“They Go All Wobbly”: Rush Limbaugh Instills Fear In GOP Candidates
How’s this for political cowardice? Right-wing bloviator Rush Limbaugh launches a vile attack, full of sexual insults and smarmy innuendo, against a young woman whose only offense was to speak her mind. Asked to comment, the leading Republican presidential candidates — who bray constantly about “courage” and “leadership” — run from the bully and hide.
“I’ll just say this, which is, it’s not the language I would have used,” said Mitt Romney. I wonder what language Romney thinks Limbaugh should have used to call Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute.”
“He’s being absurd, but that’s, you know, an entertainer can be absurd,” said Rick Santorum. I doubt seriously that Fluke found it entertaining, in an absurdist kind of way, when Limbaugh creepily suggested she and other women post sex videos on the Internet. I hope and trust that Santorum wasn’t entertained, either.
As for Newt Gingrich, the cat got his tongue, and apparently didn’t return it until Limbaugh had already apologized to Fluke for his “insulting word choices.” Gingrich went out on a limb Sunday and called Limbaugh’s apology “appropriate.”
Which it wasn’t, by the way. Limbaugh’s claim that “I did not mean a personal attack on Ms. Fluke” is an obvious lie; there’s no impersonal way to call a woman a slut. His abuse of Fluke — who advocated publicly last week that the health insurance she receives through Georgetown, a Catholic university, should be required to cover birth control — was no one-time gaffe. He poured it on, day after day.
And when he decided to back down, Limbaugh apologized only for his choice of words — not for the bitter misogyny he now believes he should have cloaked in prettier language.
Of the GOP candidates, only Ron Paul seemed to notice the insincerity of Limbaugh’s regret. “I don’t think he’s very apologetic,” Paul said. “He’s doing it because some people were taking their advertisements off his program. It was his bottom line he’s concerned about.”
Why will Paul say the obvious while Romney, Santorum and Gingrich are barely willing to clear their throats? Because Paul, who is in this campaign to spread the gospels of libertarianism and Austrian economics, knows he can’t win the Republican nomination. The others, who think they do have a chance to win, are afraid of making Limbaugh into an enemy — or, in Romney’s case, into more of an enemy than he already is.
So let’s get this straight: These guys want us to believe they’re ready to face down Vladimir Putin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong Eun, the Taliban and what’s left of al-Qaeda. Yet they’re so scared of a talk-radio buffoon that they ignore or excuse an eruption of venom that some of Limbaugh’s advertisers — nine, at last count, have said they would no longer sponsor the show — find inexcusable.
I would have thought that crass political calculation might lead the would-be GOP nominees to the correct position on Limbaugh’s rhetorical depravity. Women constitute a majority of voters. If they merely lean toward the Democrats this fall, as they usually do, Republicans still have a mathematical chance to win the presidency by racking up a big majority among men. But if the GOP is perceived to endorse Limbaugh’s hateful rhetoric about “feminazis” and his stance of male grievance, female voters could turn what looked like a winnable election for Republicans into a debacle.
But Romney, Santorum and Gingrich are so frightened of being labeled insufficiently conservative — in this context, meaning “not nice enough to Rush” — that when given the opportunity to show some backbone, they go all wobbly.
What does this say about these men? To me, it suggests that maybe Romney isn’t as smart and disciplined as he’s said to be. Maybe Santorum isn’t as sincere, compassionate or moralistic as he appears. Maybe Gingrich’s vaunted intellectual courage is afraid of its own shadow.
As it happens, President Obamacalled Fluke last week to express his support. Perhaps, as a father, he imagined how he would feel if one of his daughters were attacked so viciously. Perhaps, as a canny politician, he saw the benefit of denouncing Limbaugh’s caustic caterwauling.
Either way, Republicans spent yet another week talking about contraception. Casey Stengel once said that “most ballgames are lost, not won.” He could have been talking about elections.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, March 5, 2012
“Unflinching Conservative” Rick Santorum In 1993: “More Government Needed In Health Care”
Rick Santorum’s pitch to Republican voters is simple: He is the “true” and “consistent” conservative in the GOP’s presidential nomination fight. He describes himself as “a candidate who, throughout [his] career, has not only checked the box on conservative issues but has fought for conservative issues.” And he slams front-runner Mitt Romney for flip-flopping on abortion and the Wall Street bailouts and, most of all, for passing government-mandated health care reform in Massachusetts. If elected president, Santorum vows, he will end the “tyranny” of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act.
Yet as an up-and-coming congressman in the early 1990s, Santorum took a much different line. Then—like now—health care was one of the nation’s most divisive issues. In 1993, Republicans were up in arms about a health care reform bill spearheaded by Hillary Clinton and pushed by President Bill Clinton. Republicans decried the measure as excessive government intervention in the marketplace, and Santorum opposed the legislation. But his position was not so clear-cut.
During that fiery debate, Santorum said it would be a mistake to allow the delivery of health care services to be determined only by the market. He asserted that Republicans were “wrong” to let the marketplace decide how health care works. He instead argued that government should play a “proactive” role in shaping the health care marketplace “to make it work better.” (Santorum spokesman Hogan Gidley did not respond to requests for comment.)
Santorum’s call for more government intervention in health care came during a December 1993 appearance on a Pittsburgh TV program, The Editors, hosted by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette‘s Jane Blotzer and John Craig. At the time, Santorum was running in a Republican Senate primary and looking to challenge Democratic incumbent Sen. Harris Wofford. Mother Jones obtained a previously unreported transcript of the interview made by staffers for the Wofford reelection campaign. In 1994 Santorum eked out a narrow win over Wofford, 49 percent to 47 percent, in a bitterly fought race that gained national attention.
In the 1993 interview, the 35-year-old Santorum sounds little like the unflinching conservative he claims to be today. He describes his voting record in the US House of Representatives, where he represented the eastern suburbs of Pittsburgh, as “pretty much in the middle” compared with the rest of the Pennsylvania delegation, which included 11 Democrats and 9 other Republicans. His record, he went on, was “pretty compatible” with that of Arlen Specter and the late John Heinz, both moderate Republican senators from Pennsylvania. (Specter later switched to the Democratic Party.)
In the interview, when asked about the role of government in Americans’ lives, Santorum responded, “I believe that the federal government should set up a system where we create the right incentives for you to make efficient choices.”
On health care, as he called for more government involvement, Santorum said Republicans had “dropped the ball” by not making health care reform a headline issue in recent elections. “I even said it to President Bush when he came to Pittsburgh to campaign for Dick Thornburgh [then running for US Senate] in 1991, that health care was gonna be the big issue and that we had to take responsibility for trying to solve this problem,” Santorum said. “We can’t continue to ignore it and say, ‘Oh well, you know, it will work itself out in the marketplace.’ That’s wrong.”
Government intervention, he continued, was key to creating a functioning health care marketplace. “The government helps set the marketplace up, so we have some responsibility to alter that marketplace to make it work better.”
Talking about health care, Santorum explained: “I take a much more proactive position in government in solving problems than most Republicans, because I believe government has a role. A lot of folks believe, ‘Well, just keep government out of it.’ I don’t believe that.” He added, “I think government has a role in making sure that there is equal opportunity.”
On the campaign trail these days, Santorum denounces government and maintains that it is not government’s job to help those who are suffering (because suffering has its positive consequences, he contends). His top priority, he says, is repealing “Obamacare.” He also wants to privatize Medicare and eliminate the agency that oversees it. “You want the private sector out there competing, driving down costs, improving efficiency,” he said recently.
At a November 2011 debate, Santorum boasted about his unwavering conservative record on health care. “I was always for having the government out of the health care business,” he said, “and for a bottom-up, consumer-driven health care, which is different than Governor Romney and some of the other people on this panel.” Yet Santorum, who has attacked Romney for reversing his positions, has flip-flopped as well.
“People In My Position Never Apologize”: Is Rush Limbaugh Too Big To Fail?
For three days, Rush Limbaugh pursed a relentless, sexist and hateful assault on law student Sandra Fluke. (You can read a catalogue of 53 separate attacks by Limbaugh on Fluke here.)
As more advertisers announced they would no longer sponsor Limbaugh’s show, he abruptly reversed course on Saturday and issued an apology on his website. Some have questioned the sincerity of the apology since the brief statement also furthered his attacks on Fluke, suggesting she and other women’s health advocates wanted to testify before Congress regarding their “personal sexual recreational activities.”
A review of Limbaugh’s rhetoric, which is littered with misogynistic language, shows that there is reason to be skeptical of his remorse. For example, here’s an exchange from November 2007, when a caller reacts to Limbaugh commenting that “I’m like a woman when you get to numbers. I don’t follow them too easily”:
RUSH: I had a Barbie doll once, Cheryl, and you’d pull the string on the back, “Math class is tough.” You know the stereotype. I was just making a stereotypical joke.
CALLER: Oh, my goodness, I can’t believe you said that. I really can’t. We laugh at you all the time, but that was not funny. That was degrading to some women. […]
CALLER: Okay. Do you apologize to the women? (Laughing.)
RUSH: Well, you know, Cheryl, I have to tell you, Cheryl is one of my all-time top-ten female names, and I hope that I can salvage your loyalty here as an audience member. I’m not going to apologize. People in my position never apologize. But we just acknowledge that you were upset and offended by it. I’ll apologize you were offended.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: But I’m not going to apologize for saying it. I meant to say it. Why would I apologize for something I meant to say? It was a joke.
CALLER: Okay. I guess. Okay.
Some advertisers are also not convinced that, this time, Limbaugh is sincerely apologetic. After he announced his apology, two additional advertisers announced they were dropping their sponsorship.
By: Judd Legum, Think Progress, March 5, 2012
“Picking And Choosing”: The Church, Taxes, And Health Insurance
The other day Tim Noah used the occasion of the Senate’s vote on allowing any employer to prevent their employees’ insurance from covering anything and everything the employer doesn’t like (which every Republican senator except Olympia Snowe voted for) to argue that this is yet more evidence that employers ought to get out of the business of providing health coverage, and we ought to just have the government do it. In a single-payer system, these kinds of decisions can be made by our democratic process, and not by every employer individually.
There’s just one note I want to make about this. Conservatives have been talking a lot about the importance of preserving the “conscience” of the Catholic Church, their right not to participate in anything that violates their beliefs. That, of course, is a privilege that the rest of us, being citizens of a democracy, don’t enjoy. We pay taxes, which go to a lot of things we dislike. I don’t like the fact that our government spends as much on the military as every other nation on earth combined. I also don’t like the money we spend on tax subsidies for oil companies. My conservative friends don’t like the fact that the government gives food stamps to poor people, and pays the EPA to make sure our air and water are clean. But we all pay taxes, because that’s how it works—we don’t get to pick and choose each line item we want to pay for and which ones we don’t.
The Catholic Church, on the other hand, like all religious institutions, doesn’t pay taxes. Nor do their affiliated organizations like hospitals and universities, because they are nonprofit organizations. So if we had a single-payer system, the Church wouldn’t be involved in anybody’s insurance. The only way they could influence the law would be the way they do on other issues now: not by demanding that the law give them yet more special treatment, but through their moral persuasion on how they think the rest of us should act. And you can imagine how much force that would have.
By: Paul Waldman, The American Prospect, March 5, 2012
“From Eve To 2012”: What’s Behind The Slut-Shaming
As leading Republicans have been asked about Rush Limbaugh’s typically despicable attacks on Sandra Fluke—the law student who testified before congressional Democrats about the importance of health insurance coverage for contraception—they’ve offered some pretty weak responses. Mitt Romney said that when Limbaugh called Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute,” “it’s not the language I would have used.” Perhaps he meant that he would have called her a “harlot” or a “trollop.” Rick Santorum, whose opposition to contraception is well-established, said that Limbaugh was “being absurd, but that’s, you know—an entertainer can be absurd.” Before we move on to this week’s controversy, it’s important to note just what kind of venomous beliefs this episode has brought to the fore. Republicans are insisting that this isn’t really about contraception, it’s about religious freedom. But for some people, it’s about something much more fundamental: the dire threat of uncontrolled female sexuality.
Limbaugh is indeed an entertainer, and he’s an entertainer who understands his audience very well. Does anyone think that when he called Fluke a “slut” that millions of his listeners didn’t nod in agreement? The real threat, as Limbaugh sees it, the thing that must be shamed and ridiculed, is the idea that a woman might be in control of her own sexuality. As Limbaugh said, “So Miss Fluke, and the rest of you Feminazis, here’s the deal. If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex. We want something for it. We want you post the videos online so we can all watch.” In other words, her sexuality is only acceptable if it can be placed in a context where it exists for his pleasure and not hers.
In rushing to Limbaugh’s defense, Bill O’Reilly offered only a slightly different take. “Let me get this straight, Ms. Fluke, and I’m asking this with all due respect,” he said. “You want me to give you my hard-earned money so you can have sex?” Displaying his typical ignorance, O’Reilly, like Limbaugh, is under the impression that this issue is about taxpayer money and not what is being covered by the private insurance that women themselves are paying for. It’s convenient, because that way he can still consider himself involved, and claim the right to withhold his payment. And that way, the decision about whether a woman will have sex, and what will happen to her if she does, still lies in some measure with him.
It’s no wonder that even when a group of conservative state legislators passes a law requiring any woman who wants an abortion to get it only if she’ll submit to a series of humiliations, they usually insert exceptions for rape and incest. If it were about the fetus, it wouldn’t matter how a woman became pregnant. But if she was raped, then she wasn’t committing the violation of willingly having sex, so she need not be punished. So long as her sexuality doesn’t belong to her, she hasn’t fallen.
This is an old story, of course, going all the way back to Eve, through Hester Prynne, and going strong in 2012. So if you thought there weren’t still people, lots of them, who view the idea of a woman controlling her own sexuality with horror and rage, then the last week was a helpful reminder.
By: Paul Waldman, The American Prospect, March 5, 2012
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