of his mouth). Does it really make a difference whether the government controls your body or a church? …or for that matter a hobby store?

For practical purposes the word ‘your’ today excludes anything claimed by those of us with a y chromosome, but take heart mens’ rights activists! I’m sure someone is oppressing a man somewhere; y’all can still howl!

This notion that corporations are persons for purposes of the Bill of Rights really has opened up new ground in the frontiers of collectivism, and all manner of good commie-bashing Republicans have jumped the gun to homestead this new turf without the slightest trace of irony. So, today we face the perverse prospect that the religious views of a corporate entity may trump the personal liberties of a woman (along with the good judgement of her doctor).

Pardon me, I have to vomit.

If there was ever any doubt that religious exemptions to the terms of the Affordable Care Act are about controlling the bodies of women, that should have been dispelled long ago. It should have been dispelled the day Rush Limbaugh reacted to a critic of these exemptions by calling her a ‘slut’ and a ‘prostitute’ and spreading lies about her sex life. It should certainly have been dispelled when good respectable conservatives all across the land shouted ‘yea verily’ at the grand bigot-pontiff of hack radio and promptly drafted themselves up a rash of laws restricting the health options of any women unfortunate enough to live in the wrong state or county. For all the rhetoric of rights, one doesn’t have to look hard to see the naked power politics of the right wing’s current approach to women’s health. Control over women’s bodies is an end in itself, and the Republicans want it now.

On this topic, they can count on the support of half-baked misogynists everywhere.

Today the great masculine hope lies with Hobby Lobby and misogynists are lining up to buy a kitchy piece of cloth, or perhaps a nice candle. Others are happy to simply tweet their support. Their keyboards say ‘Religious freedom’, but so often their texts read sexism, and they read it loud and clear. Take for example this little gem from the Matt Walsh Blog. Matt’s thoughts on individual rights aren’t particularly interesting; one is hard-pressed actually to call them thoughts, at least insofar as they appear on the pages of this post, but what’s really fascinating to me is the social posture he takes in this post, the footing as it were. You see Matt isn’t content to frame a basic argument about religious freedom or the rights of supposedly Christian corporations, he wants to set his post up as a direct response to those women who may want birth control. The result is epic mansplaining.

I’ve poured through mounds of research, read pages and pages of court precedent; I’ve reflected on it, meditated, retreated into the mountains to ponder this mystery in peace; I’ve even Googled it, and all of these measures have brought me to one incredible solution for women who want birth control:

Pay for it yourselves.

Or find an employer that chooses to provide it.

Or have sex and don’t use it.

Or don’t have sex.

Basically, take responsibility for your sex life, one way or another.

By ‘epic’ I suppose I mean childish and petty, but what do you expect. Anyway, there you have it folks; at bottom this issue is basic childishness. Apparently, women need to take more responsibility for their own sex lives. So, Matt is going to give them all a good lecture and be done with it.

Can you just hear the guy saying “I won’t cum inside you baby?” No really just the tip? If it comes to that, he no doubt promises to do the honorable thing.  …You get the idea. I’m almost sorry if this is too graphic, but I’ll be damned if the issue of personal responsibility for sexual matters doesn’t play out in just such moments all over the world. Seriously the notion that women need to take more responsibility for their sex lives is perversely ironic and that is precisely what Walsh’s framing of the issue sets up. His blog post isn’t a polemic on a tricky political problem, it is a lecture given to an errant little girl, one whose rights certainly don’t extend to questions about her own medical care. Why not? Well, let’s let Matt tell you…

It used to be that your rights were infringed upon if the government punished or threatened you for expressing your sincerest beliefs.

Now, your rights are infringed upon if you want something but someone refuses to buy it for you.

It used to be that the vision of tyranny was a man or woman bound, gagged, and shoved in a cage for speaking his or her mind.

Now, tyranny is the tragic image of man or woman forced to spend their own money on something because nobody would give it to them for free.

We used to fight and die for free speech.

Now we sit around and whine for free birth control.

Here Matt’s language echoes that of Limbaugh’s old attack on Sandra Fluke. This is a simple case of someone wanting something for free (which isn’t true, but don’t tell these hacks). Gone is any consideration of larger medical issues or questions about how one decides to deal with his or her own body. I say ‘his’ because I think most of us can relate to those moments when an insurance company turns out to be the reason your doc is doing this as opposed to that, and I sincerely doubt that Matt and his fawning fans are any less likely to grumble about such things when faced with them. But when Hobby Lobby turns out to be the reason why a woman can’t get birth control, well that’s just the facts of life, dontchaknow! Oh yes, of course she can pay for the birth control herself, just like you can pay for any number of medical procedures and prescriptions yourself. The fact is that in THIS world, and I by THIS world (I mean the crappy world of health-care we have here in the U.S.A.) what insurance will and won’t pay for is often the difference between what we get and what we don’t. In the real world Hobby Lobby’s policies will make a difference in the care some women get. Some of us think that difference ought to be up to her and her doctor, but apparently that is the view of tyrants.

…and of silly girls who whine.

Of course this is the tip of the Obamacare iceberg here, and many of those telling women to go fly a kite for contraception are the same folks who fought tooth and nail to stop the Affordable Care Act. Their solution for women is the same solution they offered all of us in the years leading up to the ACA, let the market run its course. Pay for your own insurance or pay for your own medical care; that’s what apple pies and supply curves are all about! That folks would say this knowing that medical bills in the U.S. have long since become prohibitive for large sections of the working public is irresponsible in the extreme. It isn’t just governments that skew the market; corporations (and particularly insurance corporations) do that too, but don’t tell the free market fundamentalists. They’ll call you un-American, …or maybe a slut or something.

In any event, the ACA is law now, warts and all, and the present battle is a classic exercise in scapegoating. It turns out that health-care for women is more complicated than it is for men, and when it comes to sex and its consequences, women are more vulnerable than men. So, Hobby Lobby and its pious supporters have risen to the occasion, leading the right wing to its scape-goat. We may have to accept this abortion of a law, they seem to be suggesting, but at least we can leave the sluts out in the cold.

And if they don’t like it?

Well then there are always mansplaining culture warriors to put them in their place. You can’t help but notice the pleasure some of these folks take in explaining the issue. For some, it’s a kind of theatrical moment, a chance to play the role of the stern father or maybe the soup Nazi.

No sex for you!

Ah well! Let’s give Matt the last word here:

And, seriously, in case I forgot to mention it: pay for your own birth control.

The end.

Next issue?

 

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