Monday, August 9, 2010

Just Give Me ONE HOUR With El-Rushbo...

I should just play a CD or listen to music. But when I’m in my expensive, foreign-made, gas-sucking SUV between 11 AM and 2 PM weekdays, I listen to that bloated windbag Rush Limbaugh. I guess that’s the genius of his program – you can love him; you can hate him; but you listen. He didn’t get to be the most listened-to person on radio by being boring.

But he is predictable.

The oil spill disaster? What disaster? They can’t find any oil to clean up. The entire event may have been set in motion by the Obama Regime, as a way to get us to give up personal automobiles and use mass transit.

The appeals court ruling that strikes down California’s anti-gay-marriage “law”? An activist judge, setting aside a decision made by the people of California, and inserting his own bias as a substitute for law.

President Obama is the least experienced and least qualified person in any room he enters, and Sara Palin has more experience and is better-suited to national leadership than the man-child.

The government is running two of the nation’s largest auto companies, and they’re failing because nobody in the Obama Regime knows anything about cars.

All four of the above (oil spill, appeals court ruling on Prop. 8, “least-qualified”, and government-run car companies) are entirely predictable positions taken by Limbaugh. Watch the morning news, and you can easily predict how Rush will spin and twist it.

Before you label me as just another “Madison Liberal”, bear in mind that I believe the same could be said of any of the left’s national talking heads. You know which side of an issue they’re going to come down on, and how they’re going to spin it left instead of right. Rachel Madow and Keith Olbermann are just as predictable as Rush, Glen Boeck, and Sean Hannity.

For just an hour, I’d love to sit with Rush in his studio at the Southern Command in sunny Florida, and be given carte blanche to comment on anything he says. But, I suspect a lot of people feel that way; perhaps as many as half the 5 million people who listen to his show.

When he tosses off a line about the “drive-by media and state-controlled Associated Press”, and then, moments later, references an Associated Press story as the absolute truth about some matter, I’d call him on it. When he talks about the Obama Regime running General Motors, I’d ask him where the government controller’s office is at GM….or to produce evidence of any memos from the Obama Regime. Not “the government”, which does more than its fair share of regulating carmakers, but a memo from the White House telling GM what to do.

Anyone with a facility for critical thinking could easily best Rush in any debate and trip him up easily. But that’s why he doesn’t have guests on his show and why the few callers actually heard on the air are carefully screened. It’s why his failed TV show didn’t work. Rush is at his best in theater-of-the-mind radio.

The thing that scares me the most are the listeners to Rush, Boeck, Hannity, Madow, Olbermann, et.al. who think what they’re doing is “news”.

6 comments:

  1. I'd give you one hour with him. Or maybe two. That is a show I'd listen to!

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  2. A couple things...

    A few years ago I subscribed to Limbaugh's web site for one reason and one reason only: the news digest. His staff collects stories from all the major news sources into one place. There are as many if not more links than Drudge without the stories about houses full of animal droppings.

    You know yourself, Colonel, that I'm not a knee-jerk conservative. You also know that Limbaugh DOES present news along with his copious commentary. I would say that the people "who think what they're doing is 'news'" are really looking for an ideologically simpatico figure to give them a reading of the news that doesn't make them gag. Limbaugh, for all of his manifest faults, gives people a counterpoint to the packaged, focus-grouped, and stylized news broadcasts.

    Personally, I like Dennis Miller more than Limbaugh. I was disappointed when WOSH swapped Miller's show for Glenn Beck between 9:00am and 11:00am. They moved Miller to 6:00-9:00pm, but I'm rarely in the car alone at that time (my wife can't tolerate talk shows).

    I've tried listening to Beck, but I've found that he makes far less sense live than he does in print (...and all that cross-talk with his sidekicks just ain't that entertaining). His book, "Arguing with Idiots" has one of the best defenses of the 2nd Amendment I've ever seen.

    I was talking with an old friend the other day who's a staunch conservative. He was shaking his head over Obama and over "that idiot" George W. Bush. We came to the conclusion that the progressive movement will prevail because it's easier to sell nationalized health care than it is to support the independence of doctors and hospitals; it's easier to sell the idea of giving control of GM to the unions than it is to let it go bankrupt; it's easier to sell regulation of business than it is to sell the idea of less regulation and a free market. The progressives that punch through national health insurance legislation and banking reform and a moratorium on deep water oil drilling, well, they may take a beating at the polls this November, but the Republicans that replace them will sure as shootin' fumble the ball again; and the next wave of Democrats can pick it up in four or eight years and push it further downfield towards the nanny state goal.

    And Rush Limbaugh will be powerless to stop it.

    The Town Crank
    Neenah, WI

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  3. I hope Crank is wrong.

    And I agree:

    1) Limbaugh is one of history's greatest entertainers, and

    2) He DOES impart a spin.

    So what? Nothing wrong with a clash of ideas; it's usually the way in which solid compromises are made.

    At least you're clear-eyed about the ultra-spin of the Left (which DOES encompass the press).

    And Beck is as close to raving lunacy as anyone--except that he DID hit a gold-mine with the Progressives. There, he's right.

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  4. Dad,

    Me? Wrong?!?! Well, I suppose it could happen...

    Freedom, free markets, and small government are very, very hard sells. Have you ever read, "Not yours to give", the story of Davy Crockett's conversion to a Constitutionalist? Of course you have; I don't think that you'd have missed it.

    I only mention it because to progressives it seems so archaic, outmoded, and mean-spirited. It's only natural for the government to help people, and who are we to deny the legitimacy of the government's mandate to provide help where it's needed.

    Of course, those that buy into the idea of government as impartial benefactor conveniently forget that government also protects big business in myriad ways. Even though our Congresscritters haul the captains of industry up before Senate panels and dress them down before national audiences seemingly every week, all that sound and fury signifies nothing. We simply have more and more of government bureaucracies and our elected encumbrances covered in big business pocket lint so that those businesses can be provided with bigger and bigger bailouts and too-big-to-fail protections.

    So while we're nannying big business we might as well nanny the rest of us, eh?

    The Town Crank
    Neenah, WI

    I'm reading Atlas Shrugged for the first time. Boy, howdy! Ayn Rand sure wrote something for the ages!

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  5. Yah...but like Bill Buckley, I'm not a RandFan.

    Change is coming.....one way or the other.

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  6. Dad,

    >> Yah...but like Bill Buckley, I'm not a RandFan. <<

    Well, that's OK. I had no truck with Rand before I read her novel. Now I see that she's got something substantial to contribute to the promotion of American exceptionalism.

    >> Change is coming.....one way or the other.
    <<

    Is that it?! Hey! You're supposed to be a big-time blogger! How 'bout somethin' with more meat on the bone, eh?

    The Town Crank
    Neenah, WI

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