As promised, I’m posting some of today’s Rush Limbaugh program. This will be a regular feature because I think it si critical that the media and everyone else realize that so-called “fake news” isn’t anything novel. Rush Limbaugh has been an absolute savant when it comes to twisting and exaggerating and manufacturing facts. By the end of one of his programs, his listeners are actually left with a net negative working knowledge of politics. Daily listeners build up that deficit until they inhabit a dangerous fantasy world filled with all manner of hatred and evil liberals.
Last night Farheed Zakaria hosted a two-hour special review of the Barack Obama presidency. Inevitably, Republican obstruction was discussed. Here’s Limbaugh’s reaction.
Transcript: [Zakaria] pontificated as ominous music played, ‘Did race play a role in the brick wall of Republican resistance to Barack Obama?'” Mr. Zakaria, there wasn’t any resistance. That’s not quite the…
There was all kinds of resistance. But not official. The Republicans announced every year they weren’t gonna oppose Obama. The Republicans made it clear they were not going to try to stop Obama, not legislatively. Now, you might have had individual Republicans out on TV criticizing Obama, but there wasn’t any opposition to him. It’s the exact opposite. Mr. Zakaria, if you want to bring in the racial component here, what you’re gonna have to admit is that the race of President Obama paralyzed this country.
It paralyzed legitimate criticism of the president of the United States. It amplified malcontent operations like Black Lives Matter. It gave rise to a thugocracy, and nobody had the guts to speak out against it for fear of what would happen to them. And it’s not just they were afraid of being called racist. It was what would happen to them by Black Lives Matter or whoever if anybody got wind of what they were saying.
As outrageous and racist as it is, let’s leave the BLM scare-mongering aside for the moment, though that is a critical component of many conservative’s worldview. Instead, here is Michael Grunwald in Time describing the GOP strategy for dealing with the overwhelming majorities Obama enjoyed in his first months in office:
But McConnell believed Republicans had nothing to gain from me-too-ism. He reminded his caucus that Republicans wouldn’t pay a price for opposing Obama’s plan if it succeeded, because politicians get re-elected in good times. But if the economy didn’t revive, they could return from the political wilderness in 2010. “He wanted everyone to hold the fort,” Voinovich later explained. “All he cared about was making sure Obama could never have a clean victory.”
The Republican strategy on the stimulus was as simple as it was clever. The Obama plan had $300 billion worth of tax cuts, plus all kinds of spending that had enjoyed some bipartisan support: unemployment benefits, infrastructure, research and much more. It even included the Race to the Top education reforms, anathema to Democratic teachers’ unions. But the GOP message never wavered: Big Government, big spending, big mess.
Inside the leadership team, though, there were tensions between Cantor, who wanted to put Republican politics first, and GOP conference chairman Mike Pence of Indiana, who wanted to put ideological conservatism first. Ultimately, the Republicans fell off both sides of the horse. The official $478 billion GOP alternative was a Pence-style ideological bill, consisting entirely of tax cuts and unemployment benefits. But Republicans also crafted a Cantor-style political bill, a $715 billion substitute with even more traditional infrastructure than the Democratic bill. Most House Republicans–including Ryan–voted for both. They never did explain how their stimulus could be good public policy while Obama’s similar $787 billion stimulus was freedom-crushing socialism, but their no vote was unanimous. “The caucus had decided we weren’t going to give Obama a bipartisan victory on this,” recalls moderate Republican Mike Castle of Delaware.
[…]
The stimulus debate established the pattern for the next four years. Republicans opposed the entire Obama agenda–a health care plan based on Romney’s, a cap-and-trade regime that McCain had supported in 2008, financial reform after a financial meltdown. Obama squeezed his health care and Wall Street reform bills through Congress anyway, but the quest for 60 votes in the Senate forced him to cut deals that made his initiatives look ugly. And the Tea Party–which held its first rally 10 days after Obama signed the stimulus–became a powerful force opposing the Obama agenda, and a double-edged sword for Washington Republicans.
Later in his program, Limbaugh told his listeners that Trump’s opposition were uncomfortable with the slogan “Make America Great Again” because they believe it to be code for advocating the re-imposition of slavery. (A classic conservative dodge is to pretend that Jim Crow and post-slavery racism never existed). Here’s Limbaugh’s take on race and white supremacy:
Transcript: …and the left looks at people by group, by the way. We don’t. They do.
[…]
Logic would say there aren’t enough white supremacists, but are there any? When you get right down to it, white supremacists? I mean, you could put ’em in a phone booth, for crying out loud. However, there are black supremacists. There are all kinds of minority supremacists, and they are perfectly fine in that state, according to the left. But whenever white people happen to vote their interests, have you picked up on the fact that that’s somehow illegitimate? But when any minority votes its interests, whether it be economic or cultural, when any minority votes its interests, why that’s perfectly fine, it’s justifiable, makes perfect sense. When white people do it, it’s unacceptable, it’s white supremacism, and it’s racism.
That, my friends, aside from being self-contradictory, is rhetoric straight out of the Alt-Right/White Supremacists fever swamps. It’s a very rich white man embracing his race and claiming victimhood.