Rush thinks Apartheid wasn't worth all the hand-wringing.
I sometimes listen to Rush Limbaugh on my way home for lunch because his grotesquerie kills my appetite a little and I'm trying to lose a couple of holiday pounds. Plus, he serves as an object lesson in over-eating because I can actually hear the pudge in his larynx and think "alright, that's it. No ice cream after lunch."
Anyway, on his show today he was mocking liberals and Democrats for trying to turn everything into a scandal. Specifically, he commented on a Washington Post news analysis entitled "
Despite Advocacy, Alito Is Not On Public's Radar Screen." This is because, according to Rush, liberals (a word from which he constantly removes the "e" - "lib'rals" - as if we aren't worth three whole syllables, I guess) have been trying to make everything the Bush Administration or the Republicans in power touch lately - torture, spying, Abramoff, Alito - into an impeachable breach of trust.
(As an aside, he says there "has been no spying on Americans without a warrant under the Bush Administration. It's a myth." Odd, I thought that once Rush's Lord and Master George W Bush admitted the truth of some demonstrable fact that Rush, in turn, could then admit its truth. My mistake. I guess, on this count, Rush is like a confused traditionalist Catholic who rejects Vatican II, but still insists on the infallibility of the Pope. That must be tough. I think he got that cochlear implant because he couldn't hear anybody over all the cognitive dissonance.)
Americans, says Rush, see through all the lib'ral attempts to drum up controversy over these bogus little "corruption" or "trustworthiness" issues. They hear so often that the Bush Administration and its Republican supporters are corrupt and inept (and, I would add, are bombarded with so many FACTUAL EXAMPLES of this corruption and ineptitude) that the public loses interest and can muster only a weak "meh" in response.
And that's as it should be, Rush says, because all these "scandals" are not scandals at all, but only examples of strong, right-minded governance that have been seized and propagandized by the lib'rals and the lib'ral media to attempt to lead an otherwise unwilling populace where lib'rals long to end up: Impeachment.
Rush's position in a nutshell: Nothing to see here, folks. No government overreach, no corruption, no lack of principles, no sacrifice of the weak to benefit the strong. Move along, for, despite what the lib'rals tell ya, all is well. You know, like during APARTHEID.
(pause for profanity-laced diatribe of incredulity)
Yeah. I know. That's what I said.
I shit you not, though. After belittling all these "pseudo-scandals" of the Bush Administration, he said, and I'm paraphrasing from here on out, that he was "reminded of the time, back in the `80s, when all these universities and businesses were racing to divest their interests in South Africa to protest Apartheid."
"Oh no," Rush mockingly whined, in his high-pitched-boo-hoo-morbidly-obese-infant voice he reserved when imitating lib'rals. "They have Nelson Mandela in jail. How could they? I mean, they even had the parliamentary hearings on television here in the US. And people just got tired of it. After a while nobody cared."
Focus on the through-line of the reasoning here. It goes: the Alito nomination, the torture, the spying, the corruption; they're no big deal to Rush Limbaugh. They're all simply business-as-usual. They are non-issues captured by lib'rals and spun into a falsely hyped cause celebre, unworthy of our attention or concern.
Just ... like ... Apartheid.
cross-posted at my site