The Rush Limbaugh way…

I guess this is supposed to be racist or something. I thought it was pretty funny.

So now that Rush Limbaugh has moved to the new “Rush Radio 1200″ in Boston, they’re playing him on the morning drive in. Presumably, when Howie Carr leaves WRKO he’ll go there and take that morning slot. Anyhow, I was listening this morning and caught this bit on Net Neutrality:

What’s coming way beyond this, what’s coming in the fall is the deceptively named net neutrality. The easiest way to understand this is to think of a Fairness Doctrine for the Internet. Now, how would this work? Let’s say that you want to go Google or Bing, you want to search the mating habits of the Australian rabbit bat. Net neutrality would require that every search engine produce an equal number of results that satisfy every disagreement about the issue. Yep. And that’s going to happen. That pretty much is going to happen. And the White House is in bed with Google. The White House and Google are bedmates, Google, largest search engine. Already, if you do a search of me on Google and you look at the crap that comes up, it’s by design and on purpose. It’s literal crap, I mean the most obscure places you never knew existed with comments about what happened on this program every day. It took a long time, but we had to really work hard at getting our website to pop up in a search of Google, our own website.

So in the era of net neutrality — and this is where the Google-White House partnership comes into play — the results of any search, let’s say you want to search abortion, or you want to search the health care bill, they want to control what you see. They want to control what your options are. They can’t really control the content, it’s too massive and it’s too big. What they want to try to do is limit your access to it and have that access flavored toward whatever particular point of view the administration wants supported. Now, that is coming. That’s why they want all this new broadband. That’s why they want all this new speed. That’s why they want all this new access. It’s not to own it; it’s to control the content as best they can. Just think of it as Fairness Doctrine for the Internet. I’m not making this up. I guarantee you that’s what’s coming. I think this is a fait accompli. I think it practically has been voted on, done deal.

Rush evidently thought that this was so good that he decided to publish it on his website. For the record, this couldn’t be more wrong. All net neutrality says is that if you’re selling Internet service, that said service adhere to the published standards of Internet protocol (IP), and that providers cannot intentionally degrade service from particular websites or from the use of particular programs whom they don’t like or who refuse to pay a ransom to the ISP.

I’ve written extensively on Net Neutrality in the past. Click on the tag to see everything I’ve written on it. In short, my position is that I’m in favor of it so long most consumers continue to have no choice in broadband providers at their home. And I don’t subscribe to the FCC’s definition of broadband. My definition would be “If you can watch YouTube and Hulu at their highest definition without skipping, you have broadband.” DSL doesn’t cut it for that.

I have deeply mixed feelings about this whole Letterman thing. If you’re unfamiliar, Letterman basically made a joke about Sarah Palin’s daughter being raped by a New York Yankee. And then followed it up with another joke implying that another of Palin’s daughters was a prostitute having something to do with Eliot Spitzer. The first joke appeared to have been made about Palin’s 14 yr old daughter, but rather than apologize when called on it, Letterman basically said he got the daughters mixed up, and that people should be able to take a joke.

The National Organization of Women gives their roundup and condemnation here.

That has caused at least one former-liberal turned conservative, Cynthia Yockey, to call for conservatives to get über-organized, and engage in an intense letter writing campaign to get Letterman fired. After all, that’s what liberals do, and having just switched sides, she views Republicans as giving up too easily:

Sebastian says it will take 30 days of daily letter-writing to CBS and Letterman’s advertisers. That’s because for the first two or three weeks, they’ll just wait for the tempest to blow over. Not only do we have to keep it up, we have to make it build. This is our line in the sand. Letterman MUST BE FIRED NOW!!

Yockey goes on to list the address of the companies who advertise with Letterman, attempting to start a campaign to take him down.

On the one hand, I do admire the fighting spirit, and I do believe that Republicans can use more of it. Republican legislators in particular have a way of negotiating with themselves before going to negotiate with Democrats, and once they’ve done that, there’s very often little left to support. It’s this fact that has supporters demoralized, particularly after eight years of Bush (more here).

But on the other hand, this type of tactic has long bothered me, and is, in a sense, the very tactic used by Letterman himself against the Palins. The tactic I’m talking about is social ostracization. By turning people who hold particular viewpoints into social pariahs, the Left hopes to end debate on subjects where they will lose. For democracy to work properly, we need to be able to debate everything, come to some conclusions, and then move on. And in our country’s history we’ve openly debated things that today we would consider absurd to debate, things such as whether we should own slaves, whether blacks should have citizenship rights, whether women should be allowed to vote, whether alcohol should be legal, and many more. And in each instance, we reached a societal conclusion and moved on.

But far too often, the Left today seeks to stifle debate, whether it be by organizing protesters to shout down conservative speakers on college campuses, or by turning those who disagree with them into laughing stocks and social pariahs. They’re not debating anything, they’re shutting off debate. And as a result, issues that need to be resolved by debate just fester, and often become uncivil.

I’m reminded of a time when Rush Limbaugh was a spokesman for Pizza Hut. It was in the mid-1990′s, and I guess I thought nothing of a fat guy hocking pizza on TV. But when I was over a gay friend’s house that I saw a gay newspaper instructing its readers to write to the executives of Pizza Hut saying how offended they were, how they wouldn’t frequent the joint, etc. I was pretty appalled. I mean, granted, Limbaugh is a political figure, he’s pretty much in the mainstream of conservative political thought. He’s certainly not a bigot or anything. So what the heck? Should Pizza Hut not advertise to conservatives? Were these gay people really big Pizza Hut fans in the first place? I mean, seriously…

Years later, I was working at LoJack, and the CEO of the company at the time was an old tight-fisted yankee type. I was friends with the #2 guy in marketing while I was there. LoJack advertised almost exclusively on radio at the time, because they found that people weren’t thinking of car accessories unless they were in their car. And of course, the biggest show we advertised on was the Howard Stern show. Of course, the Howard Stern show was despised by religious types, who were attempting the same social pariah tactics that the Left often uses, and they sent countless letters complaining. But the marketing department had to run a conspiracy within the company to keep those letters from reaching the CEO’s desk, because if they did reach his desk, and if he was made aware of what went on on the Howard Stern Show, he would have certainly pulled the advertising, something that would have had a seriously deleterious effect on the company’s marketing efforts.

Which I guess brings me to my next point, that these tactics are rarely effective, and when they are, they aren’t. The Howard Stern show would have survived without LoJack, and Rush Limbaugh is rich beyond most people’s wildest dreams without the endorsement of Pizza Hut. So really, what exactly are you trying to accomplish here?

Finally, these kinds of tactics amount to little more than bullying. It’s schoolyard stuff that we should have long since grown out of, but some of us just don’t. Rosslyn Smith has a great piece up today on this point, and I would strongly encourage you to read the whole thing:

For years now much of our comedy has gotten increasingly mean. It laughs less and less at the contradictions inherent in the human condition and increasingly picks out and personalizes targets to demean and humiliate. In the world of the comedian-cum-bully, wit has been replaced with name calling and the wry irony of the nerdish observer with the swagger of the schoolyard bully who decides who is among the in group and who are “them”, the outcasts to be made the butt of every mean spirited politically correct joke. Name calling is the stock in trade of the bully. So is telling the target who protests, “What’s a matter, can’t you take a joke?”

There’s a great Family Guy clip illustrating this point, but I’ll have to wait until I get home to find it as they block video at work.

But to be fair, Smith does think that some sort of reaction is warranted:

Allowing the bullies to go unmolested has hurt the party among other voters, too. One lesson I learned when I moved to rural America is that while blowing your own horn doesn’t cut it here, defending one’s honor does. The reticence of party insiders to challenge the elitist liberal media culture has been a huge source of dissatisfaction with the Republican brand among the rank and file outside the major urban areas. Nowhere has it been more apparent than with the media scorn heaped on Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber and the me-too echo of certain party insiders anxious to keep their credentials on the Sunday news show circuit

I agree that some sort of reaction is warranted, I’m not sure exactly what it is. But I’m not sure getting Letterman fired is it, or will amount to much if successful, We need to be able to speak freely to each other in this country, to debate and resolve political issues with our intellects. I think that it’s appropriate to respond to demagoguery with demagoguery. And I think a below the belt punch or insult is deserving of another. So here goes my effort in that vein:

Fuck you David Letterman. I hope your bastard son gets raped. And when you die, I will seek out your resting place and take a dump on it.

UPDATE: Letterman has apologized. Transcript.

UPDATE 2: Jim Treacher gets it right. I suppose I should also say I do not, in fact, hope Letterman’s son gets raped. But I still reserve the right to take a dump on his grave, if only because that actually is funny.

UPDATE 3: Found the Family Guy clip:

Sully has been asking where all the conservatives were during the Bush years of profligate spending? His implication has been that they were all boot clicking loyalists during the Bush years, supporting everything he did, and then they turned on a dime and all of a sudden got concerned with spending when Obama got into office.

Now this sort of accusation is impossible to refute when lobbed generally against the right in America or against the right online, but Sully made the critical mistake yesterday of claiming Glenn Reynolds had never opposed Bush’s spending:

But it seems odd to describe this as anything but a first stab at creating opposition to the Obama administration’s spending plans, manned by people who made no serious objections to George W. Bush’s. The tea-parties are as post-partisan as Reynolds, one of the most relentlessly partisan bloggers on the web.

The problem here is that Reynolds came under fire just two years ago from none other than Rush Limbaugh for NOT BEING PARTISAN ENOUGH, and in effect, saying the Republicans deserved to lose due to abandoning their principles. Relevant links to Reynolds and Rush me discussing Rush (Limbaugh’s link produces a 404).

Seriously, even easily verifiable facts don’t seem to matter to Sullivan any more. He should probably stick to rick rolling and staring out his window. It’s hard to screw those things up.

So Paul Ryan writes a column in the WSJ today detailing what the Republican opposition will be to the Obama budget. Here’s what he writes:

The plan works to accomplish four main goals: 1) fulfill the mission of health and retirement security; 2) control our nation’s debts; 3) put the economy on a path of growth and leadership in the global economy; and 4) preserve the American legacy of leaving the next generation better off.

Uh huh. So long as the Republicans view their #1 job as “fulfilling the mission of health and retirement security” they are different from the Democrats only in degree. Contrast that with Rush Limbaugh.

There’s been a lot of talk about wanting or not wanting Barack Obama to “fail” as of late. I thought some clarity would be called for, as the whole line of inquiry can seem pretty nasty.

Those who want Obama to fail want him to fail to implement his agenda. This is decidedly different from wanting his agenda to fail to work.

I’m reminded of what Tip O’Neill said after losing the famous vote to lower tax rates, thus implementing Reagan’s agenda. After attempting to stop Reagan’s agenda from being implemented on the floor of the house, O’Neill lost the final vote. Knowing Reagan’s agenda was about to be implemented, he made a televised call to Reagan and said to him, “Well I hope for the sake of the country, you’re right Mr. President, because you just got what you wanted.”

You can, of course, see the difference here.

I am an unabashed capitalist. I do not want to see Barack Obama’s agenda implemented, and I should hope he fails to do so. But should it get implemented, I should hope, for my own sake and that of the country, that I am wrong about what the consequences would be.

But for the record, neither I nor, to the best of my knowledge, others who oppose Obama’s measures, wish ill on our country, or wish for his policies, should they be implemented, to fail. But something tells me that that is what certain media types want you to think that people like me wish for, namely failure for his policies to succeed should they be implemented. There is a world of difference there.

UPDATE: David Limbaugh on his brother Rush:

Rush wants Obama to fail in his unabashed efforts to permanently turn this center-right nation radically toward the left. He does not want America to fail. Rush is unabashedly rooting for America. And anyone with the slightest ability or moral clarity to make mental distinctions understands this.

Yet many have deliberately twisted Rush’s meaning to suggest that he wants America, under Obama’s presidency, to fail.

So after reading many laudatory pieces regarding Limbaugh’s speech at CPAC I went ahead and tried to read it. And honestly, I could only get about half-way through. It’s basically a rambling mess. Not that I found myself disagreeing with any of it particularly, but it just wasn’t very coherent or cogent. I didn’t see any point.

Maybe that’s considered folksy or real or whatever, but it seems to me that a meeting of supposedly great minds should not have trouble finding someone to deliver a better keynote speech than that.

Howie Carr got me laughing with this one. How do you know if you’re a moonbat?

You believed the National Enquirer totally when they busted Rush Limbaugh.

You don’t believe a word of the National Enquirer now that it’s busting John Edwards.

Read Howie Carr.

Drudge is reporting that Limbaugh has just signed a $400 million contract with Clear Channel and Premiere Radio to be on the air through 2016. Two points immediately come to mind.

First off, I don’t think that this deal is as big as Howard Stern’s turned out to be at Sirius. I could be wrong, but he’s made a similar amount of money in 5 years, not eight. Though part of that is locked up in Sirius stock, whose fortunes are hanging on a decision from the FCC.

Secondly, this is a desperation move on the part of Clear Channel. Commercial radio is dying, and only a handful of stars can pull in the listeners. Limbaugh jumped the shark already this election season, and his message, which was very resonant in the 1980′s, doesn’t carry the same resonance in a world where what were once called conservatives are split up and bickering in a post-Bush era. The best analogy I can draw is Microsoft buying Yahoo, or maybe even IBM buying Lotus.

George Will writes a must read piece on why Barack Obama must not choose Hillary Clinton as his vice presidential running mate. His closer says it all:

Clinton, having risen politically in her husband’s orbit, is a moon shining with reflected light. Were Obama to hitch himself to her, he would reduce himself to a reflection of a reflection.

That just about says it.

Read George Will.

Oh, and one more thing, that’s two conservatives today who are breathing a sigh of relief and openly thanking the Democrats for not having nominated Hillary Clinton as their standard bearer. So much for Operation Chaos.

UPDATE: Related thoughts on Limbaugh from Myhraf.