The cult of Rush Limbaugh certainly is an interesting phenomenon, isn't it? He's an unattractive, poorly-spoken hypocrite who has somehow weaseled his way into becoming the chief spokesman of the country's most powerful minority party.
This particular appointment, of course, was not by invitation. (Well, at least not entirely.) If the GOP are the the Sex Pistols—which I, incidentally, like to imagine they are—then Limbaugh is Sid Vicious, the manic, talentless, pill-popping attention whore who commandeered the band in 1977, probably murdered his girlfriend the following year, and overdosed on heroin the year after that. But the comparison is not entirely fair: while Vicious at least pretended to be the “ultimate fan” of the Sex Pistols before taking the helm, Limbaugh transparently cares for nothing but himself.
The GOP executives are clearly sick of him, and fair enough, but if they're now forced to jump at every crack of his whip—à la RNC Chairman Michael Steele, Congressman Gingrey, and others—it is because they have been so limp and permissive for so long. But why should they be surprised? If you're going to let your party get hijkacked by a professional troll, don't be surprised when he refuses to let you stand on his bridge. Even most of the embarrassingly credulous American public audience has caught on; he has an approval rating that aspires to meet that of the younger President Bush. But for some reason, he is considered nonetheless to be the most important political pundit in the country.
This is a man who mimicked on camera the physical manifestations of Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's Disease for the purposes of ridicule, and then actually accused Fox of melodrama. This is a man who didn't condemn or deny the torture regime at Abu Ghraib like an ordinary apologist but who rather positively supported it, describing the practices as well-deserved catharsis for the troops. This is a man who suggested drug users should be subjected to lengthy prison sentences and was not more than a few years later himself discovered to be abusing prescription drugs. In short, to merely describe him as a despicable human being just doesn't seem sufficient.
But the tenor of the national conversation with him has changed. He recently made a fairly vanilla comment about a comprehensive health bill being named in memorial of the not-yet-deceased Ted Kennedy—without, it should be said, any innuendo to either Teddy's alcoholism or Chappaquiddick—and still found himself embroiled in controversy. And never mind his public desire to see President Obama fail, other than to observe that saying the same thing about President Clinton a decade ago wouldn't have made him persona non grata in his own party, it would have made him Newt Gingrich.
Perhaps the conspiracy theorists are right. Perhaps the entire affair has been a disingenuous design of the Democrats. It certainly has worked out well for them; about six months ago, I wrote that the GOP was unavoidably headed for a schism, and now it seems like that observation was about six months late. All of this is somewhat satisfying to those of us on the left; conservatives spent a fair amount of time last year crowing about we had finally managed to uncover in Former President Clinton what they had known all along. Well, we're now we're finally in a position to return the jeer. The fact is, the majority of people in this country loathe Rush Limbaugh, and always have. I just hope for the sake of conservatism that when he falls—and he will fall, if he hasn't already—conservatives will be smart enough not to soften the landing with themselves.
