Rush Limbaugh: The Boil Lanced

Sometimes, in medicine, you have to dissect open a wound and follow it from the surface downward into a deep cavity, to really appreciate the extent of the pathology. One of the most common instances of this is a a peri rectal abscess, which can, once excavated, wrap around all sorts of anatomy and be far more extensive than anyone appreciated when they first began cutting.

So let's explore, layer by layer, the peri rectal abscess which is Rush Limbaugh. I have thought, until now, of Limbaugh as the central nervous system of the Republican party, but now I realize, he is the the peri rectal abscess. But then, rectum, brain, when talking Republicans, I repeat myself.

Limbaugh attacked Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown University law student who had the temerity to say she thought the Jesuit institution, which provides health insurance to its non Catholic workers and students ought to include in that health insurance contraceptive coverage, which she considers part of health care for women.

To his credit, and typical of the Jesuits, the president of Georgetown, who disagrees with Fluke, quoted Saint Augustine, "Let us , on both sides, lay aside all arrogance. Let us not, on either side, claim we have already discovered the truth."

You got to love the Jesuits. Mad Dog was on the faculty of that Jesuit institution for nearly 30 years, and if there is an order in The Church, which can disarm you with its open mindedness, it has to be the Jesuits. But I digress.

Rush Limbaugh.

Rush Limbaugh says Ms. Fluke went "before a Congressional committee and says that she must be paid to have sex. What does that make her? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She's having so much sex she can't afford the contraception. she wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? We're the pimps. The johns." And then he adds, the coup de grace, saying if we are all be asked to pay for her having sex, we ought to demand something for our money, "We want you to post the videos [of you having sex] on line so we can all watch."

Whew!

Where do you begin? There's a lot going on in there.

First, there is the idea that a woman who asks for coverage for an IUD or an oral contraception is asking to be paid for sex. If she had a health insurance account, from which she could withdraw money for any health care cost, would she still be asking to be paid for having sex?

When most people think of a woman asking to be paid for sex, they are thinking about a woman who structures a deal with a client: I will have sex with you if you will pay me money. Here we have a woman who says, I would like treatment which will protect me if I behave in a way you do not want me to behave, but I want to avoid some very unhappy outcomes.

Before we go on: The insurance payments for Georgetown students do not come out of the taxpayer's pocket. The payments come from the pockets of the parents of the Georgetown students, for the most part.

And then there is the notion that insuring someone engaged in a risky behavior is something the insured is being paid "to do?" Consider the auto wreck. Have we paid the woman who was knocked unconscious and fractured to be knocked unconscious and fractured?

If we paid for the installation of a seat belt in her car, would we be paying her to have a wreck?

We want to prevent breast cancer, so we pay for mammograms. If a woman is found to have breast cancer, we do not say we are paying her to have breast cancer.

Then there is the usual Limbaugh escalation to moral outrage: If you make me pay for your coverage, then you are making me complicit in your crime of having a need for contraception, and that makes me both a pimp and a john, a participant in illegal and immoral sex.

Well, up to this point, there is a certain logic: You are demanding other people become involved in the implications of behavior they may not approve of and so they have a right to feel possibly complicit. It's all hyperbolic and over the top and exploded into outer space, but there is a shred of a line of reasoning.

Until we get to the sex videos.

And this is not exactly new with Rush Limbaugh.

I well remember, during the Clinton years, a twenty minute rumination by Rush Limbaugh about the Clintons having sex at the White House. First he elaborated about how fat Bill Clinton had become. Then he expounded on how fat Hiliary was. Then he put them in a bed in the Lincoln bedroom. Then he cackled about the creaking and moaning of the wooden timbers of the Lincoln bed, straining under the weight of the Clintons having sex and on ad nauseam.

What was really peculiar and striking was the detail with which he described the sex and duration of his description. He simply would not let go of it.

He was getting rather breathless describing it.

It was Clinton porn, right there on the radio, courtesy of Rush Limbaugh.

Limbaugh had his paid guffawers in the studio, laughing like drunken hyenas at a fraternity party, of course, but he was stoking his own flame.

I am not a psychiatrist. I am not even much of a fan of pop psychology.

But I would say, this man has a problem with sex.

I mean, just look at the man.

I don't want to even imagine or explore why he might have a problem with sex, with women, especially with women who, while they might want to have sex with some male, would not under any circumstances want to consider having sex with Rush Limbaugh.

Even thinking about Rush Limbaugh having sex has got to be a pretty disturbing proposition for most people on the planet, no matter what their gender.

None of this would be particularly germane to a political website, were it not for the particular psychopath we are considering.

After all, Don Imus is just as rancid, but Imus, as right wing as he is, does not inform, does not formulate thought for the Republican Party. Rush Limbaugh does. He is the central nervous system for the Tea Party Republicans, for Joe Six pack Republicans.

Rush Limbaugh is the pacemaker for the heart of the Republican Party, Fox News.

And this is what they are made of.

Yikes!

The Big Tent: Republican Party Style

The Republican Big Tent

Sometimes Hendrick Hertzberg is simply on his game.

Writing in the New Yorker, March 5 he encapsulates what the Republican Party has become:

"An excitable, overlapping assortment of Fox News friends, Limbaugh dittoheads, Tea Party animals, war whoopers, nativists, Christianist fundamentalists, a la carte Catholics (anti-abortion, yes; anti-torture, no), anti-Rooseveltians (Franklin and Theodore), global warming denialists, post-Confederate white Southrons, creationists, birthers, market idolators, Europe demonizers, and gun fetishists."

And that's not to mention, Ayn Rand idolaters, Ronald Reagan worshipers, super patriots, endless war advocates, labor union bashers, American Royalists, constitutional originalists (whatever that may be) Bible thumpers, anti contraceptive, anti pre marital sex, anti sex Puritans.

And that's just the short list.

These are not people you can talk to. These are people you have to defeat, dismember and drive a stake through their hearts because, if you do not they will re emerge like so many zombie vampires and try to kill the Republic.

A Republic, as Ben Franklin once said, "If you can keep it."

A Republic requires a loyal opposition. That, we ain't got.

Moral Hazard

Bail Them Out? Think of the Moral Hazard!

Downloaded to my Kindle are books examining the origins of the financial crisis which surely would have precipitated the second Great Depression, had the federal government not acted to avert it.

This appears to be a case of having studied history and as a result, having been able to avoid repeating it.

The origins, the history of how we got to the brink is, like all history, one long argument, and surely, there are many factors, but sometimes it helps to be simple minded and unencumbered by too many facts; Alexander, after all, cut through the Gordian knot with a single stroke, seeing a simple solution.

In my case, being simple minded, the story looks clear enough: For years Republicans agitated to rescind the safeguards, the regulations, placed on the American banking system after the 1929 Depression. The Republicans argued our economy could not compete with other economies around the world as long as our bankers were shackled by regulations which prevented bankers from engaging in the imaginative, creative, innovative practices which the rest of the world was developing. Unleash the animal ferocity of market forces, the Republicans cried, and the Democrats, as usual, not having the courage of their own convictions, not wanting to look like the slumped shouldered, wispy voiced wusses the Republicans said they were--the Democrats meekly acquiesced and allowed the repeal of a law called (and I've likely misspelled) Glass-Speigel Act.

So the bankers were now free to take the most carefully examined and reliable form of personal debt--home mortgages--and to buy and bundle these as collateral and sell these as stocks on the market.

Of course, as soon as mortgages became a commodity, the quality of the work which had made mortgages so safe and valuable evaporated, and the brokers didn't care what they were selling as long as they had something to sell, so the bankers rushed to find any names to affix to any paper mortgage and a lot of people found themselves new home owners and that phony phrase, The American Dream, became just that. A dream, not a reality.

Of course, as is true of most shoddy products, these mortgages looked good for fleeting moment but with time, they fell apart like cardboard shoes.

Then the whole thing collapsed, right on President Obama's head.

The Republicans, who had been the instigator of the whole fiasco then blamed it all on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the most available scape goats with a government connection, and loudly decried any form of relief for mortgage holders, for the average guy on the street, for the fools, as a form of "Moral Hazard."

After all, the mortgage holder was fool enough to sign a contract for a house he could not afford--now he had to take his bankruptcy and the loss of his home like any gambler who had lost a foolish bet.

Of course, there was no moral hazard talk in connection with the sleazy brokers or the sleazy bank officers or the sleazy Republican politicians who had built, marketed and sold the cardboard shoes.
No, all the moral hazard belonged to the little guy on Main Street, not to the Wall Street Crowd.

The Wall Street crowd had long since got its bonuses and moved on.

A Republican Mount Rushmore

A stock question at every presidential debate is: Who are your heroes?

We have, in New Hampshire a nice granite surface, recently transformed from the Old Man of the Mountain into a blank palate.

With Republican majorities in the House of Delegates and the state Senate, we ought to consider whose faces might be carved into the stone.

For sheer, unbridled veneration, surely Ronald Reagan will get the nod.

As the man who most clearly enunciates the Republican gospel and as a man who inspires all Republican politicians and provides the phrases and the style to Republican values, Rush Limbaugh belongs up there.

And for pure gamesmanship and model behavior, Mitch McConnell, too long neglected deserves his place.

And one more thing, now that we are talking symbols. Do we really want an elephant? I mean, elephants have long memories and the last thing we want is to remember things. The Depression and how we got there, the rescue from the Depression and how that happened, the great Recession and how we got there, and how Obama averted it. Republicans live in the present. We have been called vulture capitalists, but you know, vultures eat only the dead. So we ought to consider a better pack animal, one who derives his strength from falling in line and coordinating attacks: The hyena, a better idea.

Destroying the Village to Save It

We Had to Destroy That Village, Mr. Ryan, To Save It

Paul Ryan presented a plan to convert Medicare into a coupon care plan, where Medicare insured would receive a coupon for a set amount every year, (some estimated $8,000 per person annually) to cover all medical expenses for that year.
A coronary by pass surgery runs about $250,000, all of which is covered under current Medicare rules.

Virtually every Republican voted for this bill, to kill Medicare.

Ryan and the Republicans justified voting to convert Medicare to Coupon Care, as a way to reduce the deficit they had dreamed up (to justify killing Medicare.)

Class Warfare

My Success Does Not Diminish Your Worth--That's the Politics of Envy

Republicans are really admirable when it comes to marketing.
I've been watching Mad Men re runs and I can see the art now, as it applies to selling ideas.
So Ritt Romney is not "filthy rich," he is "Successful."
And the fact the rich are rich is not of concern to those who have been cut out...the rich are hard working and successful and they have played the game by the rules and those who are not rich, are not deserving.
The big concept is that if I am rich and have a bigger slice of the pie, you ought to be happy for me, and someday, when you are rich I will be happy for you. And my big slice does not make you any poorer, because when we grow the economy, the pie gets bigger and even your small slice of that big pie will be more than you can eat.
Just look at African Americans, who travel back to Tanzania or Liberia and come home saying they are lucky to be living in America. Even our poorest citizens are doing better in America, because the American pie is so big.


Nice fantasy, if you can sell it.

Entitlement Envy

Entitlement Envy

A recent survey of Medicare and Social Security recipients noted that only 40% of those receiving payments realized these checks came from the federal government

Of Republican recipients of Medicare and Social Security, a substantial number say they are opposed to "entitlements" and would like to see the budget deficit addressed by reducing "entitlements."

When Republican candidates like Mitt Romney and Ron Santorum say they want to cut "entitlements" recipients of Medicare and Social Security apparently do not connect the proposed cuts to the checks they are themselves receiving in the mail

If you ask these same people how they feel about "entitlements," they are against entitlements, which they think of as government handouts to the undeserving
If you ask them whether they would be willing to give up Medicare or Social Security, they say they deserve these benefits because they earned them.
This might be called "Entitlement Envy."
Once again, the Republicans have been masters of rebranding. Call Medicare and Social Security, two programs they have been hungering to devour and destroy for decades, "entitlements," and you can likely slip by many voters the actual fact these voters would be hurt badly if the Republican bosses got their way.