Liberals to the left of us, liberals to the right...

By Capt. Fogg

Is it possible to find enough nasty things to say about Rush Limbaugh? I don't have the vocabulary or the time fully to describe a man of such privilege that he can go relatively unpunished for drug charges that would have sent another man to prison; whose friends in high places (no pun intended) make sure that he can lie and vituperate and rave against the politics of our founding fathers and the philosophy behind our nation without let or restraint or consequence. But let me try.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, a political liberal is a man in favor of democratic reform and opposed to privilege. According to Rush, such a man is the radix malorum, the source of all our woes, while a man opposed to democracy and in favor of special privilege or plutocracy would of necessity be, like Rush, the answer to all that ails us, including apparently: paranoid schizophrenia.

Rush's April 19th attempt to show that the massively demented Virginia Tech shooter Cho Seung-hui was in the grip of liberal fervor rather than an illness would be a new low for any other man, but in Limbaugh's vocabulary there is no word for bottom:

"This guy had to be a liberal. You start railing against the rich and all this other -- this guy's a liberal. He was turned into a liberal somewhere along the line. So it's a liberal that committed this act."

Anyone who calls liberals gun-grabbers while calling Cho Seung-hui a liberal is a fabulist on the order of Hitler. Anyone who can lump everyone from Jesus Christ to John Wilkes Booth into a category and make that category seem vile; anyone who can invent a language that makes such subhuman reasoning possible should be more understanding of mental illness, but as I said earlier, such people shy away from recognizing the existence of insanity because they are afraid of the obvious and unavoidable comparison. Worse than mental illness, in terms of culpability for one's actions, is the mission of Rush Limbaugh: to lie for money, to disrupt Democracy and American principles for money, to promote special privileges for plutocrats for his own gain, to shout down reasoned discourse by sheer volume and amplitude of lies, misstatements, half truths, distortions and hysterical departures from objective reality -- for money.

But it's neither a Conservative nor a Liberal, a communist or a democrat or a libertarian or Bolshevik or royalist or an anarchist who spoke those words -- it was Rush Limbaugh and it is Rush Limbaugh's every continued breath and heartbeat that confirms that there is no justice in this world unless we fight for it.

(Cross-posted at Human Voices.)