Rush Limbaugh In 2012?

“The devil knew not what he did when he made man politic: he crossed himself by ‘t: and I cannot think but, in the end, the villainies of man will set him clear.” Shakespeare, Timon of Athens

The porcine blowhard Rush Limbaugh, dressed and acting like a deranged gangster, gave the keynote address at the Conservative Political Action Conference (C-PAC) on February 28. Rush looked like a latter-day Mussolini, and talked like a man preparing to run for high political office.

At once easily mockable and disturbingly powerful, Limbaugh has become, with the help of White House focus, the ‘intellectual’ force of the Republican Party. In mid-January, this very influential right-wing talk show host infamously expressed what the rump of the Republicans think, saying he “wants Obama to fail.”

Most recently, the new Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman, Michael Steele, joined the long line of Repub politicians groveling before the grotesque Limbaugh. Steele is the guy who said right after being elected to head the RNC that he was planning an “off the hook” public relations campaign to apply “conservative principles…to urban-surburban hip-hop settings."

Rush is a former Oxycontin lush who, after railing for years against drug abusers, destroyed his hearing abusing the drug and had to have a cochlear implant. Less than a week ago Steele, responding truthfully to one of Limbaugh’s tirades that included him, called Rush an “entertainer" with an “incendiary” talk radio program.

Within a few days, Steele got down on his knees: “My intent was not to go after Rush – I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh…I was maybe a little bit inarticulate. … There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership.”

Why is all this worthy of comment, much less an investigation of the philosophy and political portents behind it? Because people who still have something left of their hearts almost always underestimate what disembodied heads are capable of doing.

Too many Democrats just don’t get Rush. They believe that “no Independent with a single brain cell is going to let Rush Limbaugh lead anything.” But as much as it stinks, we have to grapple with those who follow the Limbaugh mold.

Limbaugh loonies are dividing my own family. A brother-in-law, who has done well in the insurance business, has been a rabid Rush fan for years. Though mine is a conservative family in a conservative state (Michigan), he has been viewed as beyond the pale.

Until recently that is, when his gifted son, set to graduate from college in New York, began openly proclaiming his Limbaugh bona fides. No one in Michigan can quite figure out why, and in good American fashion, family members have agreed not to talk about politics. Limbaugh-like jabs at his Obama-supporting grandparents from my nephew are poking through the veneer however, and my mother said in a recent phone call that the whole thing “has nearly caused a rift.”

The plot to blow up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City was hatched on the Nichol’s farm in the ‘Thumb’ of Michigan, a stone’s throw from where I grew up. I encountered some of the militia madmen a few months before McVeigh parked the Ryder truck just below the day care center in the building and walked away, detonating the ‘worst act of domestic terrorism in American history.’ Never underestimate what a committed core of crazies can do.

One of the most disturbing things Obama has said since taking office (and he has said it several times in several ways) is that “if I don’t succeed, then someone else will be president in four years.”

Such glibness indicates either lack of understanding or lack of honesty about the pit that American political culture has fallen into, which made eight years of Bush-Cheney possible. The idea that we have turned a corner with Obama simply isn’t true. Despite the Obama Administration’s flurry of superficial to substantial policy changes, we’re still stuck in the pit.

America cannot go from an undeniably evil government to even a minimally decent government without much more of a reckoning than we’ve had.

There is a large school of thought among progressive people that with an even more extreme and dangerous Republican Party coalescing around the rotund Limbaugh, the Left has to suck it up and support Obama, or the Rotunda could collapse.

But speaking truth to power is as imperative when those in power are aligned with one’s views as when they’re not. Doing so does not, as many imagine, embolden enemies on the Right who wait in the wings.

All reactionary regimes depend on an apathetic, homogenized populace. Fascism cannot flourish when governments and politicians are held to account.

Barack Obama is a politician, and we can’t forget it. Therefore we must neither dismiss Limbaugh, nor treat Obama with kid gloves.

- Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net. The author welcomes comments.

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