Don't Rush me

By Capt. Fogg

Thinking back to the dear dead days of Father Coughlin and the childhood of right-wing hate radio, it seems like neither active opposition nor the deliberate ignoring of their brand of theater is as effective as allowing their own success to put them outside the pale of justification for or acceptance of their propaganda.Coughlin whose bigotry and anti-Semitism trapped him when Hitler became an enemy, had his network taken away after he became an embarrassment to the Church and indeed to the country.

Nobody outside of the lunatic fringe can really, if they are honest, think Rush Limbaugh's bombast has been anything other than full support for all that's torpedoed America, from his apparent acceptance of torture, to his steadfast denial of the growing sickness of our economy; from denying the dishonest origins of the Iraq war to the dishonest, scabrous, sleazy and relentless attacks on those who opposed the outrages of the George Bush presidency. He has become identified with the vicious kind of campaign that helped sink the Palin-McCain candidacy by making Obama seem all the more a man of integrity. I don't think I'm being fatuously optimistic to think he may go down with the ship he helped sink.

I think a lot of people like to hear what he's saying but I think it's also a little bit polarizing and confrontational,

said Ron Paul in an uncharacteristic understatement during a telephone interview with CNN's John Roberts this morning.

I guess the Democrats think its to their advantage if he's leading the charge.

I would add that it's to the world's advantage, but that's just my opinion. If I were a Republican, even a more characteristic Republican than Paul, like Michael Steele, for instance, who said on CNN Saturday:

Rush Limbaugh, his whole thing is entertainment. Yes it's incendiary, yes it's ugly,

I would have to agree that it sure as hell is and yes, his dirty, nasty, mean-spirited, and unencumbered by honesty rhetoric is just the kind of thing to associate him with the party people rightly associate with bringing down a prosperous economy, putting our country in danger and protecting crooks and tyrants in their quest to make a mockery of liberty and the institutions that protect it.

[S]ome of us would like to see an approach that would emphasize personal liberties, civil liberties, looking at the drug war… It’s really the old Republican Party because even Limbaugh was a big supporter of Bush so he doesn’t have anything new either when it comes to bringing our troops home, not expanding the war in Afghanistan,

said Congressman Paul. Some of us of course have been saying that for a number of years -- Democrats, to be specific -- and we do remember being called traitors for agreeing with what the "new" GOP now seems to be trying to be seen saying. We remember being called traitors, loonies, dementia sufferers, Marxists and a long list of epithets of unrestrained hyperbole by Limbaugh and his fellow polemicists.

Although, as a habitual Democrat, I wouldn't mind seeing Limbaugh go down with his leaky, worm eaten ship of shame, it would be far better for us all if there really were a new Republican Party that really did believe a bit more along Libertarian lines and particularly if it were led by someone who is capable of maintaining a dialog rather than hiding larcenous demagoguery behind a smokescreen of war and pretended patriotism. So far no one but Mr. Paul comes to mind.

(Cross-posted from The Swash Zone.)