I hate giving that fat fuck Rush Limbaugh any more ink.  I hate that he makes me so mad I’m starting off this post with vulgarity.  But too many people are engaging him on his own terms, giving him what he wants, which is lots and lots of attention.  You think he wasn’t loving the networks that broadcast his CPAC speech live in its entirety?  The man is a lonely and insecure human being with an enormous chip on his shoulder.  Or it was on his shoulder, until he ate it.

Okay, no more cheap shots on his weight.  What drove me to put pixel to Word doc today is an email exchange between Greg Sargent and El Rushbo in which the Sargent posed a hypothetical: let’s say for the sake of argument that the programs President Obama proposes work.  Let’s say that in a year the recession has abated, the unemployment rate has dropped, 401(k)s have regained some of their lost value.  Will Rush still say he was right to root for the president’s failure?  Rush, el jefe of the Republican Party, refused to even engage in the conversation.  His position is that Obama’s programs will not work.  They are designed for failure and aimed only at stimulating the size of government and attacking wealth and those who produce it.  Anyone who hopes and believes otherwise is naïve.  Yes, but setting aside the purpose, what if the policies do, in fact, wind up working, Sargent persisted.  But they won’t, Rush retorted.  That’s the whole point of what I’ve been saying.

That in a nutshell is why moderates and liberals should not bother engaging with Rush.  One sign of a mature intellect is the willingness to consider alternate points of view, to contemplate the possibility that someone else has an idea or a theory or a plan that might be anathema to your own beliefs but will still be the right plan for a particular situation.  By rejecting outright any discussion that he might be wrong, Rush proves himself to be an intellectual flyweight.  This should not surprise anyone.  After all, in the course of his day is he ever challenged on an intellectual level?  I have never listened to his show, so maybe he allows callers with opposing viewpoints on there all the time.  But I have my doubts.  He sits in that room with just his microphone and talks and talks and talks.  He controls the terms of the debate.  It’s not dissimilar to Bill O’Reilly and his infamous habit of cutting off the microphones of guests who disagree with him.  Guys like that don’t want to be challenged, they do not want to debate, they do not even care to have a civil discussion.  Why should they, when it’s so much more rewarding to always have slobbering followers telling you you’re right.

Has Rush ever run for office?  Has he ever been a part of a political system where compromise, civility, and respect are integral to the process?  Has he ever truly had to debate anyone about anything?

I think this is what Obama may have been getting at when he told Congressional Republicans, “You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and expect to get things done.”  Because Rush is not serious about finding solutions.  He doesn’t HAVE any solutions.  The conservative mantra of tax cuts and smaller government is the wrong fix for these times, whether any conservatives can admit it or not.  And Rush will never admit it. 

There are plenty of Republican moderates out there who know this.  But they are in disarray right now, trying to figure out a message that will position them to the right of Obama, still be activist enough to make the public think they have better ideas for pulling us out of this mess, and reach out to and appease the extreme right wing of the party all at the same time.  In the meantime there is a vacuum that the noise machine led by Rush has stepped into.  And all that noise obscures the possibility that there is a reasonable argument to be made for some of conservatism’s principles.  Those arguments will be marginalized while the Republican Party tears itself up.

I hope that Tim Kaine, Rahm Emmanuel, et al. have gotten their Rush-bashing out of their systems.  Doing so just puts the Republican moderates on the defensive and if they feel attacked, they will organize to get their views heard within their party.  It will take a couple of election cycles, it might get ugly, but it will happen.  In the meantime, liberals can push through all sorts of legislation to re-orient this country’s priorities away from the selfish, economic Darwinism that has held sway for the past thirty years.  Entire generations of Americans can come of age with the belief that this is the way forward.  Liberals can win the battle for hearts and minds while buffoons like Michael Steele are busy kissing el jefe’s ring every time they make the mistake of doubting his power and importance. 

Helping the Republicans shoot themselves in the foot…that’s a tactic.  If we’ve learned anything from the bygone era of Karl Rove, it is that tactics without strategy is not a viable form of governance.  So let’s leave it alone.  Let us concentrate on cementing the peoples’ beliefs in progressive philosophy and governance.  Let the far right keep screeching, marginalizing itself and the counterbalancing hand of the moderates in the Republican Party in the process.  Let’s win because our ideas are better.