Democracy under assault

Few thinkers, past or present, could match the intellectual and rhetorical power Christopher Hitchens harnessed when he sat down to put pen to paper, excoriating what he saw were the misdeeds of leaders across the cultural and political spectrum, from Joseph Ratzinger, Bill Clinton, Mother Teresa to God himself.

“One of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority,” he once said. “It’s indispensable.”

No one is above scrutiny, I believe he would say.

Sadly, we lost this imperishable writer in 2011, but one wonders what he would say today if he could witness the widespread regression taking place in politics and society, at a time when free speech is being threatened on college campuses across the nation, when journalists are demonized as “enemies of the people” and when the nation is being led by one of the most dishonest, borderline autocratic and nationalistic administrations in United States history.

The Washington Post’s motto reads, “Democracy dies in darkness.” While the battle for free speech on college campuses and elsewhere may not appear to be related to President Donald Trump’s administration, the two are actually working in tandem to dim the light of our democracy.

In recent years, dozens of speakers, including evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, libertarian Ben Shapiro, classical liberal and psychologist Jordan Peterson, conservative commentator Ann Coulter, feminist Christina Hoff Sommers and former CIA director John Brennan, of all people, have been either deplatformed or forced to end their talks early amid protests at public events in traditionally progressive centers.

To take one case, Dawkins was blacklisted by Berkeley progressive radio station, KPFA, for what the station described as “abusive speech” against Islam. Readers of Dawkins well know that while he is an unapologetic atheist, he, along with other members of the New Atheist movement, which includes Hitchens, have been careful to criticize the ideas of Islam, not the people who practice it.

Thus, officials at Berkeley and many other liberals toeing the social justice line have confused, and continue to confuse, this distinction, such that many rational liberals and progressives have been compelled to defend conservatives in the interest of free speech and the latter’s inalienable right to speak openly. College campuses and liberal towns are supposed to be bastions of free speech and expression. That is where students go to be intellectually challenged, not to be coddled.

“How have the mighty fallen,” Dawkins said in 2017. “Berkeley, the home of free speech. Now, the home of suppression of free speech.”

Trump’s ongoing attacks on the media — exempting, of course, his friend Sean Hannity and other supporters at Fox News — stick the dagger in even deeper.

To its credit, Fox News scolded Hannity for appearing on stage with Trump during an event in late 2018, but that was too little too late. With even a cursory look at the cable news channel, one must conclude that it stopped pretending to be “fair and balanced” long ago. For Trump’s part, dismissing stories as ”fake news” — fake, not because they aren’t true, but because the president just doesn’t like the reporting — and lambasting journalists who have an important job to do, maybe the most important job to do in this era of misinformation, undermines one of the pillars of our democracy.

For a sitting president to sneer at reporters and childishly complain that he is being treated unfairly, as he has done repeatedly since before the election, is beyond the pale, and even many of his fellow Republicans have found this behavior indefensible.

In August, the GOP-controlled Senate unanimously passed a symbolic resolution declaring that the media is not the “enemy of the people,” and Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., was among those on the right to challenge Trump’s charged rhetoric.

“We can’t go on like this,” Flake said. “We’ve got to reach across the aisle and find common ground. If we don’t, it’s just going to escalate further.”

Compound Trump’s hostility toward the media with overseeing one of the nation’s most secretive, intellectually dishonest administrations potentially one of the most corrupt if special counsel Robert Mueller’s work provides incontrovertible proof of collusion with Russia one could argue, as E.J. Dionne Jr. with The Post did in August, that we as a nation are “slouching toward autocracy.”

While we can laugh, and often do, at Trump’s Twitter meltdowns and the ridiculous speeches — he has the “best words” — what we have here is a prelude to disaster if the nation continues down the road of less transparency and the subversion of free speech and the press.

The First Amendment must be protected at all costs. In the year 2019, this should not be a controversial statement.

[Image credit: “Freedom” by DeviantArt user Bozack.]

Heil, mein Führer

This billboard, which is on rotation in my town in East Tennessee, pretty well embodies the fringe movement in this nation and their ludicrous and desperate attempts at scaring people into distrusting and even hating the Democratic Party or progressives. Following the logic of the sign, we are supposed believe that either President Obama or our leaders in Washington as a whole are secretly plotting to take over the nation by enacting stiffer gun control laws, as if we actually live in a dictatorship like Nazi Germany circa 1942. This is beyond absurd, of course, but I’m starting to think that the fringe right in this nation are about on par with the 9/11 conspiracy theorists and the supposed UFO abduction victims, and as such, should be treated with as much contempt and mockery for first, failing to seriously advance any viewpoints that may actually improve this nation and the world, and second, by actively working to keep us slavishly in the dark ages and so far behind parts of Europe, China and Japan that we may never be the greatest country again … whatever that means.

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Bachmann signs pledge

Because signing your name to a document automatically makes you a better candidate and person:

(Michele) Bachmann’s latest attention-getting move came Thursday when she became the first – and thus far only – candidate to sign a pledge drawn up by a Christian conservative group in Iowa. The pledge, called “The Marriage Vow: A Declaration of Dependence Upon Marriage and Family,” requires signers to promise, among other things, to keep marital fidelity, support the Defense of Marriage Act and “robust childbearing and reproduction,” and oppose gay marriage, abortion, “Sharia Islam,” “intrusively intimate commingling among attracteds” in the military, and the abuse of women and children through human trafficking, pornography and prostitution. The group, called the Family Leader, run by Bob Vander Plaats, a former Iowa gubernatorial candidate and influential conservative, promises to withhold political support from any candidate who does not sign.

Sadly, she will get votes because of this ridiculous action on an even more ridiculous document. Forcing a candidate to sign something or else withholding political support — sounds like blackmail to me. Full document here.

‘Just comical’ claims from the fringe right

I don’t think you’ll find New York Times columnists complimenting CNN’s reporting very often, but one exception came yesterday with Thomas Friedman’s piece, titled “Too Good To Check,” in which Friedman lauds Anderson Cooper’s recent efforts in unveiling a patent untruth circulating in conservative circles about the alleged cost of President Obama’s recent trip to India and elsewhere overseas. Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, radio host Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and others (I’m sure there are others. Although I have not listened to Mark Levin lately [Can’t tolerate his nasally snarl], he surely hopped on the bandwagon like his like-minded-bash-the-Obama-administration-at-any-cost brethren) all claimed that the administration was spending some $200 million per day on the trip.

Here is Friedman quoting Bachman, who appeared on Cooper’s show:

I think we know that just within a day or so the president of the United States will be taking a trip over to India that is expected to cost the taxpayers $200 million a day. He’s taking 2,000 people with him. He’ll be renting over 870 rooms in India, and these are five-star hotel rooms at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. This is the kind of over-the-top spending.

Here is the Anderson Cooper video, in which he asks Bachmann what specifically she would like to cut in federal spending now that her party controls the House.

In the absence of any answers, she proceeds to immediately and ludicrously lampoon Obama’s “over the top” spending. The only sparse answer she gives as to how the Republicans would account for some $700 billion in lost revenue if the Bush tax cuts were extended is to suggest that Medicare eligibility levels may be too high. Cooper asked for three; he got one … half answer. Here is one exchange:

COOPER: But extending the Bush tax cuts will mean, in order to offset the costs of extending the Bush tax cuts, you have to come up with $700 billion dollars just in spending cuts alone just to offset that cost. If you acknowledge that that is true, what are three things you would cut immediately to help offset those costs?

BACHMANN: Well, it’s always considered a cost when people are allowed to keep their own money. I don’t think that it’s a cost when people get to keep their own money. Right now, the current tax policy is, in my mind, it’s actually too high. The taxes right now. If we don’t extend these tax cuts, for instance, in my district in Minnesota, we’ll see 1.6 … 1.2 billion dollars taken out of the pockets of my constituents and taken out of my local community, where it will be spent, instead, 1.2 additional dollars will be sent to Washington D.C. sucked into that hole.

Here, of course, Bachmann missed the point and dodged the question altogether. The federal government has to have money to continue to offer such services as Social Security and Medicare. The “cost” to which Cooper was referring was the cost the federal government incurs in continuing to offer services, not the cost to locals, and Bachmann failed miserably, and predictably, from the Palin mode.

But back to Friedman, who picks up Obama’s trip to India in his column:

The next night, Cooper explained that he felt compelled to trace that story back to its source, since someone had used his show to circulate it. His research, he said, found that it had originated from a quote by “an alleged Indian provincial official,” from the Indian state of Maharashtra, “reported by India’s Press Trust, their equivalent of our A.P. or Reuters. I say ‘alleged,’ provincial official,” Cooper added, “because we have no idea who this person is, no name was given.”

It is hard to get any more flimsy than a senior unnamed Indian official from Maharashtra talking about the cost of an Asian trip by the American president.

“It was an anonymous quote,” said Cooper. “Some reporter in India wrote this article with this figure in it. No proof was given; no follow-up reporting was done. Now you’d think if a member of Congress was going to use this figure as a fact, she would want to be pretty darn sure it was accurate, right? But there hasn’t been any follow-up reporting on this Indian story. The Indian article was picked up by The Drudge Report and other sites online, and it quickly made its way into conservative talk radio.”

Later, Friedman notes:

Cooper then added: “Again, no one really seemed to care to check the facts. For security reasons, the White House doesn’t comment on logistics of presidential trips, but they have made an exception this time. He then quoted Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, as saying, “I am not going to go into how much it costs to protect the president, [but this trip] is comparable to when President Clinton and when President Bush traveled abroad. This trip doesn’t cost $200 million a day.” Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, said: “I will take the liberty this time of dismissing as absolutely absurd, this notion that somehow we were deploying 10 percent of the Navy and some 34 ships and an aircraft carrier in support of the president’s trip to Asia. That’s just comical. Nothing close to that is being done.”

The fringe right’s tactic here, as Bachmann, Savage and others use without fail, is to dodge substantive talk on specific reform with dodgy figures from even dodgier sources to blast Obama at all costs, never mind fact-checking any of their claims. Savage has even made analogies between Obama and the Red Army Faction, saying that while the RAF was a violent, left-wing movement, Obama was seeking to induce a nonviolent socialist revolution in America. For however untrue that may be, that kind of talk makes Savage and the gang look like raving lunatics. Some on the right, as Friedman notes, even called Obama’s trip a “vacation.” All the while, they proceed to make sweeping suggestions on how we must cut spending and rein in the government but offer barely anything in the way of substantive solutions. As I have said before, in the absence of intelligent ideas in political discourse, nothing is left but desperate and emotionally-charged ranting.

Friedman concludes by noting that

When widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, we have a problem. It becomes impossible for a democracy to think intelligently about big issues — deficit reduction, health care, taxes, energy/climate — let alone act on them. Facts, opinions and fabrications just blend together.

While I agree with him wholeheartedly, we can’t forget how these people became “widely followed” public figures: the public put them there, which is an unfortunate truth that seems to say less about the figures themselves (They just ride the wave to the bank) and more about the people, who, by and large, don’t know what is best for them or how to think critically about important issues. The best we can hope for, as he says, is that more people will learn not to swallow everything they hear on radio and television without doing their own fact-checking. But given that most people only watch or listen to commentators that reinforce, rather than challenge, their own views, I can’t be sure such a noble exercise will gain widespread popularity.

Mark Levin: ‘Trust me.’ Sure.

Loving news talk, but not having satellite radio, I purposefully subjected myself to about an hour or so of the Mark Levin Show on the way back tonight from covering something for work. Levin, as I’ve mentioned before, is one of the many current fear-mongering talking heads dubbing themselves “Constitutionalists,” and his show is aired on this new radio station in Northeast Georgia on the 103.7 dial. The radio station airs the usual cast of Levin, Limbaugh, Hannity and Savage. This is no surprise, given the location, but several months ago, I actually e-mailed the station and said something to the effect of that, while I appreciated the fact that we now had a talk radio station in Northeast Georgia, I find the content they’ve chosen to air to be disingenuous and destructive to any kind of constructive political conversation. An official with the station replied back that, as programming manager, he must strike a balance between the kind of content offered versus what is marketable. Basically, he was saying something along the lines of, “This is what is popular right now, and this is what sells and people in this region want to listen to.” While that may be true, that fact certainly doesn’t give the station any credibility as a real news source. Of course, in radio and many news outfits today, credibility isn’t the important thing, now is it?

But back to Levin. His usual shtick, in which he condemns Obama of having some sinister socialist mind and agenda, was very much evident tonight (Actually, a taped episode from Oct. 29), as in every other episode to which I have listened. Tonight, right in line with the theme of his book, Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto, available in fine book stores everywhere, Levin seems to equate the Obama administration and everything certain Democrats and progressives are trying to accomplish as tyrannical efforts, efforts such as bolstering the effectiveness of government programs and, well, helping those who can’t help themselves.

Here is Levin from Oct. 29:

Conservatism is the only antidote to tyranny because conservatism is our founding principles (sic). Conservatism is a recognition of the value of the individual human being. That’s the bottom line. All these other models, all these other philosophies, political philosophies, they’re not about the individual human being. They’re about some centralized power where masterminds, whereas I decided to call them, stateists (?), decide what’s best and isn’t best, but I don’t care how they dress it up. Tyranny is tyranny.”

The audio:

[audio:http://www.jeremystyron.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Levin10292010_A1.mp3|titles=Mark Levin, Oct. 29]

Might I remind Levin that some of the most important Founding Fathers, namely Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison, would today probably have been Democrats for their belief in a strong centralized government. For what is the point of having a government at all if it’s not to be a strong one, and I think Hamilton and Madison understood this. Do we really want a weak or measly federal government? What would be the point of that? State governments surely can’t be expected to regulate international commerce, markets and provide for the common defense and welfare.

On Levin’s statement about the value of individual human beings, I couldn’t agree more, in circumstances where said individual is, indeed, capable of finding and keeping a job and engaging in entrepreneurial enterprises, but we well know that many people in our nation are not capable of exercising their supposed “value” within the job market because of disability or education or economic disparagement. So, while Levin’s theory may work with economically upright Americans, it doesn’t work with others, and indeed, it’s a slap in the face to the thousands who need help and have nowhere to turn but the government. Sure, some abuse exists within the system, but to assume that the majority seeking government help abuse the system is a heartless exaggeration. And this heartlessness is, I think, at the heart of the current wave of Tea Party, constitutionalist movement. We are not an open prairie, agricultural society anymore, and I’m not sure we ever have been, except under the clouds of slavery, indentured servitude and sharecropping. So, I’m not sure what Levin and others are trying to achieve, but it seems that the world they seek is an illusion, anachronistic and irrelevant from modern America.

Tea partiers or tea baggers?

In my own criticisms of the Tea Party movement, I was made well aware that supporters don’t take kindly to the term, “tea bagger,” which I used more than a year or so ago, and loosely, in my correspondence with some of the movement’s followers.

President Obama has apparently learned this lesson as well. As reported by this article:

Reading through Jonathan Alter’s new book on President Obama’s first year, “The Promise: President Obama, Year One,” Tapper comes across a November 30, 2009 interview in which Obama declared that the unanimous vote of House Republicans against the stimulus bills “set the tenor for the whole year … That helped to create the tea-baggers and empowered that whole wing of the Republican Party to where it now controls the agenda for the Republicans.”

Never one to hide her ill-gotten feelings on all matters of the Democrat Party or of progressives, Michelle Malkin chimed in thusly:

Really. How many more selective civility police lectures can we take from this vulgarity-clogged White House?

And as Ian Lazaran with Conservatives4Palin (Yes, you read that right) said:

Obama may be the most thin-skinned President we’ve ever had. It’ll be funny to see him apologize for his crude, offensive, and juvenile language when this book officially comes out.

The Tea Party crowd represents an illogical, anachronistic and sheepish antagonism toward something; although, as of yet, we haven’t been given a clear answer as to what that something might be, and we have less notions of any proposed solutions. Thus, the message is: We rail against increased taxes (Which, in reality, would only affect those making 250K a year or more) and government spending, yet we can offer no solutions other than pouring anti-government rhetoric down your collective throats. And the ignorant masses who actually stand to gain the most from this administration’s efforts, who know no better, align with the other side, which, it’s no secret, is far removed from having the poor and middle class’ interests at heart.

But enough.

I’ve shredded the “Don’t Tread On Me” crowd and their arguments before, so I’m done for now.

Really the only response needed toward the Tea Party crowd and this wellspring of irrational, anti-government vitriol is a good measure of ridicule, and on that, I’ll stake my ground.

More irony from the Tea Party crowd

Rachel Maddow on Tuesday made light of the New York Times story (on which I commented here) that presents the painfully obvious, yet lost to some, point that picketing against the government after having traveled to a public park via public transit is profoundly illogical. As if that wasn’t nonsensical enough, some took the irony to a new level, saying that Washington, D.C.’s public transit system was inadequately prepared to handle the crowds who would be coming to Washington to protest the government. From The Wall Street Journal:

Protesters who attended Saturday’s Tea Party rally in Washington found a new reason to be upset: Apparently they are unhappy with the level of service provided by the subway system.

Rep. Kevin Brady asked for an explanation of why the government-run subway system didn’t, in his view, adequately prepare for this past weekend’s rally to protest government spending and government services.

Seriously.

Seriously, how can we possibly take these folks seriously?

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Next election, I think I’ll run a straight tyranny ticket

I’m sure it appeared to be an ingenious progression of “F” words (“Faith * Family * Freedom”), but it is astounding to me that would-be politicians can paint mere words such as the local endorsement sign to the right (Taken in Westminster, S.C.), and folks, not knowing if the said candidate has a functioning brain or not, will vote for such candidates without knowing anything else about them.

Credit: Me

As a political exercise, I’ve got an idea. I think I will run on a “Theocracy * Domestic violence * Tyranny platform.” How do readers think that will fare? Think I will get some votes? No?!? How about the Faith * Hope * Charity platform. Surely, that one will be money.

The vote’s obviously out, but I’m willing to bet my boots that Richard Cash, who, by the way, has the endorsement of the America’s Independent Party of SC and the Tea Party of the Lakelands, will get lots of votes just based on this sign. The latter party, if I may add, has a global warning hoax section on its Web site, which tells you all you need to know about Cash and the Tea Party of the Lakelands.

That said, maybe we can set some guidelines for being a successful fringe candidate:

  • First, get yourself an easy to pronounce, all-American name. Preferably three syllables or less.
  • Second, and this should be a no-brainer: Drape your political message in the red, white and blue. You should include plenty of stars (nothing says “America” like objects from outerspace. We own space, fools!) and possibly add as many pictures and/or quotes from the Founders as possible, including Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Paine, Ben Franklin and John Jay. The particular Founder’s stance on more government or less doesn’t really matter. Your potential constituents won’t know the difference. Just uttering the Founders’ names will get you tons of brownie points!
  • Third, and finally,  use words like faith, family, freedom, Democracy, Jesus and God as many times as possible, even though they might not make sense in context. They’ll never know the difference, and the seat is yours!

Moreover, what does “freedom” have to do with anything? Is Cash saying he is going to revisit the matter, in support, of course, if he gets elected? Didn’t we settle all that in 1776 when we officially broke free from British rule and again in 1865 when we broke blacks free from slavery’s rule?

Couple hours with talk radio on Friday night

Thank goodness for fringe talk radio to keep me angry enough late at night so I’m not attempted to fall asleep at the wheel while returning from a lengthy trip Lexington, Ga., to cover a football game.

I’m not sure what radio host, Mark Levin’s, obsession is with The Washington Post (Levin calls it The Washington Compost) writer, Dana Milbank, but Milbank is linked on Levin’s Web site, and Levin, in usual form, went into a 10-minute rant about this column, appearing Friday in The Post. In it, Milbank detailed some of the more unusual features of a protest held Thursday on Capitol Hill by House Republicans and Tea Party supporters, who were rallying against the health care reform bill currently under consideration. To briefly point out some of what Milbank observed:

In the front of the protest, a sign showed President Obama in white coat, his face painted to look like the Joker. The sign, visible to the lawmakers as they looked into the cameras, carried a plea to “Stop Obamunism.” A few steps farther was the guy holding a sign announcing “Obama takes his orders from the Rothchilds” [sic], accusing Obama of being part of a Jewish plot to introduce the antichrist.

According to Milbank, also being displayed was a banner which read: “National Socialist Healthcare, Dachau, Germany, 1945.”

Levin on the radio show claimed he saw none of this nonsense, and was quick to point to a 90-year-old veteran he saw in a wheel chair on the front row and the numerous American flags, etc, etc. Levin seemed to indicate that among 20,000 people (He must have had a different math teacher than Milbank, who only recorded about 5,000 in attendance), there were sure to be a few crackpot, zany signs and that you could pick out fringers anywhere, like Waffle House on any given day. But the tough news for Levin is that he is a fringer. In his long rant on the air tonight, Levin accused liberals of doing everything in their power to ridicule some of the strong, female leaders of the conservative movement, like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. He awkwardly threw in the word “attractive” in his description, but I have no idea what physical appearance has to do with anything.

But the point is this. He accused some of ridiculing the intelligence and the very being of people like Palin and others, but leveled a barrage of belittling names Milbank’s way in response to the column. In his vitriol, in which by the end, Levin was for all practical purposes, screaming into the microphone, used the following choice words to describe Milbank (I wrote some of them down as I was listening): “jerk” (three times); “moron”; “propagandis,” and a “pathetic” one at that; “liar”; “coward”; “punk”; “hack”; “ass”; and “backbencher”. The liar and coward accusations begin teetering into slander territory. Regardless, what sort of person do you have to be to, in one breath, accuse someone of belittling or mocking Palin, while not more than two minutes later, to begin such a barrage of insults I just listed against another person?

I want to address one more thing. The use of the word “patriots” to describe Tea Party attendees or Republicans or anti-Obama zealots is just plain offensive to the spirit on which this country was built. One person who called in to Levin’s show described the attendees of the aforesaid rally as “citizen patriots,” whatever that means. This type of nonsense basically throws feces over the venerable graves of John Adams, Sam Adams, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Hancock, George Washington and the thousands who fought from Massachusetts and the other colonies against the British to help us win independence. I’m not a patriot. Obama isn’t a patriot. Levin isn’t a patriot. Neither is Milbank. The New England Patriots aren’t even patriots. The dictionary definition of the word generally means anyone who loves her country, but look deeper, and the word originates from Greek root, patēr, meaning “father,” hence, as it relates to this country, Founding Fathers. Using that word so lightly after all that this country has been through in its 200-plus year history makes a mockery of what the above men worked to accomplish, and it’s personally offensive to me, and it should be to anyone else with a brain.

I’ll probably have more to say on Levin later when it’s not 2 a.m. after having worked 12 hours. …

Limbaugh, unhappiest, most miserable person alive? Perhaps

According to a recent U.S. News & World Report story, conservative talk show commentator and Christian Broadcasting Network founder Pat Robertson criticized Rush Limbaugh’s comments, heard here:

in which Limbaugh said he wished, not only for the stimulus plan to fail, but also for Obama himself to fail in the presidency. We know Limbaugh to be obnoxious and so irrationally conservative that he can’t see straight — and often, downright mean — but he said during this interview with Sean Hannity that he hoped Barack Obama failed in his presidency IF he threw out Bush’s tax cuts and signed on to many traditional “liberal” policies.

Here, in a clipping from the U.S. News & World Report article, Robertson, when asked,

So you dont subscribe to Rush Limbaugh‘s I hope he fails school of thought?

said,

That was a terrible thing to say. I mean, he’s the president of all the country. If he succeeds, the country succeeds. And if he doesn’t, it hurts us all. Anybody who would pull against our president is not exactly thinking rationally.

Some, like a fellow who named himself “Pure Constitution from Indiana” on the U.S. News & World Report Web site, have claimed the criticism of Limbaugh was ill-conceived:

 

Once again Rush’s statement was taken out of context. He was specifically referring to President Obama’s social agenda. He does not want him to fail personally but Rush is concerned that the country will be placed on the path of a socialist nation in direct conflict with the constitution. Our government is already huge and out of control. the Constitution does not give congress or the president the right to spend freely. President bush was also guilty of his by overspending and starting unnecessary and costly new government programs. We can argue the issues when we don’t take things out of context and discuss the true intent of the statements. To be fair, both the right AND the left have been guilty of this.

But in the radio sound clip above, Limbaugh clearly and in his signature bombastic style said, “I want everything he’s doing to fail.”

In the interview with Hannity, of course, he said the same thing, with the caveat that he supported Obama IF he enacted or maintained good conservative principles, but if Obama enacted and sought to maintain liberal principles, like supporting women’s rights, reversing Bush’s tax cuts, etc, he hoped Obama failed. He outright said he hoped the stimulus package failed. The rub is that Limbaugh knows Obama (though he claims the contrary), and he knows Obama’s not going to go against his own principles. He’s going to run the country as he thinks it needs to be run, that is, in the liberal framework. Thus, Limbaugh literally was saying he hoped Obama would fail, both generally and specifically. It wasn’t taken out of context, and the word “everything” wasn’t supposed to just mean Obama’s “social agenda,” but all of his policies.

Though I certainly don’t agree with Robertson on most points, I do agree with him that Limbaugh was off base saying he hoped Obama failed. If Obama fails, we are in a world of trouble. If the stimulus package fails, we are in a world of trouble. Limbaugh’s multiple repetitions, “He is my president,” mean nothing. If he was your president, Rush, you would get behind him, at least until your party gets another attempt at the White House because if he fails, what does that mean? More chaos in the Middle East? Another attack on the country? A second Great Depression? If he fails, you may not have the ability to keep your radio show. You might end up in a soup kitchen with the rest of us.

Two interesting notes from the Hannity interview:

  • Limbaugh said he didn’t think Obama would close down Gitmo. Oops.

“These executive orders represent a giant step forward. Putting an end to Guantanamo, torture and secret prisons is a civil liberties trifecta, and President Obama should be highly commended for this bold and decisive action so early in his administration on an issue so critical to restoring an America we can be proud of again. — Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU

  • On health care, Limbaugh said, “If he gets nationalized health care, I mean, it’s over Sean, we’re never gonna roll that back. That’s the end of America as we have known it because that then’s going to set the stage for everything to be government-owned, operated or provided. Why would I want that to succeed? I don’t believe in that. I know that’s not how this country is gonna be great in the future. It’s not what made this country great. So, I shamelessly say, ‘No, I want him to fail, if his agenda is a far-left, collectivism, some people say socialism, as a conservative, heart-felt, why would I want socialism to succeed?'” Really?? First, he’s making some giant leaps, equating universal health care with all-out socialism. Second, is it truly over for countries like England, Singapore, China, and Germany? Singapore, it’s important to note, has the lowest infant mortality rate and one of the highest life expectancies in the world, according to the World Health Organization.

Limbaugh has to be the most miserable person on the planet. The policies he would like to see enacted are anachronistic and inadequate, and he probably knows it. That’s likely why he sounds so mad all the time. Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathon is probably overkill, but we need big plans, not small ones. We need big thoughts and big ideas, not more of the same. More of the same has run this economy downward. Tax cuts for the rich have gotten us nowhere because the rich care about one thing, and believe me, it’s not about helping those below them on the economic social ladder. They care about getting richer and holding on to their precious treasures. The bank debacle proves as much. The automaker execs flying into Washington on private jets proves it again. We hear Limbaugh’s passion. Heck, he should come down to earth and use some of that passion to help get things done for folks who are hurting, but he would be unwilling. He’s not hurting, and he’s got two decades of broadcasting vested and wrapped up in the alternate view.