Posted on 03/08/2009 4:43:26 PM PDT by lewisglad
When Michael Steele, the hapless chairman of the Republican Party, lost his bearings and called Rush Limbaugh's style ugly and incendiary, everyone knew it was the truth. But it was a perfect example of an inconvenient truth. The right wing has long used ugly, incendiary speech the way baseball players use steroids: to artificially pump themselves up. Limbaugh has taken to saying that he wants Obama's policies to fail because they spell the end of an America based on personal freedom. This isn't just a grotesque exaggeration; it disguises the very thing the right wing has been doing when it curtailed civil liberties in the name of national security.
Yet I know people who listen to Limbaugh every morning. They don't believe a word he says. They deplore his rhetorical sins. They detect the whiff of hypocrisy. Basically, they tune in out of sheer incredulity.
Limbaugh has been plowing the field of moral outrage for decades, but unlike Billy Sunday and the other hot-headed radio preachers who cashed in on social resentment in the Great Depression, Limbaugh threw out God. With no religious tradition to anchor himself, he can swing wider. Anything Limbaugh judges against is condemned, not by scripture, but simply by him being pissed off. Whatever Limbaugh hates -- however petty, personal, and arbitrary his animus -- is ipso facto wrong.
This represents a huge social shift in American values. Before the Eighties there were a handful of right-wing outlets on the air; now there are well over a thousand. They exist purely as steam vents. The common citizen gets to be pissed off by the millions, unrelentingly, without cease or solution, and in return, he is praised. To be outraged is to be morally superior.
The Limbaugh effect fueled the anti-morality of the Bush years. Under ordinary morality, the wretched plight of illegal immigrants, for example, must be considered along with the fact that they are breaking the law. Being poor, illiterate, and desperate, their human condition makes them more sympathetic than ruthless lawbreakers would be. But under anti-morality, if you hate immigrants because they are foreigners who don't look American enough, the argument is over. Your anger strips away tolerance, sympathy, and regard for "the other." Hence the almost imperial bearing of Limbaugh, the bland certainty that because he never stops being angry, he never stops being right.
The same goes for a wide range of "others" who mightily tick off Limbaugh's listeners: Muslims, feminists, people of color, gays, and environmentalists. There's no need to understand them or try and accommodate their views. Just put them through the wringer of Limbaugh's perpetual judgment and, poof, there's no problem anymore. Of course, the whole scheme is delusional. Problems aren't solved by remaining perpetually ticked off. Accords can't be reached when you demonize the other side.
By any sane account, Rush Limbaugh is dead weight when it comes to finding a solution to anything. Like Sarah Palin, his spiritual bride, he lurks in the shadow of the human psyche, expressing the dark anger, resentment, jealousy, and vindictiveness that society can never escape. And yet, the next time you tune into Limbaugh's censorious circus of insensitive scurrility, give him a kind thought. As far back as Mark Twain, the American character has been ornery. We secretly love rascals, bank robbers, tricksters, swindlers, hell raisers, and outlaws. And when we feel so inclined, we laugh at them. Rush Limbaugh may represent a toxic form of entertainment -- and the bile he spews bears no resemblance to true morality -- but the fact that America makes room for him is something to be proud of. I don't pray that he goes away. I pray that we can keep laughing, even if our grin is crooked, at the pranks of the eternal shadow who is our companion for life, whether we want him or not.
Yup, as has his older brother twelvepak!
In the next 4 yrs I think we will all need their guidance.
Ughh...just ughh.... I’ve gotta go take a Deecrap and wipe my Chopra
Honestly, how does someone become as morally confused as Deepak Chopra? What is the source of such an enfeebled ability to reason in the realm of morality? It’s not just that he’s wrong—rather, it is that he reverses good and evil, right and wrong, decent and indecent. So it’s more than just ignorance. It’s some kind of active process that is “jamming” his conscience and making it dysfunctional. It is a moral dementia.
You see, it’s all our fault. The problem began not with the terrorists, but with our response to them. This is logical—no different than how crime is caused by police, ignorance is caused by education, and disease is caused by doctors.
For Chopra, the film depicts, “with sickeningly convincing brutality, how tragically that approach has failed.” Follow the holy man’s paradoxical reasoning closely here. You see, the terrorists have not failed. Rather, it is our “sickeningly brutal response” to the terrorists that has failed.
Gagdad Bob takes on the Moral Dementia of Deepak Chopra. January 03, 2006
http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/2006/01/weakness-vanity-and-cruelty-glimpse.html
Not to mention his father Fujpak who turned Deepak’s world upside down. Or was that downside up? ;^)
Absolutely true. That’s why I call him Deep pockets Chopra.
Chopra is projecting, alright...hilarious.
Pray tell, who is this Cheepak Dopra? Has this POS performed any type of useful service to society?
In the view of pantheism, Rush and the zebra at the zoo have the same claim to divinity as Deepak himself. So what is he getting all bent out of shape about?
You really have become quite a crank on this subject. It really makes it very hard to take anything you say on any matter seriously.
Problems aren’t solved by remaining perpetually ticked off. Accords can’t be reached when you demonize the other side. ....projection of the Obama/Dem crowd.
well, sort of...he has shown why people drink kool aid via Jim Jones style and why such BS should be monitored closely...in his glorious world, as long as the money keeps rolling in, all is forgiven with reservations
This is the guy who gave the Pakistani terrorists aid and comfort on CNN.
Funny you should mention "jamming" -- it's a known propaganda technique, of sending powerful contradictory messages to critics: contradictory of their own good opinion of themselves, in order to trick them into reevaluation and self-examination at the very moment they are delivering their moral point.
Jamming is the equivalent of a blow to the groin. It's not just dishonest, it celebrates dishonesty as the road to victory. It's a sand-in-the-eyes technique, and the embodiment of the antislogan, "all's fair."
Homosexuals use this dishonest, hate-filled "jamming" a lot in their war against the preachers of Genesis and Leviticus -- and they do so openly, as described by Hunter Madsen and Marshall Kirk in After the Ball.
How stupid that is. No room for Jesus...
What a great picture.
If you have a colored printer, just click on the right of your mouse and you can save it and print it. I’ve done that several times. My latest was the picture of our Sarah with Reagan toasting her in the background. Came out beautifully.
He almost became our head honcho in the medical field but he turned Obama down. God is good.
You nailed it.
His rant is hateful, bigoted, intolerant, and filled with inaccuracies. He is displaying ignorance and fear of "the other", to use his phrase. Just what he is complaining that Limbaugh does.
Agreed. He's also addicted to fame, and will say any politically correct thing to get invitations to talk shows.
Pardon my "judgmentalism", but major league greed and vanity are pretty big failings for a (self-appointed) spiritual master.
I'm obviously way behind on this thread, ( reading it Monday), but that comment made my morning! Too funny !
Yep, I might give that a shot.
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