Showing posts with label Rush. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rush. Show all posts

Saturday, March 10, 2012

The Feminazis Go Hunting For Rush

The co-founders of the Women's Media Center, radicals Jane Fonda, Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan, are calling for the FCC to pull our nation's most popular radio show host, Rush Limbaugh, from the airways.  Just so you know who you are dealing with, let's go down this rogue's gallery, shall we.




Jane Fonda is shown in the above picture manning air defense artillery in North Vietnam in 1972, during the Vietnam War.  She actively supported the North Vietnamese war effort.  Leaving aside the fact that she should have been prosecuted for treason and should, to this day, be spending her life in jail, Hanoi Jane has also been known for explosive rhetoric, such as referring to President Nixon as "Hitler."





Gloria Steinem, one of the original radical feminists of the 60's, has been a lifelong advocate of "women's rights," She was a particularly vocal opponent of Clarence Thomas after Anita Hill claimed that Thomas sexually harassed her.  Steinem later found sexual harassment to be wholly acceptable and, indeed, defensible when Bill Clinton was the perpetrator, going so far as to write a WSJ article on his behalf.





Robin Morgan is a self described radical feminist who, besides being a partner with Steinem on Ms. Magazine, has taken "radical feminism" to new heights.  For instance, she has claimed that most sex is rape: “I claim that rape exists any time sexual intercourse occurs when it has not been initiated by the woman, out of her own genuine affection and desire.” And for a woman who is now offended by "hate speech," it seems surprising given that she has previously stated: “I feel that ‘man-hating’ is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them.”

Now these three radical women are calling for the FCC to remove Rush from the airway because of his supposed history of "hate speech" and the "degrading language Limbaugh deploys on women, people of color, lesbians and gays, immigrants, the disabled, the elderly, Muslims, Jews, veterans, environmentalists and so forth." We can't have satire in America, at least when directed at protected left wing classes. Freedom of speech only goes so far. Actually, what is truly interesting is that Robin Morgan can charge that Rush is using "hate speech" when he uses demeaning names, but her own call for actual, visceral hatred of males is somehow okay.

Leaving that aside, at least two of the examples the ladies give of Limbaugh hate speech are worthy of comment.

The ladies are apparently offended that Rush once said that "The National Organization for Women is "a bunch of whores to liberalism." Given that Rush was talking about the fact that NOW, like Gloria Steinam, is quite willing to jettison all of their principles and come to the defense of left-wing men when they commit acts demeaning to women, he was completely correct. Though I hate to link to Meida Matters, they actually have the quote in context on their site.

Another beef of the these three defenders of American values:

Limbaugh doesn't just call people names. He promotes language that deliberately dehumanizes his targets. Like the sophisticated propagandist Josef Goebbels, he creates rhetorical frames -- and the bigger the lie the more effective -- inciting listeners to view people they disagree with as sub-humans. His longtime favorite term for women, "femi-nazi," doesn't even raise eyebrows anymore, an example of how rhetoric spreads when unchallenged by coarsened cultural norms.

His favorite term for women? "Feminazi" is a term he only uses to describe the radical activists - such as Fonda, Steinem, and Morgan, as well as the NOW crowd. For these three to think that he is describing all women as "feminazis" means that, one, they have never listened to his show, or two, that they are so arrogant and narcissistic that they are actually projecting their radical views onto all women. I would imagine it is both. At any rate, one could conclude that referring to the radicals as mere "nazis" is still less coarsened than comparing Nixon to Hitler. And of course, the only reason the term "feminazi" has stuck is because there is a big kernel of truth in it.

The ladies conclude their call for the FCC to pull Rush from the airwaves with this laugher:

This isn't political. While we disagree with Limbaugh's politics, what's at stake is the fallout of a society tolerating toxic, hate-inciting speech. For 20 years, Limbaugh has hidden behind the First Amendment, or else claimed he's really "doing humor" or "entertainment." He is indeed constitutionally entitled to his opinions, but he is not constitutionally entitled to the people's airways.

It's time for the public to take back our broadcast resources. Limbaugh has had decades to fix his show. Now it's up to us.

Isn't political???? Not only have these three women studiously ignored truly crass speech from the left, but they have been guilty of more than a bit of it themselves. Certainly Fonda manning an enemy anti-aircraft gun in time of war is possibly the single most offensive bit of speech I have ever been privy to. Their effort to get Limbaugh off the air could not possibly be more political. They don't care about coarse speech, they care about speech antithetical to their positions.

As to the "people's airways," Limbaugh, with somewhere between 16 and 20 million listeners each week, has the single most popular show on radio. It is a position he has held for years. The "people" of America have voted on what they want to hear - and its not the braying of the nags who want government to silence speech that offends the left.




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Wednesday, March 7, 2012

A Red Herring: The Left's Opportunistic War On Rush

Rush apologized the other day to Sandra Fluke for referring to her as a prostitute (for requiring people to pay for her to have sex) and a slut (at $3k a year for contraception, various estimates are that she must be having sex 3 to 5 times a day, 365 days a year). Fluke and the left don't merely want her to receive free contraception paid for by all of America, but they think she should be free of moral judgment. Whether Rush should have apologized to Fluke is very much open to debate (see this from Cassy Fiano at PJM and this from Belladona Rogers, also at PJM), but the fact is that he did.

After Rush apologized, Sandra Fluke refused to accept his apology. And then today, in an utterly disgusting display of base partisanship, Obama himself refused to honor Rush's apology, saying that he "didn't know" what was in Rush's "heart." This coming from the same piece of pond scum who has made a cottage industry of apologizing for America. At any rate, it is not like the left is acting in accordance with some higher moral standard here. Compare and contrast the faux outrage of the left with Rush over their virtual cone of silence when it is someone on the left making truly inappropriate remarks about Sarah Palin, Palin's 14 year old daughter, or Laura Ingrahm. Likewise is Obama's acceptance of $1 million from Bill Maher, a man who regularly disparages women on the right in the crudest of terms. Or just read of the left's brutal disparagement of Michelle Malkin. This outrage over Rush's remarks is pure opportunism.

The left from top to bottom is refusing Rush's apology because they are, to quote Legal Insurrection, at total war with the right. The left is not aimed at righting a wrong, but rather aimed at silencing Rush and removing his voice from the public square. The modern left is an implacable enemy of free speech.

In what has become a tried and true tactic for the left, they are expressing their faux outrage to their target's advertisers. To this point, they have succeeded in having some 35 advertisers, bowing to a tsunami of complaints from the left, pull their ads from Rush's show.

This tempest in a tea pot will eventually wind down. But as long as it goes on, the biggest potential danger is not that it threatens Rush Limbaugh's continued viability, but that it may fix in the public's mind the utter canard that this really is all about some vague "war on women." It is a travesty. The two issues are that the HHS mandate violates the First Amendments Free Exercise of Religion clause, and equally, why all Americans should be forced to fund the sexual lifestyle choice of some women. That is what this whole debacle needs to be refocused upon - immediately.





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Sunday, March 4, 2012

Pulling Defeat From the Vagina Of Victory

What a goat screw the Republicans are making of the contraception and Plan-B abortion pill mandate Obama is imposing on the nation. Between Daryll Issa and Rush Limbaugh, the Right is managing what I thought near impossible - ceding the narrative on this unconscionable overreach to the left.

Specifically, last week:

. . . the House Democratic Steering Committee held a hearing concerning the religious exemption on contraception coverage and women's health, inviting Sandra Fluke, a student at Georgetown Law School as the sole witness. Leader Pelosi called the hearing in response to the refusal of Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA), Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, to allow Fluke to testify at last week's hearing "Lines Crossed: Separation of Church and State. Has the Obama Administration Trampled on Freedom of Religion and Freedom of Conscience?"

In an unusual move, Chairman Issa did not allow the Democratic minority to have a single witness at last week's hearing, allowing testimony only from those opposed to the Obama Administration's decision on women's contraception to testify. The hearing's primary panel did not include a single woman, prompting Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) to ask "Where are the Women?"

At the hearing yesterday, Fluke spoke out for the importance of the Obama Administration's rule to ensure that Catholic students have access to contraceptive coverage under the preventive care package of the Affordable Care Act. The coverage would come from private insurance companies without any funding from religious institutions. In her testimony, Fluke stated, "I attend a Jesuit law school that does not provide contraception coverage in its student health plan. Just as we students have faced financial, emotional, and medical burdens as a result, employees at religiously affiliated hospitals and universities across the country have suffered similar burdens. We are all grateful for the new regulation that will meet the critical health care needs of so many women...We refuse to pick between a quality education and our health, and we resent that, in the 21st century, anyone thinks it's acceptable to ask us to make this choice simply because we are women."

Number one, Issa should never have been so heavy handed as to allow the joint hearing to go forward without allowing the left to call Fluke as a witness. He was too smart by half. Yes, it would have allowed the left to introduce their "it's all about the contraception" narrative into a hearing that Republican's wanted to keep focused on Obama's grotesque violation of the 1st Amendment's free exercise of religion clause. But the left was always going to get the narrative out, with the only question being whether the Republicans would have a chance to cross examine their witnesses. And that would have been worth its weight in gold.

There should have been two questions asked of Ms. Fluke. One - Ms. Fluke, what is it that makes you so special that you can force every working American to contribute a part of their hard earned money to pay for your personal lifestyle choices? And two - Ms. Fluke, the Catholic Church has taught against contraception and abortion as a fundamental part of their religious doctrine since ancient times. Most Christian sects hold likewise. There are millions of religious Americans who believe that it is wrong to use artificial contraception or abortion. Now the argument here has not a single thing to do with whether contraception or abortion should be available in the U.S. That is not at issue. What is at issue is whether these institutions and individuals can be forced to pay for you to use contraception when it contravenes their religious convictions. So please, explain to me any possible scenario in which this Obama HHS mandate is not a clear, utter and blatant violation of that part of the 1st Amendment that provides that Congress shall pass no laws prohibiting the free exercise of religion?

Fluke's attempts to answer those questions are what should have been playing across the news - every hem, every haw, every stutter, every attempt at prevarication. Instead, not merely did Issa screw this up, Rush Limbaugh made it worse. The day after Fluke got a chance to "testify" uncontested, with no cross examination, Rush Limbaugh described Fluke as a slut:

. . . the Georgetown student who went before a congressional committee and said she's having so much sex, she's going broke buying contraceptives and wants us to buy them. I said, "Well, what would you call someone who wants us to pay for her to have sex? What would you call that woman? You'd call 'em a slut, a prostitute or whatever.

In one sense, what Limbaugh said, in the entirety of his remarks, was fine. But the MSM is always on the look out to create new martyrs, regardless of how little justification in reality. No one does faux outrage like the left. And that is precisely what has happened with Fluke. She is now the deeply aggrieved party who, after owning up to facts that indicate she has a sex life to rival that of ancient Rome's Messalina, is apparently entitled not merely to free contraception, but freedom from moral judgment. (Lest I be accused of hypocrisy here, let me just say I happen to have a deep and abiding appreciation for sluts. But while I do not hold Ms. Fluke's impressive appetite for sex against her, that does not mean that she should be free from measurement by others against moral norms.)

Rush has since apologized to Ms. Fluke for "insulting" her. What idiocy. The only thing Rush should have apologized for is giving the left a chance to wholly distort what is at issue. Even in his apology, Rush neglected to bring up the First Amendment issue. It's rare that Rush Limbaugh so screws up and, apparently, loses site of the real issue. But he has done so here.

How all of this will impact what should be an absolute winning argument in the court of public opinion that the HHS mandate is a gross and unconstitutional big government overreach, it is impossible to say. But if many others follow the examples of Issa and Limbaugh, it really may well be that Republicans are able to pull a defeat from the vagina of victory on this one.





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Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Rush Endorses Thomas Sowell's Take On Gingrich

Go here to watch. The Sowell column that Rush addresses is blogged here.

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Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Advice On How To Lose The 2012 Election

The Republican National Committee has issued a warning to fellow Republicans:

During the conference call, various Republican affiliates expressed concern that attacking President Barack Obama may prove too dangerous for the GOP. “We’re hesitant to jump on board with heavy attacks” said Nicholas Thompson, vice president of Republican polling firm the Tarrance Group. “There’s a lot of people who feel sorry for him.”

Are these people insane?

My biggest complaint about the Republican party, for the past decade, has been their utter inability to communicate effectively. I've wailed about it on this blog with regularity (for example, see here, here, here, and here). And indeed, it is advice such as that above that has been responsible for Republicans abysmal showing over the past decade.

Perhaps the two worst most destructive instances of Republicans allowing falsehoods to become fixed as facts in the minds of the majority of Americans are the Iraq War and the fiscal meltdown. There was Bush not responding to the left wing attack machine's "Bush lied" meme. Karl Rove came very late to the conclusion that failing to respond was the biggest mistake of the Bush presidency. Then there was McCain not responding to the Democrats' effort to misdirect the blame for our economic meltdown onto Wall St. greed, rather than the actual cause, two decades of left wing government directed social engineering that tore apart credit standards and put Fannie and Freddie on steroids.

And now we have Obama making the most outrageous of claims about the failure of markets and capitalism as well as the supposed sin of the profit motive.  Indeed, IBD has an editorial out today discussing the Five Big Lies In Obama's Economic Fairness Speech. Even WaPo's Fact Checker gave the speech three Pinnochios. Yet the RNC responds by telling Republicans not to attack Obama because he is likable and the electorate feels pity for him? And just how are Republicans to counter this? Their silence would only cede the message to Obama and the left - and we have years of evidence telling us how that works out.

The RNC has it exactly wrong. Republicans need to be passionate and loud - with the caveat that they must be absolutely intellectually honest in their criticisms.

You want to see how to do it wrong - Mitt Romney's ad attacking Obama by taking a quote completely out of context.



That really will engender sympathy for this most destructive of Presidents.

Now to see how it is done right - Newt Gingrich laying out, in two minutes, why Obama is the President of class warfare and food stamps while conservatives are the party of paychecks.


There is a reason Gingrich is leading in the polls. And if he stays there, it will be in very large measure because he will have ignored the craven advice of the RNC.

As a parting gift, here is Rush in high dudgeon over both the idiocy of the RNC's advice to Republicans and the prevarication of Obama in his Kansas speech yesterday.



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Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Those Who Forget History . . .

It is almost trite to trot out the quote "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it."  But I think it perfectly apropos as regards today's race for the Republican nomination for President.

What in the hell is wrong with the supposedly conservative pundit class? Their memory seems selective indeed, as they apparently have wholly forgotten WHY Ronald Reagan popularized the 11th Commandment:

"Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican."
The need for the 11th Commandment arose after the Republican party cannibalized itself in 1964, with vociferous demonization by many Republican's on their own eventual nominee, Barry Goldwater. Indeed, "Nelson Rockefeller labeled Goldwater an "extremist" for his conservative positions and declared him unfit to hold office." The attacks had a profound, and likely decisive effect. Goldwater lost to Lyndon Johnson, who then proceeded to put the welfare state on steroids with his "Great Society" program.

In subsequent years, the Republican Party began to do it again, this time to Reagan when he ran for governor of California. In his 1990 autobiography An American Life, Reagan explained that:.

. . . the personal attacks against me during the primary finally became so heavy that the state Republican chairman, Gaylord Parkinson, postulated what he called the Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican. It's a rule I followed during that campaign and have ever since.
Yet what we are seeing today seems a replay of 1964 all over again. Indeed, Dafydd at Big Lizards asked about a week ago, "Can somebody please explain to me why conservative bloggers are transcendentally driven to kill and eat their own candidates?" Apparently it is due to a recessive gene in Republican DNA. Jennifer Rubin has given a good portion of her columns over to savaging Newt Gingrich. Ramesh Ponnuru and Brian Bolduc at NRO and the ever mercurial Ann Coulter have all written hit pieces on Gingrich that have all the context and intellectual honesty of a rant from Alan Grayson.  Then there is George Will who seems to be on LSD.  According to him, the election of either Romney or, in particular, Gingrich will mean the end of conservatism - oh, and apparently, he has referred to Rush Limbaugh as a Marxist.  With crap like this from the Republican attack machine, the Independents may well be driven into Obama's arms before the general election campaign even begins.

Several pundits have weighed in on the issue of which candidate they prefer thoughtfully and respectfully - Krauthammer (Romney) and John Hawkins (Gingrich) come to mind.  And it is reasonable indeed to delve deeply into the character and background of all the candidates.  Indeed, that is what Republican primary voters need to see and hear.  But that is a far cry from what we are seeing in the demagougic and out of context, vicious attacks emanating from much of the right wing punditry.  Indeed, as Rush said in his monologue today:

It's like clockwork. It's becoming predictable. I don't care who it is, a Republican presidential candidate breaks out of the pack, gets close to Romney -- or even surpasses Romney in polling data in certain states -- and the Republican establishment goes after him. Today there is a coordinated -- well, I don't know that it's coordinated, but it sure appears to be. Regardless, no matter where you look in the Republican establishment media today, there looks to be a coordinated attack on Mr. Newt. I'm not gonna mention any names because you know when I do, all I do is elevate these people and the names don't matter here.
. . . So I'm just gonna tell you, there are -- count 'em, one, two, three, four -- there are five, not counting whatever's happened on television, there are five hit pieces on Newt Gingrich today that come from Republican establishment conservative media. It's amazing.

. . . I want to call these people and say, "Let me ask you a question. When this is all over, who would you rather have --" and, by the way, none of this is to defend Newt. I don't want to be misunderstood on this, folks. None of this is to defend. I mean this is pure, 100% commentary right now. But I feel like calling some of these people, . . . I would say, "Do you really at the end of the day prefer Obama to Newt? 'Cause that's what you're gonna bring off here if you keep this up." 

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Newt News

Rush on an important consideration in picking the Republican nominee for President.



It bears repeating that in assessing Newt and, particularly his performance as Speaker of the House, one needs to keep at the forefront of their mind the context of the times.  In the mid-90's, the left wing MSM wholly controlled the media and Newt was not merely the left's mortal enemy, but he was demonized to the to a degree not seen again until the emergence of Sarah Palin.  Indeed, it is notable that, in a recent segment of Hardball, Chris Matthews explicitly referred to Gingrich as "evil."  That should give you a feel for just how out-of-control the 90's MSM were in their hatred of Gingrich.

Moreover, to the extent that members of his own party turned on Gingrich at the end, I think it more than likely that they were responding to the unrelenting attacks on Gingrich coupled with the ambition of a few in the party to wrest control from him.  In particular, ask yourself if the Republican party was better served by Gingrich or the disaster that was Tom Delay or the non-entity that was Denny Hastert.

At any rate, I will start keeping a running tally on this blog of Newt-mainia, both pro and con.  It is actually befitting the gravity of this upcoming election that there is so much interest and passion about the Republican nomination.  It is impossible to to over-estimate what is at stake.  Thus it is all the more important to dig through the tons of BS being spewed to get to the nuggets of truth at the bottom.

  

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Friday, December 2, 2011

NYT's Curious Definition Of "Hope"

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that in November, 315,000 people "dropped out of the labor force," while only 130,000 new jobs were added.  In other words, the jobs situation took yet another significant turn for the worse.  Yet in the unique math practiced by today's BLS - not accounting for those who have dropped out of the labor force in the U-3 unemployment number - that means the our nation's job situation actually improved, on paper only of course.  The reality is that we still have "13 million unemployed workers, whose periods of unemployment averaged an all-time high of 40.9 weeks" and that number continues to grow, far outpacing job creation.  Nonetheless, the BLS calculates that the unemployment rate dropped from 9% to 8.6% in November, thus leading the New York Times to trumpet:

Signs of Hope in Jobs Report; Unemployment Drops to 8.6%

Many more signs of hope like that and our nation will be completely wrecked. 


Update:  The broader unemployment number, U-6, which includes the underemployed, is at a staggering 15.6%.


Rush Limbaugh has a colorful rant dealing with both the fraud in the unemployment number and the reaction of the drive-by media to the 8.6% number.  Meanwhile, TIME magazine's Stephen Gandell suggests that this drop below 9% could be a "game changer," a sure sign of a strengthening economy.  That level of intellectual dishonesty is stomach churning.


That said, not all left of center pundits are intellectually dishonest.  My hats off to The New Republic for publishing this Brookings Institution analysis of the current job situation:

Three points are worthy of note.

First: Despite the growth of the working-age population over the past four years, the labor force (roughly, the sum of those employed plus job-seekers) has not expanded. For various reasons, more and more Americans have been dropping out of the labor force. If Americans of working age were participating in the labor force at the same rate as they were at the onset of the recession, the labor force would be nearly 5 million people larger, and unemployment would be significantly worse in both absolute and percentage terms.

Second: Despite the modest economic recovery since the recession ended in mid-2009, total employment remains more than 5.5 million below the level of 2007 and about 1.6 million below where it was when President Obama took office.

Third: To regain full employment (5 percent, which happens to be the same as the level when the recession began) with the pre-recessionary labor force participation rate, we would need 150.7 million jobs—10.1 million more than we have today. That’s a reasonable measure of the hole we’re still in, two and a half years since the official end of the recession.

The American people are unlikely to cheer up about the economy until we get appreciably closer to the top of the hole.

This graph, from Doug Ross, shows the depth of unemployment during this recession in comparison to all of the other recessions since WWII:


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Saturday, April 24, 2010

Rush Responds To The Left's Attempt To Silence Criticism

Rush Limbaugh has written an exceptional essay in the WSJ: Liberals and the Violence Card - Conservative protest is motivated by a love of what America stands for. In it, he deconstructs the left's charges that covservatives are suborning violence. This from Rush:

. . . Now the liberals run the government and they're using their power to implement their radical agenda. Mr. Obama and his party believe that the election of November 2008 entitled them to make permanent, "transformational" changes to our society. In just 16 months they've added more than $2 trillion to the national debt, essentially nationalized the health-care system, the student-loan industry, and have their sights set on draconian cap-and-trade regulations on carbon emissions and amnesty for illegal aliens.

Had President Obama campaigned on this agenda, he wouldn't have garnered 30% of the popular vote.

Like the millions of citizens who've peacefully risen up and attended thousands of rallies in protest, I seek nothing more than the preservation of the social contract that undergirds our society. I do not hate the government, as the left does when it is not running it. I love this country. And because I do, I insist that the temporary inhabitants of high political office comply with the Constitution, honor our God-given unalienable rights, and respect our hard-earned private property. For this I am called seditious, among other things, by some of the very people who've condemned this society?

I reject the notion that America is in a well-deserved decline, that she and her citizens are unexceptional. I do not believe America is the problem in the world. I believe America is the solution to the world's problems. I reject a foreign policy that treats our allies like our enemies and our enemies like our allies. I condemn the president traveling the world apologizing for America's great contributions to mankind. And I condemn his soft-peddling the dangers we face from terrorism. For this I am inciting violence?

Few presidents have sunk so low as Mr. Clinton did with his accusations about Oklahoma City. Last week—on the very day I was contributing to and raising more than $3 million to fight leukemia and lymphoma on my radio program—Mr. Clinton used the 15th anniversary of that horrific day to regurgitate his claims about talk radio. . . .

Rush is an articulate man indeed. Do read the whole article.

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Thursday, December 31, 2009

Rush Limbaugh Hospitalized


Rush, on vacation in Hawaii, was taken to the hospital this afternoon with chest pains and is now listed in serious condition. Let us all pray for his health and a speedy recovery.

I was going to end the post with that single paragraph, but I made the mistake of glancing at the comments to the post on TMZ. If you wish to know the difference between today's left and the right, compare how the right reacted to the illness and death of Ted Kennedy with how the left is acting in response to Rush's apparent heart attack:

Here are some of the comments on a random page at TMZ:

1. good riddance!

Posted at 10:01PM on Dec 30th 2009 by james
2. Best news I've heard in years...Hope he joins MJ, the sooner the better!

Posted at 10:02PM on Dec 30th 2009 by Ron Burgundy
3. i'm with james . . .

Posted at 10:03PM on Dec 30th 2009 by tb
5. Won't miss ya! There will be a little less rage in the world if this druggie goes.

Posted at 10:02PM on Dec 30th 2009 by toe
6. I have no simpathy for Rush. He is a racist, piece of sh

Posted at 10:03PM on Dec 30th 2009 by andy
7. he haw

Posted at 10:02PM on Dec 30th 2009 by e33
8. I hope he dies.

Posted at 10:03PM on Dec 30th 2009 by Chris
9. best news today

Posted at 10:03PM on Dec 30th 2009 by Dave
10. Boo-hoo. I don't wish ill on him, but the fool has been living an unhealthy life for a long time as though personal responsibility does not exist for himself--just for other people. If you live like an idiot, this is what happens, and this will be the price you pay.

Personal accountability, Limbaugh. Can you handle it now?

Posted at 10:21PM on Dec 30th 2009 by sara
11. so long hypocrite!!!

Posted at 10:04PM on Dec 30th 2009 by steve
12. I hope he fails.

Posted at 11:08PM on Dec 30th 2009 by Robert Ex-Republican
13. LMFAO @ James. I was kind of thinking the same thing, but didn't want to seem tacky by putting it into words. I wonder if 2009 will take one more celebrity before the year ends? Gosh it's been a rough year for celebs.

Posted at 10:03PM on Dec 30th 2009 by Next: Bill O'Reilly?
14. Die, suckah

Posted at 10:04PM on Dec 30th 2009 by ts

Hmmm, these are the truly classless and crass people who form our modern "progressives." Anyone want to bet that not a single one of these people celebrating Rush's sickness and rooting for his death has ever listened to an hour of his shows? I wonder at the subculture that sustains these moronic zombies and what our public schools of this era must have done to produce them?

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Monday, May 11, 2009

A New Era Of Political Discourse?


Nothing has become more obviously a joke than Obama's promises of bipartisanship and an elevation in the political discourse. Even the Brits are noticing. This from the Telegraph's U.S. editor:

What was Wanda Sykes thinking? Perhaps more to the point, what was President Barack Obama thinking when he laughed and smiled as the comedienne wished Rush Limbaugh dead?

Although the Left is reporting her White House Correspondents' Dinner speech as "taking shots" at Limbaugh and mocking everyone, that's a gross misrepresentation of what turned into a hateful and disgusting diatribe.

I was at the dinner and I began by laughing at Sykes's gentle teases about the press loving Obama . . .

But the speech took a very ugly turn when she laid into Limbaugh.

This is what she said: "Rush Limbaugh said he hopes this administration fails, so you're saying, 'I hope America fails', you're, like, 'I dont care about people losing their homes, their jobs, our soldiers in Iraq'. He just wants the country to fail. To me, that's treason.

"He's not saying anything differently than what Osama bin Laden is saying. You know, you might want to look into this, sir, because I think Rush Limbaugh was the 20th hijacker. But he was just so strung out on OxyContin he missed his flight."

She then concluded: "Rush Limbaugh, I hope the country fails, I hope his kidneys fail, how about that? He needs a good waterboarding, that's what he needs." Obama seemed to think this bit was pretty hilarious, grinning and chuckling and turning to share the "joke" with the person sitting on his right.

There's not much room for differing interpretations of what Sykes said. She called Limbaugh a terrorist and a traitor, suggested that he be tortured and wished him dead.

What was his crime? Hoping that Obama's policies - which he views as socialist - will fail.

That's way, way beyond reasoned debate or comedy and Obama's reaction to it was astonishing.

. . . [W]hen the "joke" comes from a liberal, Obama-supporting comedienne and the target is a right-winger then the likes of Hilary Rosen and Donna Brazile are on CNN saying it's just comedy and Limbaugh is "fair game".

And Obama laughing when someone wishes Limbaugh dead? Hard to take from the man who promised a new era of civility and elevated debate in Washington.

Obama can get away with this because he has a cult of personality with his most rabid acolytes being members of the press. He is a man of no principles. And I am not surprised by this. I can well imagine that he reacted with similar approval to equally hateful speech as he sat in the pews of Rev. Wrights church. People, other than those still enthralled by our Don In Chief, are starting to take note that maybe the carefully crafted persona that they saw of Obama during the campaign was little more than smoke and mirrors.








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Saturday, February 9, 2008

Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and McCain Derangement Syndrome

The justifications given by Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh for not supporting McCain and abandoning our soldiers and national security to either Obama or Clinton are incredibly disingenuous and do not withstand a cursory examination.



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(Updated)

Ann Coulter is a witty, acerbic shock jock-ess. I liked her until she referred to John Edwards as a "faggot" at the 2007 CPAC convention. At that point, I perceived her goal to be self-promotion rather than promoting the conservative cause. And likewise seems to be her position on McCain. Her assertion that she will not only refuse to support McCain, but actively campaign for Hillary seems far more an act of self promotion than it does the elucidation of a principled position. You can listen here to her speech on McCain that she gave before the Young Americans Foundation during the CPAC convention.

Powerline has posted a good analysis of Coulter's speech:

I enjoy listening to Ann Coulter, partly because I usually agree with 80 to 90 percent of what she says and partly because of the guilty pleasure I get from much of the other 10 to 20 percent. However, watching the replay of her speech explaining to the Young America's Foundation why Hillary Clinton is preferable to John McCain, I found that those percentages were reversed. Moreover, though I did take guilty pleasure from her attacks on McCain, it became increasingly difficult fully to enjoy the spectacle of Coulter attempting to persuade college-age conservatives that a McCain defeat at the hands of Clinton would be just fine.

. . . For example, in response to a question about Iraq, Coulter responded that McCain wants to close Gitmo and end waterboarding. But Clinton wants to close Gitmo, end waterboarding and, more likely than not, get out of Iraq without having won. McCain wants to close Gitmo, end waterboarding, and win in Iraq. How is that even a close call for Coulter?

Similarly, when asked about judges Coulter reminded the audience that McCain was part of the Gang of 14, and added that there was no assurance McCain would appoint judges like John Roberts (whose nomination Coulter was no fan of at the time) and Samuel Alito. But McCain voted in favor of Roberts and Alito, and (though I disagree with the Gang of 14) supported restricting filibusters of Bush nominees to exceptional cases. Clinton voted against Roberts and Alito, and thought there should be no restrictions on filibusters of their nominations and the nominations of like-minded appellate court judges. Again, this seems like a no-brainer for conservatives. . . .

Read the entire post here. As to Rush Limbaugh, on the occasions I have been able to catch parts of his show in the wake of Super Tuesday, I have heard caller after caller criticize McCain and assert that they will not vote for him in the general election. Rush has fully agreed with their concerns and expounded upon them, but he has stopped ever so slightly short of endorsing their proposed actions. I could be very wrong on this, but it appears to me that Rush is allowing his audience to vent for the moment and that he intends to throw his support to McCain at some point in the future.

That said, Limbaugh has made precisely the same disingenuous arguments as has Coulter about McCain - that McCain, Clinton and Obama are essentially the same in all respects. Bill Kristol, in a very thoughtful essay, has appropriately labeled this thinking as McCain Derangement Syndrome.

Indeed, when you sit and listen to the Democrats, and then you go back and listen to Coulter and Rush, its easy to come away mystified. Anyone who thinks that the economy of the U.S. would function the same under McCain as under Hillary has not been paying any attention. Hillary is not Bill. She is very explicit about her intent to involve government in the economy in a big way - and I am not just referring to Hillarycare. Besides her desire to break our piggy banks to spend on social programs, she has expressed her extreme mistrust of our (mostly) capitalist economy. See here and here. And Hillary is the earmark queen among the Presidential candidates. Say what you will of McCain, he has shown no such inclinations to have a command economy - and indeed, he has drawn a clear line in the sand on earmarks.

But where Coulter and Rush are being most disingenuous is on the major issues of our time -Iraq, Iran and the war on terror. On these issues, they both refuse to concede that we would be better off with McCain at the helm rather than Obama or Clinton. You can listen to Coulter's reasoning in her speech linked above. As to Rush, I listened to him make the same argument as Coulter about ten days ago, but do not have the site. Their argument is that, despite what Obama and Clinton are saying in the primaries, Clinton and Obama would not pull out of Iraq. Coulter and Limbaugh hearken back to ambiguous statements Clinton and Obama made prior to being pulled hard left by the Democratic base.

This is a tenuous argument indeed. It assumes that Clinton or Obama can pull back from their central bedrock campaign promise once in office. One, the political repercussions of such an act would be severe indeed, and it would likely split the Democratic Party. Even giving the appearance of pulling back would be painted as a victory by the radical Islamists. It would greatly endanger the troops we have remaining in Iraq, as both al Qaeda and Iran would be justified in thinking that if they create enough mayhem, we will fully withdraw. And it would breathe a tremendous new life into the ideology of radical Islam.

Further, character matters in war, more so than in any other endeavor. By character I mean attempting to do what one perceives as right based on principles, even if doing so comes at great personal cost. It is the polar opposite of making decisions on the basis of expediency. The criticality of character is easily demonstrated.

The only reason we won the Revolutionary War was because of the character of a few men who stayed true to their ideals when all seemed lost. George Washington was chief among them. On December 1, 1776, the nascent revolution was all but dead after a series of defeats that left Washington with only the remnants of a demoralized army. Few if any believed the revolution would succeed, and many were clamoring to sue the King for peace. Yet when night fell on Christmas in 1776, George Washington risked the last hope of the revolution in an incredibly audacious gamble. He led this depleted army across the Delaware River to attack the feared Hessians at Trenton. And on that date, the fortunes of war turned.

And it was only principles of Abraham Lincoln that allowed the North to achieve victory in the Civil War. It was Lincoln’s principled stand against any expansion of slavery that led to the war – and it was not a war that went well for the Union forces in the beginning. As elections drew near in 1864, Lincoln’s commitment to his principles and refusal to end the war looked likely to cost him the election. Yet he never wavered.

That said, the hallmark of much of the modern left is that they subordinate any principles they might have to expediency. Indeed, as Charles Krauthammer noted about Hillary Clinton not long ago: "She has no principles. Her liberalism is redeemed by her ambition; her ideology subordinate to her political needs." Assuming that what Coulter and Limbaugh posit about Clinton and Obama is true – that they have no intention of abandoning Iraq despite promises to contrary – that itself is proof positive of their willingness to place expediency over principle. In this case, the expediency is lying to the American public in order to win an election.

To see the dangerous intersection of political expediency and military conflict, one need not look far back in the annals of history for an example. Bill Clinton provides it. In 1993, he gave our military forces in the Somalia the mission of nation building – a mission that necessitated combat against a particular warlord with ties to al Qaeda. As combat intensified in 1993, the commander of the U.S. forces requested the authority to deploy tanks and close air support – both of which were readily available in theater – for force protection. The Clinton administration refused the request on the grounds that they did not want to be perceived as escalating hostilities. A matter of days later, the Blackhawk Down incident occurred in Mogadishu. Unprotected U.S. infantry soldiers were caught in a massive ambush assisted by al Qaeda and resulting in 18 U.S. soldiers killed and 79 injured. Clinton immediately gave up the mission of nation building and took our ground forces out of combat.

All of the decisions made by the Clinton administration as regards the Black Hawk down incident and its aftermath are textbook examples of political expediency. The long term ramifications of the withdrawal of our soldiers were that Somalia slipped back into civil war and al Qaeda claimed a victory against the U.S. It was a pyrrich victory in the sense that upwards of 2,000 Somalis were killed by our soldiers in that engagement. But the dead are meaningless to al Qaeda. Their claim to victory was predicated on the U.S. withdrawal and the abandonment of its mission as the result of suffering a comparatively small number of casualties. As we now know, it was one in a series of incidents that led to the jihadist’s belief that they could attack America on its home soil and not face any determined counterattack.

I would note that I do not think Clinton's decision to leave Somolia was wrong. Our strategic national interests were not in question there. With Iraq, Iran, and in the broader context of triuphalist Wahhabi / Salafi Islam and its offshoots, our strategic national interests are directly involved.

And as much a role as character plays in the conduct of wars, it also plays an equally critical role in keeping us out of war. An enemy that knows we have both the means to destroy them and the will to use that power may well be disuaded from pursuing acts of war. That is particularly true as regards to Iran, where the threatened or actual use of force by the U.S. have been the only factors to ever have caused the theocracy to alter their behavior in times past - i.e., Khomeini released the U.S. hostages on the day the impotent Jimmy Carter left office and directly before Regan took the oath of office; Khomeini stopped the mining of the Persian Gulf after the U.S. destroyed half of the Iranian navy over a period of several hours in 1988; and, if the recent NIE is to be believed, Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program when the U.S. invaded Iraq.

The flip side of that coin is that a government that believes that those opposing it do not have the stomach to use their power will not be disuaded. Examples abound, but possibly the clearest can be seen in the history of pre-war Nazi Germany. And in that regards, it would seem Obama wants to reprise the role of Neville Chamberlin.

The war in Iraq and the conflict with Iran are zero-sum games that we cannot afford to lose. The consequences of losing to us and to Western civilization at large would be dire. But in Iraq and with Iran, we face enemies that are willing to endure significant casualties in order to achieve their goals. I do not believe that we can possibly prevail against such a foe should we have a Commander in Chief whose character is such that he or she will place expediency over principle.

McCain operates on principle. It is his greatest strength. McCain supported the surge on the basis that he believed it was the right thing to do even when it looked as if it would put a stake in his Presidential bid. In that light, the attempt by Coulter and Limbaugh to suggest that McCain, Obama and Clinton would be interchangeable as respects to how they would handle Iraq and Iran is simply ludicrous.

McCain Derangement Syndrome needs to die a quick death. The chief justifications underpinning MDS as articulated by Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh are demonstrably false and fully mirror the irrational hatred that defines BDS. And, as I see it, their proposed actions amount to an abandonment of our soldiers in the field in a time of war. In short, its time for Coulter and company to ‘rush’ through the "Five Stages of McCain."

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