Posted on 03/05/2012 5:18:47 AM PST by SJackson
Rush Limbaugh has got the progressives pitching a fit over some remarks on his radio show about a Georgetown University law student named Sandra Fluke. Fluke had made the preposterous claim, while addressing House Democrats over President Obama’s rule forcing Catholic institutions to pay for contraception, that the cost of birth control was prohibitive for Georgetown law students. Limbaugh responded by calling Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute” who is “having so much sex, she can’t afford the contraception; she wants you and me – the taxpayers – to pay her.”
Progressive dudgeon hit the stratosphere. Democrat Representative Louise Slaughter wrote a letter that decried Limbaugh’s “sexually charged, patently offensive, and obscene language” and “atrocious and hurtful words.” MSNB’s Jonathan Capehart called the comments “hateful” and “rude,” and said they were “low” even for Limbaugh. Democrat “strategist” Krystal Ball (sic) called Limbaugh “despicable,” “disgusting,” and a “loathsome individual.” The Washington Post’s Jamila Bey called the remarks “hate speech” and claimed they “crossed into the realm of sexual harassment.” The president of Georgetown said the remarks were “misogynistic, vitriolic, and a misrepresentation of the position of our student.”
And in the midst of crisis in the Middle East and the ticking entitlement time bomb, President Obama found time personally to call Fluke and deplore Limbaugh’s “inappropriate personal attacks.” Following the loss of some advertisers, Limbaugh apologized for what he called his “attempt to be humorous.”
I’m not interested in Limbaugh’s comments or whether or not they are “appropriate.” When you enter the political kitchen, as Fluke did, you should be ready to get scorched. As always, more interesting is the reaction to the comments. And that reaction once again reveals the monstrous hypocrisy of progressives. The folks who proclaim their sensitivity, nuanced thinking, therapeutic concern for the tender sensibilities of others, and open-mindedness have always been the most vicious, bigoted, narrow-minded, crude, dogmatic, conformist people on the planet. Take everybody’s exhibit number one, the HBO blowhard Bill Maher, who’s on record calling Sarah Palin a “c—t” and inviting Jon Huntsman to “suck my d—k.” I don’t remember the President calling Palin or Hunstman to regret “that our political discourse has become debased,” as his flack Jay Carney put it. Nor is anyone demanding that Obama-supporting superpac Priorities USA Action should return the million bucks Maher gave it. Why should they? Remember when Obama called the Tea Party folks “tea-baggers,” a vulgar sexual term? “Appropriate” and “debased” are in the eye of the progressive beholder, and depend on the ideology of whoever is being attacked.
Of course, in the progressive hysteria we are also subjected to the “chilling free speech” charge, as when Fluke on the Today Show Friday said that Limbaugh’s comments were an “attempt to silence me.” She apparently doesn’t think that her threat to sue Limbaugh––the left’s favorite WMD when it comes to destroying free speech–– might be an attempt to silence him. In fact, rather than “silencing” her, Limbaugh’s comments have given an obscure law student the biggest platform on the planet, at the same time Limbaugh’s apology suggests that it is his free speech that’s been “chilled.” And are the media so dumb that they don’t see the absurdity of a guest on the Today Show claiming to its 5.6 million viewers that someone tried to “silence” her?
More important than occasioning a display of progressive hypocrisy is Fluke’s claim that law students at a prestigious private school can’t afford birth control. If Fluke could produce one of her colleagues who doesn’t have an I-phone, an I-pad, an I-pod, a high-speed internet connection, or cable television; who doesn’t spend $20 a week at Starbucks, or has to eat ramen every night, or never takes a vacation, never eats out, never goes to bars or concerts; or who has parents on welfare who can’t contribute to her education, or works part-time at a burger joint, or has any other characteristics of someone so poor she can’t budget for birth control pills, then maybe she’d have a point. But even then, condoms are available for free at numerous clinics and even at some retail stores. And God forbid we should suggest that the young lady just say no.
The cost of birth control, though, is just a smokescreen. More pernicious is the assumption that, as Fluke puts it, “This is about women’s health.” In other words, unplanned pregnancy is a disease, something that like breast cancer just sort of happens to a woman, and for which she bears no responsibility. That’s how House minority leader Nancy Pelosi sees it. Speaking of the failed Senate amendment to allow religious organizations not to fund contraception, Pelosi said that the measure was “part of the Republican agenda of disrespecting women’s health issues [by] allowing employers to cut … basic health services for women, like contraception, mammograms, prenatal and cervical-cancer screenings.”
Since pregnancy is a disease, then, someone else should pay the premium for insuring against the consequences of a woman’s risky, careless behavior. She shouldn’t even be responsible for grabbing some free condoms at the clinic and taking care of the risk herself.
Look even closer, and we see the real progressive agenda at work: increasing the power and reach of the federal government and its bureaucratic minions by discrediting and marginalizing any other source of authority over our behavior, especially institutions of moral authority such as churches. That way the government can aggrandize its power by relieving people of the responsibility for their choices through palliating their damaging consequences while making others pay for them. Tocqueville noticed 150 years ago this tendency of centralized power to expand by infantilizing the citizenry. Centralized governments, Tocqueville remarked, act as “if they thought themselves responsible for the actions and private conditions of their subjects, as if they had undertaken to guide and to instruct each of them in the various incidents of life and to secure their happiness quite independently of their own consent.” Moreover, this insidious paternalism corrupts the people, who “invoke its assistance in all their necessities,” and who “fix their eyes upon the administration as their mentor and their guide.” But all for a price: the diminishment of our freedom and autonomy, both of which require accepting the burdensome and sometimes painful responsibility for the consequences of our actions.
Our modern progressives, however, have added a new twist to this process. Removing sexual behavior from the strictures of traditional authority, and then taking responsibility for the consequences of careless sex like pregnancy, make state-subsidized sexual pleasure a seemingly cost-free distraction from the erosion of freedom and autonomy, as Aldous Huxley foresaw in Brave New World. Sexual freedom now trumps political freedom, and sexual pleasure is the honey that sweetens the bitter poison of diminished freedom. Hence the progressive’s elevation of contraception and abortion into “rights,” which puts the necessary discussion of the obvious destructive consequences of sexual promiscuity out of bounds. But these “rights” have nothing to do with “women’s health” and everything to do with the progressive government’s aim of consolidating and increasing its power at the expense of other authorities, like churches, that might have something to say about the personally and socially destructive price of those “rights.” That’s the real significance of the uproar Rush Limbaugh caused: not his crudity or insensitivity, but calling attention to the centrality of sexual libertinism to the progressive agenda of increasing government power at the expense of individual freedom.
Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com
URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/03/05/the-real-point-of-the-left%e2%80%99s-uproar-over-limbaugh/
Now that the truth has come out about who this “fluke” really is maybe Rush should back-off the apology and school the press in leftist disinformation and red-herring politics.
The morals of this country are in the toilet and they aren’t coming out.
Obama fundraiser Bill Maher Calls Sarah Palin a Female Vulgarism, NOW Stays Mum (3/22/2011)
UPDATED: MSNBC’s Ed Schultz Calls Radio Host Laura Ingraham A ‘Right Wing Slut’
The Left has raised “Feigned Outrage” to an art form.
This is about a blank check for planned parenthood...
If 1% of the 12 million female college students currently enrolled in school signed up for the Sandra Fluke plan at $1250 a year through Planned Parenthood... They would pick up about $150 Million in revenue... At a 30% profit margin... That’s enough to underwrite every single abortion performed in the US last year.
Super easy to offer free abortion if the victim... Err client... Agrees to 2 years on the Sandra Fluke Birth Control Plan.
Look for a backlash against this nonsense down the road.
I would bet they’re trying to shut him down before he has Arpaio on and starts discussing his findings.
I agree, the damage is done, Fluke exposed for what she is, an activist, slut, and prostitute - damn the torpedoes Rush, full speed ahead..
Rush Limbaugh’s ONLY crime was having the nerve to say of a LIBERAL woman, on the air, the something similar to that countless LIBERALS have proudly said about Republican women, starting with Sarah Palin (Letterman) and encompassing ANY and ALL women who are conservative.
Can anyone tell me of an indignant response to any of the vile and hateful things said by the LEFT regarding the women of the RIGHT? (crickets chirp)
Rush’s show today is going to be epic.
Bet he gains a million listeners over this.
The Left IS everything that it claims to denounce.
The Left claims to fight against bigotry, narrow-mindedness, oppression, and conformity, yet Leftists are among the most bigotted, narrow-minded, dogmatic, oppressive, and conformist people on the planet.
But Democrats strategy is to make this a fight about Republicans trying to stop women from using birth control which would be a pretty unpopular position to take.
The real issue in my opinion is the difference between health insurance and welfare. Should the government force either sex to have to pay for the others treatments that can never apply to them? Is that insurance? With my auto insurance I have to buy liability insurance, but not collision. In this case liability insurance would be insurance to cover manadated emergency room treatment.
Then there is the issue of employer mandates and what they should be forced to pay for. Obama is winning that argument by claiming the employers dont really pay for the BC that he is forcing them to pay for. So who can argue over manadates that cost no one anything ?? (if thatwas really true.)
Why blame the corrupt MSM? How did Boehner respond?
The real point seems to be that some dame can assert a RIGHT to have government supplement her activity of spreading her lags, and that RIGHT trumps Rush’s right to freedom of speech.
We DO NOT PROTECT FREEDOM OF SPEECH ONLY TO THOSE WE AGREE WITH!!!!!!!
I should add more parentheses:
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Do you have a shred of evidence that Limbaugh has ANY intention of having Arpaio on his show?
I’d love to see him start his show out with:
Great weekend, folks .... great weekend. First off today, I’d like to welcome the following list of new advertisers to the Rush Limbaugh show ......
Of course they’d be the next target of the Left thugs, but if they sign up during this fake ‘storm of indignation’ at Rush, they’d know what they were in for.
Less than one year ago the elft was ceelbrating “sluts” with Slutwalks and Sluts for Choice rallies, one of them was called “As slutty as I want to be”. The MSM highlighted them and loved them.
Has this really been forgotten, even by the WASH TIMES?
The Bible LSD= LUST, SIN, DEATH (James 1:15)
Yes! Sin will take you futher than you want to go
and sin will keep you longer than you want to stay
and sin will cost you more than you want to pay!
“For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Romans 6:23)
“If we walk in the light as He[Jesus] is in the light, we have fellowship one with another; and the blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin.” (1 John 1:7)
“If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves; and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” (1 John 1:8-9)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.