Rush Limbaugh

[Guest fiznuthian]

I was sitting in my car at the library today when a guy in his mini-van parked next to me with his window cracked. Through his window he had a radio show playing which was audible and caught my attention. After listening and peeking at him, the guy had his jaw slack and seemed to have a visible interest in the radio show, almost like he was about to fist pump.

I did some sleuthing and discovered it was Rush Limbaugh's radio show. I had heard his name on television before, but was not familiar with who he is or what he does. Needless to say I spent the next 3 hours listening to his show. What I heard absolutely blew my mind. Please tell me this scumbag is not as influential in republican politics as some people say he is. I don't think I heard any argument of substance in the entire 3 hours. It was non-stop fear mongering rants. I felt like i'd waltzed into another universe..

Then there's his advertising. The ads that run on his show were so blatantly predatory. I can't help but feel bad for the gullible people who will fall for this shit. Everything from pandering to students desperate to rid themselves of student loans, to preying on the fears of elderly who are concerned with social security. At one point, Rush ranted on and on and on about the ACA, which was followed by an ad for health insurance reminiscent of late night infomercials.

 

Just what in the fuck?

 

[joshuatxuk]

I remember when my parents listened to him often in the mid-90s. Same crap but it was seemingly more jovial and less flat-out venomous and toxic. Also, Limbaugh is bad but dear god, I rather be forced to listen to his voice than Hannity or Levin or Savage or a plethora of his peers. He's got a comical tone I find more tolerable. I stress though, I do not like him.

 

Talk radio is incendiary rhetoric, pure and simple. I'm always curious how much of the shit they spew is stuff they even ponder seriously, or even believe. At it's core political spin and talking points and all that jazz is at it's core irrelevant, distracting, and anti-intellectual. The point is to piss you off, numb your independent thought, and dispute anything that doesn't fit a "world view" they advocate.

[LimpyLoo]

He is huge among middle-aged white republican men. His worldview is that of a rich, entitled white male. He thinks rich people are hard-working job creators and poor people are lazy; corporate tax loopholes are sensible incentives and welfare recipients are lazy moochers.

 

 

He used to call pot-smokers and drug-addicts 'maggots' who deserved long prison sentences...until he was revealed to be an opiate addict himself (for which he was sent to rehab, not prison).

 

 

And on top of all that he's extremely emotionally-charged and inflammatory, which is the big problem with political discussion in America in my view. Dispassionate intellect is no match for reptilian-brained moral outrage.

[MisterE]

i don't listen to rush, believe it or not, and i do agree that a lot of the conservative talk show types are clearly leaning on the scare side of things for their support. i think the same thing probably happens on the other side too, but i can't stomach bill maher enough to find out. but i just assume he doesn't paint a pretty picture if ever discussing what would happen if conservatives took over.

 

anyhow since you said that in the whole 3 hrs you didn't hear one good point i decided to look at his site and see what he said.

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2014/04/02/drive_bys_who_condemned_bush_for_hubris_celebrate_obama_s_victory_lap

 

to me that seems like some kind of a point.

imagine if republicans rammed a bill through when they had control of both houses and the presidency, which didn't have support of a majority of voters, lied about it to try to help sell it to those voters (keeping your doctors, premiums won't go up, keeping your plans), botched the roll out to such a degree that it seems like that website was probably known to be non-working by them when they put it up, and on top of all that refuse to answer specific questions about the people who are enrolling such as how many of them have paid, and how many were previously without insurance (after all those are the ones who will be paying for all of the free stuff for everyone else and they are needed to prop this thing up), but STILL dared to put on a conference gloating over their victory because of this one number they do see fit to release.

 

what would the media do in THAT scenario? if it were republicans. ?

 

and i know lots of people think this is cool that the media supports THEIR guy, but really, it's their job to question whoever is in charge, and serve as a go between between the people and the ruling class. since obama has been in office, they've all but stopped being that and have basically become cheerleaders. also it used to be considered the most important point of comedy/comedians to poke fun at those in charge, but for the past 6 or so years it's like there's been a moratorium on popular comedians making jokes about the president. and the excuse that's been given is always something like 'oh its just too hard to find good material with these guys' or something to that effect. which is a joke in and of itself.

 

rush can be a bit of an ass but how is he not making a solid point about the media fawning over our current pres which they would never do for a guy with an R by his name?

 

personally, i honestly believe that as bad as things are now, if EITHER party gained such an advantage over the other that they had total dominance for decades, in all 3 branches, things would be much much worse. so yeah i think the media bending over for obama is a problem, just like it would be if they bent over for a republican and failed to ask hard questions until they get answers, and criticize if they don't get those answers, which is supposed to be their job. if obamacare is such a success, why do they blatantly refuse to give out many key stats about the enrollees? how do i live in a country where the people in charge can just blatantly ignore completely relevant questions and still have full media support and be declared victorious? they put this plan in place without bothering to involve the other party, even though pelosi is out there saying he's the most non-partisan president ever, and with the help of a media who failed to ask any hard questions about it during or leading up to it's roll out. this is impossible to imagine a bizarro world where repubs would've been able to get away with any of this and still have the media kissing their asses this same way. this thing affects everyone, it radically transforms things as he said he'd do, and the media hasn't been interested in getting the deets about it. such as how it isn't going to be the rich paying for the free goodies, it's going to be the middle class. shocker, right?

[LimpyLoo]

For a good taste of the quality of his character, here are some highlights:

 

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2012/03/08/35-hateful-and-stupid-rush-limbaugh-quotes/

[usagi]

was not familiar with who he is or what he does. Needless to say I spent the next 3 hours listening to his show.

 

he got you good

[MisterE]

"No, ladies and gentlemen. Obamacare was supposed to insure 40, 43, whatever number millions of people who didn't have insurance. That's what Obamacare was supposed to do. Obamacare wasn't supposed to sign up seven million people. Signing up seven million people's chump change, irrelevant, it's embarrassingly insignificant. And yet they're all throwing themselves a party there in the Rose Garden."

 

"you take the most rosy figures, they've only insured about six million, and I don't even think that's an accurate number. They don't even really know. But we'll give 'em benefit of doubt. They've insured six million, 4.5 million of 'em are Medicaid, that's not Obamacare"

 

"So the mission was to insure 43 million uninsured, and they've got seven million signed up on a day dictated by law. They're actually celebrating people complying with the law as though this is some great sales job or massive job of great persuasion by Obama."

 

how is none of that any kind of a point? he didn't mention that the dems have used tv commercials, all forms of advertising, and even their hollywood/celebrity connections to promote obamacare and still they've only managed to sign up '7 million' people, and refuse to tell us how many of those didn't already have health care they lost due to ACA taking effect and forcing them off of their plans, or how many of those 7mill have actually paid, or how many are getting subsidies, etc etc etc. and are they going to include all that advertising done with the help of their celeb buddies as part of the cost of the thing? the fact that media are calling it a victory that some people signed up for something even though the law says they have to.... that's kinda pretty mental.

 

never in a million years would a train wreck like this be called a victory by this same media if it were republicans behind it. i mean it's obvious that dems are scared about november and that's why that whole 'victory lap' happened, and why the media is going along with/pushing that narrative. like it or not, the victory or failure of ACA is going to be seen this november, and will be decided by the people who now have to live under it. it's not decided by some left leaning 'news' people/democrat cheerleaders just because they say it be so. an irony to all this is that guys like rush probably wouldn't exist if the news people did their damn jobs for a change.

[Guest fiznuthian]

Well I don't know man, as a person who is experiencing some seemingly impossible to diagnose pain problems that is about to royally ass fuck my bank account, I was able to get insured thanks to the ACA and I am pretty sure it's going to get me by until I can find steady income again. Aside from some technical problems with the website, things tended to go quite okay over the phones and I feel comfortable trying to fix whatever is wrong with me as soon as my coverage begins.

 

Honestly without the coverage i'd probably be in a world of shit and hospital bills. So sorry for feeling a bit like the anti-ACA crowd are fucking loonies. The 7 million people who signed up may be small compared to the number of uninsured out there, but you know that's probably because people are struggling financially. Financial instability is growing is it now? I sure as fuck can't find a job that pays enough for me to get by on my own, and i'm no dummy.

 

Like i've said before, i'm torn between the parties. I'm now benefiting from the ACA I guess, but at the same time I have a bad feeling about corporate influence in our government. The more read, the more I get a sense that the republican party represents corporate pockets more than some kind of free market capitalist ideals. Are the democrats benign? I don't know.

 

I did listen to the segment you linked, and I thought it was rather irrelevant. There's probably more left leaning TV show hosts and news anchors, but to say the democratic party doesn't eat shit for what they do by media is not true. Fox News still does their thing, and even other networks question the Obama administration regularly sometimes.

[Guest fiznuthian]

Also, what do you suggest otherwise?
There's undoubtedly millions of Americans out there who are seriously struggling with their income and their health. Should we just let them fend for themselves? Do the republicans have a plan for helping people that I don't know about? This is a serious question, not rhetorical. I am having a really hard time figuring out what republican policies have to offer other than turning the country into a surival of the fittest scenario where economic disparity steamrolls a majority of the population.

Am I misguided? I understand the ACA is not perfect, and even despite it's offers there's a big chance a lot of people out there STILL can't afford to sign up for health insurance. Maybe this is less an ACA problem and speaks to the core of what's going wrong in this country. Not enough good paying jobs to go around, nearly everything is increasingly expensive, drastic healthcare is financially destroying people, education is financially destroying people..

 

Just what do the republicans propose we do about it? I really, really want to know because i've been reading around and I still can't seem to figure it out.

[LimpyLoo]

Also, what do you suggest otherwise?

There's undoubtedly millions of Americans out there who are seriously struggling with their income and their health. Should we just let them fend for themselves? Do the republicans have a plan for helping people that I don't know about? This is a serious question, not rhetorical. I am having a really hard time figuring out what republican policies have to offer other than turning the country into a surival of the fittest scenario where economic disparity steamrolls a majority of the population.

 

Am I misguided?

 

I think the general republican view is that it's people's own fault if they can't afford insurance. If they don't make enough money, it's because they're not working hard enough.

 

At least, that is my impression from talking to the handful republicans in my life.

 

 

 

Wealth, opportunity, the American Dream...it's all available to you if you simply work hard enough.

[MisterE]

fox news is one channel. most others lean left. you have rush limbaugh but you also have 'comedian' jon stewart who probably helped influence the political turnout since 2000 just as much as rush.

 

sorry to hear about your health issues (actually i remember seeing you talk about them), but that's beside the point of media not questioning the thing while they had YEARS to do so. then it hits, and lots of the people who manage to get through the broken (by design?) website are hit with sticker shock. some of those people are people who lost their doctors and coverage even though they were promised they werent by a president who it has been shown knew he was lying WHEN he said that. and the media had every opportunity to ask how this thing is going to work and prepare people for what would happen when it went/goes into effect (obama himself keeps delaying chunks of it, until after the next upcoming election, which speaks volumes to the faith he has in his own thing doesnt it?).

 

of course some people are going to benefit from the thing. but others won't. you can't please everyone all the time but the idea is to try to please more or most of the people. you being able to get coverage due to ACA is only one story and it doesn't tell the whole picture at all. neither do the media. again, why didn't the dems make the rich folk pay for all this free coverage of pre-existing conditions? they are the ones always villainizing the rich and fearmongering about them to get themselves elected (even though they are just as much in their pockets as anyone else if not more). they are always saying the rich doesn't pay their fair share which succeeds in getting them voted on by the scared poor. yeahp. but they had both houses of congress AND the presidency, and could've and DID pass whatever they wanted, without any support from the republicans. and what did they pass?

 

one middle class hard working person's premiums shouldn't go up under this thing if the dems are even 1/10th what they claim to be. and it turns out that plenty of those peoples' premiums will. why didn't they make the rich pay 'their fair share'?

 

??????

 

???

 

how is rush pointing out that the media should be there asking some of these questions irrelevant because you can get coverage now?

[sheatheman]

I love you E.

 

I often listen to Rush when driving. There is nothing like that suspenseful descending minor 6th that announces his coming. Comedy-wise, he is one of the funniest people on the radio. If I disagree with him, which I do on a good 40% of things, I can always switch on my ironic lens and appreciate the show aesthetically, ads included.

 

You guys are the gloom and doom ones. You just need to learn how to consume content. I offer a class. You can sign up and ride shotgun on my next shipment. Radio is a great place to sharpen your ironic gaze.

[LimpyLoo]

Us poor people just moan about rich people because we're jealous of their hard-earned success. It has nothing to do with disproportionate political influence or corruption or anything like that.

[sheatheman]

 

When I say while driving, I mean on multi-day trips.

[MisterE]

then u vote on dems because they say 'look at this rich guy! hes bad!'

 

and then dems turn around and make middle class pay for everything, instead of their rich buddies

 

guess poor ppl didn't notice the hundo dollar bills falling out of the dems' pockets, or the bankers/wall street hands stuffing more in them

[sheatheman]

Let's get Rush on watmm!

[LimpyLoo]

then u vote on dems because they say 'look at this rich guy! hes bad!'

 

and then dems turn around and make middle class pay for everything, instead of their rich buddies

 

guess poor ppl didn't notice the hundo dollar bills falling out of the dems' pockets, or the bankers/wall street hands stuffing more in them

 

I'm not a democrat, btw

 

I don't like Obama

 

and I'm not a democrat apologist

[Guest fiznuthian]

With regard to the website, it's understandable. IT operations of that scale are not something done easily. The e-commerce systems have been refined a lot over the years but building infrastructure to support 50 states worth of insurance companies, millions of potential signups, and a support system to back it all has never been done before. While it's easy to criticize it's failures, where I come from this is no easy task. Maybe the layman won't see it that way, but most anyone who works in IT knows that a lot of the time things just don't go as planned.

 

With regard to people losing plans, you might have a point but I don't know enough yet to comment on it. Scanning around doing some fact checking, it looks like the scenario being painted is a half-truth. A lot of people were given cancellation notices, but automatically signed up for comparable, if not slightly more expensive plans. I'm still looking into it.

 

As we talked about, i'm skeptical that democrats aren't at the mercy of corporate lobby and money too. This appears to have little to do with either party, and everything to do with how deeply affected our government has become by corporate interests. i wish I knew more to be honest.

[sheatheman]

*gives self pat on back for musical analysis of Rush's radio fanfare*

[Guest fiznuthian]

You may not take it that seriously, but if the guy I saw in a van is any indication there's people out there who absolutely devour it. Maybe sometimes the guy does make some critical points, but most of it is just shit talking and playing to people's inner fears.

[chenGOD]

yeah what would the media do?

 

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/DC-Decoder/2014/0331/Obamacare-deadline-101-Do-sign-ups-above-6-million-signal-success-video

 

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/03/31/obamacare_signups_the_most_important_statistics_to_know.html

 

I know using the internet to search for information is tough.

 

It's good we can always count on rush for a fair and balanced view of things though.

[MisterE]

our presidential elections are decided by fear. does that bother you? or just radio listener #s?

 

edit PS- limpy i never thought you were a straight up democrat and even if you were, i mean, it's your right to be that and, i try to not judge people at their core just based on how they vote anyway. tbh even though i disagree with u a lot i still like you, for whatever that's worth. sr4 i piss on his grave, but u, i like. i think its ur avatar mostly tbh, has a subtle psychological effect on me. just impossible to not like a guy with that lovable hunchback's face staring at you while you read his posts

[Guest fiznuthian]

Yes, but letting the banks loose the first time certainly didn't go so well. And he's right, taxpayers ended up taking the blow. There's an appeal to fears on both sides of the debate, sometimes far more blatant than it ever should be.

[LimpyLoo]

our presidential elections are decided by fear. does that bother you? or just radio listener #s?

 

edit PS- limpy i never thought you were a straight up democrat and even if you were, i mean, it's your right to be that and, i try to not judge people at their core just based on how they vote anyway. tbh even though i disagree with u a lot i still like you, for whatever that's worth. sr4 i piss on his grave, but u, i like. i think its ur avatar mostly tbh, has a subtle psychological effect on me. just impossible to not like a guy with that lovable hunchback's face staring at you while you read his posts

 

Cheers, mate. You know you're my homeboy.

 

Yeah, I don't think people have to have identical views or values to get on. I think the problem is moral outrage. I think often when two people disagree politically, each sees the other as morally inferior. I don't where that stems from, but it seems to be the norm in America.

[LimpyLoo]

(Actually, I think it stems from people being suspicious of each other's motives...like, whether someone is actually interested in making the world a better place or whether they're just looking out for themselves and their kith and kin)