Rush Limbaugh Cries “Payback” Once Too Often
There was a time when you could reliably blame just about anything gone wrong from the weather to the size of your bank account on blacks or minorities and the majority of the general public would have eagerly accepted your explanation, no matter how little sense it made. Those days are over…
…for most of us.
As in the vast, silent multiethnic majority stew that is modern day America.
Earlier this week radio jock Rush Limbaugh went back to his favorite race baiting theme—“blacks are out to get whitey”—and spouted this gem:
“This man [Obama]has not lifted a finger to create any private sector jobs. And the dirty little secret is he doesn’t intend to. Why aren’t we growing jobs in this country like we used to? Why aren’t we? It’s, it’s not hard to do. All kinds of text book evidence, real life historical evidence of how to do it. We’re not doing it, we’re not doing it on purpose. It’s payback time. All the people who’re unemployed, it’s time for you to find out what its like to be an American all these two hundred years. Fie yie, greatest country on earth, super power, right, well, might have been for some people, but you’re gonna find out what its been like for two hundred years for some of us, to be an American. It’s payback time. That’s what’s going on here.”
From The Rush Limbaugh Show via Media Matters
But Limbaugh has cried “wolf” for so long—or his case, “payback”—that nobody seems to be listening these days. Practically nobody in the mainstream news covered this outburst, as busy as they were chronicling the latest exploits of Michael Steele, Mel Gibson, and LeBron James. And very few in the blogosphere, including Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jack and Jill Politics, and AverageBro, who normally slap back at these indignities with a vengeance, didn’t give this latest round of fear mongering from Limbaugh so much as a keystroke. I hate to give him any more press than he deserves myself, but I couldn’t help but notice how little he and the other political fringe dwellers are actually impacting the national conversation these days.
Rush Limbaugh is well on his way to becoming another in a long line of men, like George Wallace, Barry Goldwater, or Eugene McCarthy, who reach an apogee as a social change agent and then harden in place, their stances becoming more anachronistic by the day as the winds of change inevitably blow society in another direction until they turned into caricatures of their former selves.
‘I don’t have guests on my show because I don’t care what other people think,’ he tells me. ‘Most guests are boring.’ But it’s not only others he is bored with, it is also, perhaps, himself. This may be what explains his recklessness, his bravado, his determination to say the unsayable. And perhaps it also explains why he never misses a beat, until you draw him out about himself — how he is difficult to live with, how he cried when his cat died, how, to his surprise, he found it helpful talking to a therapist. Only then does he hesitate.
Excerpt from the Telegraph.co.uk
Limbaugh is so far away ideologically from where the mainstream of America really is these days, the things he says often sound like he is talking about a foreign country.
The even sadder thing about all of this is how political blowhards like Limbaugh can prostitute the Republican Party party the way he does, in effect turning the party’s core principles, which are simple, human scale ones, into caricatures of themselves, the same way rappers exaggerate what it’s like to live in the ‘hood.
You would think that after seeing that the world didn’t explode, that the three raised “6’s” haven’t appeared on President Obama’s neck, the Koran is nowhere to be found in the White House, and terrorists are not calling in on the red phone at 3 am to coordinate their next move with the Commander In Chief, the people who follow Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck and Michelle Malkin would have given up these delusions by now.
Looks like it might take these diehard souls little while longer to give up their misplaced hatred and tin foil hats and apply for citizenship in America circa 2010.
