Rush, king of the demagogues
By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com
Right-wing demagogues by the legions pollute the radio airwaves of hundreds of cities in the United States, but there is only one Rush Limbaugh, and last week he proved that he is still the vilest, most hypocritical, cowardly, slimy, ignorant and mendacious scoundrel of the whole sorry lot.
Over three days, Limbaugh used his gigantic soap box – his website boasts his is the most listened to radio show in the country with 600 stations carrying the program – to insult, defame, and dehumanize Sandra Fluke, a thirty-year-old Georgetown law student, for the crime of talking to a panel of Democratic members of Congress about the need for health insurance plans to cover the cost of contraceptives.
Beyond the grievous moral wounds inflected on the young woman and the brazen misuse of the public airwaves to slander a private citizen, what Rush Limbaugh did last week matters because he is arguably the most powerful demagogue in America since Senator Joseph McCarthy.
What confers this status on Limbaugh, who holds no public office, is that his listeners represent a significant constituency within a political party that currently controls the U.S. House of Representatives and could conceivably own the White House in less than a year.
Limbaugh instills fear for their political lives in the hearts of the top leaders in the Republican Party, and that is why there has been only mild criticism and zero condemnation among the GOP following the latest and many previous egregious pronouncements by Limbaugh.
The leading Republican in the country, House Speaker John Boehner, said Limbaugh’s comments were “inappropriate.” George Will, the staunchly conservative columnist, probably best captured the pathetic character of the Republican response to Limbaugh when he said that inappropriate is when you use your salad fork for your entreé but this is something else. He added that Republicans want to bomb Iran but they are afraid of Rush Limbaugh.
The savagery of Limbaugh’s 72-hour barrage against Fluke shows just how inadequate was the Speaker’s statement. Limbaugh began his assault against the Georgetown student with distortion, transmuting her statement on an issue of public policy – whether contraceptives should be covered by insurance – into an admission of personal depravity. “She wants to be paid for having sex…What does that make her, a slut, a prostitute?”
Oblivious to this fallacious leap of logic and the total absence of evidence for his claim, Limbaugh then added cruelty to falsehood and fallacy by supposedly commiserating with the shame Fluke’s parents must be feeling.
Then Limbaugh generalized his comments to apply to Georgetown women students in general, in the process showing a breathtaking ignorance about birth control. Apparently concerned about the high cost of contraceptives to employers and insurance companies, Limbaugh asked: “How much sex do they want to have?” Is it possible that Limbaugh is so misinformed that he thinks the pill and the IUD work like headache medication, to be used only when the head hurts? It’s hard to reach any other conclusion.
If the question of how much sex they want to have was insufficient to prove a wide prurient streak in Limbaugh, his later suggestion removes all doubt. Women, he said, should put video of their sexual activities online “so we can all see what we are paying for.” He seasoned his string of calumnies and lewd requests with outright insult, at one point calling Fluke a femi-Nazi.
Limbaugh’s rant came after a series of Republican actions that read like a program for disrespecting and disadvantaging women. This included a hearing before a Republican-led Congressional committee that touched heavily on women’s health issues. The chairman refused to allow Fluke or any other woman to testify, but did hear from five men.
Yet Limbaugh and his GOP yes-men may not be able to carry on with impunity for much longer. Many women have been offended by Limbaugh for a long time, and this appears to have been the last straw. That’s key because even though Rush’s audience is largely male, women make most of the buying decisions for the household. As of this writing, seven companies have discontinued their ads on Limbaugh’s show. He had already lost about 30 percent of its audience in the last few months. If the trend of advertisers pulling out and listeners moving the dial continues, Rush will be history.
Similarly for the Republican Party, what to all lights appears as a GOP frontal assault against women could prove a political disaster, as poll numbers show significant erosion of support for the Republican Party among women, who likely will decide the next election.
Ironies abound about someone of Rush Limbaugh’s dubious moral track record publicly prosecuting Sandra Fluke, who spent the five years between college and law school working in an organization fighting domestic abuse. But that’s a subject for another column.
Progreso Weekly/Semanal authorizes the reproduction of all or part of the articles by our journalists as long as the source and author are identified.
