Tag Archives: Radical Right

Down, Down, Down We Go, Politically Speaking

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Considering that this is 2022, not 1952, it was quite a surprise the first time I read that a Republican politician called some innocuous Democrat a “communist”. But crazy talk is no longer out of the ordinary for one of our major political parties. Ed Kilgore of New York Magazine was surprised too:

The day after the 2020 vice-presidential debate between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris, then-President D____ T____ did something that is hard to do: He actually shocked me with intemperate language, in this case referring to Harris as a “monster” and a “communist.” The “monster” business didn’t surprise me, actually, given T____’s long history of personal insults to women. But “communist?” Seriously? I hadn’t heard a Republican call a Democrat a commie since the high tide of McCarthyism — and even back then, the rare slur was associated with specific (if lunatic) allegations of subservience to an international Marxist-Leninist conspiracy operating out of Moscow. Sure, for a generation, Republicans have been imprecisely calling Democrats “socialists,” though no more than a handful of Donkey Party members answer to that appellation, . . . but “communist” is actually pretty precise . . . 

It’s not just T____ throwing the term around. One of his favorite Republican acolytes, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, calls Democrats — all of them, not just some of them — communists all the time (most recently in her speech to a white-nationalist group, in which she referred to “Democrats, who are the Communist Party of the United States of America”). When Republicans lost two Senate seats and control of the upper chamber in Greene’s home state in January 2021, South Dakota governor Kristi Noem called the winning Democratic candidates communists. And another Republican member of Congress, Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, betrayed a lack of understanding of communism just last month in explaining that the Russians were invading Ukraine because, as a communist, Vladimir Putin “couldn’t feed his people” and needed Ukraine’s farmland [note: Russia’s authoritarian leader, a fascist kleptocrat, doesn’t even belong to the Communist Party, although some Russians still do].

But amazingly ridiculous accusations are now a sign of the times in Republican circles (even though journalists still refer to Republicans as “conservatives”). From Thomas Zimmer and The Guardian:

Ever since entering Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene has been making headlines . . . The latest escalation came last week, when she smeared her Republican colleagues in the Senate, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins and Mitt Romney, as “pro-pedophile” after they voted to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson to the US supreme court; Democrats, she added, “are the party of pedophiles.”

. . . The fact that Greene’s antics are so clearly designed to keep herself in the spotlight has prompted calls for the media and commentators to stop paying attention to her rather than be complicit in the amplification of far-right propaganda. And if what’s on display here were just the extremist behavior of a fringe figure, it would indeed be best to simply ignore her. This, however, isn’t just Greene’s extremism – it is increasingly that of the Republican party itself. Greene and the many provocateurs like her are not just rightwing trolls, but elected officials in good standing with their party. Ignoring them won’t work, nor will making fun of them: These people are in positions of influence, fully intent on using their power.

In any (small-d) democratic party, Greene’s extremism should be disqualifying. In today’s Republican party, she’s not being expelled, she’s being elevated. Greene is undoubtedly one of the rightwing stars in the country, and that’s not just a media phenomenon. Republican candidates crave her endorsement. . . . 

Greene’s rise is indicative of a more openly militant form of white Christian nationalism inserting itself firmly at the center of Republican politics. “America First” candidates like Greene are representing the Republican party all over the country. In Arizona, for instance, state senator Wendy Rogers proudly declared herself to “stand with Jesus, Robert E Lee, and the Cleveland Indians” back in December – all of them supposedly “canceled” by “satanic communists”. .. .  In Georgia, gubernatorial candidate Kandiss Taylor runs on a platform of “Jesus, Guns, and Babies” and openly advocates for the establishment of a Christian theocracy.

The Republican party doesn’t just tolerate such extremists in an attempt to appease the fringe – this isn’t simply a matter of acquiescence out of convenience or cowardice. What we really need to grapple with is the fact that this sort of radicalism is widely seen as justified on the right. The exact language someone like Greene uses might be slightly crasser than what some conservatives are comfortable with, and some Republicans might disagree with specific aspects of the public image she projects. But it’s obviously not enough for them to break with her, or with any of the Christian nationalist extremists in their ranks.

If anything, most of what Greene is saying actually aligns with the general thrust of conservative politics. Republicans are currently all in on smearing anyone who disagrees with their assault on LGBTQ rights [or supports sex education in schools] as “groomers” and declaring any progressive social position adjacent to pedophilia. And it’s really hard to tell the difference between Greene’s propaganda and what much of the reactionary intellectual sphere has been producing. Rod Dreher, for instance, one of the Religious Right’s best-known exponents, has called the Democrats the “party of groomers” and “the party of child mutilators and kidnappers” . . . 

That’s precisely the key to understanding why so many Republicans are willing to embrace political extremism. Greene’s central message is fully in line with what has become dogma on the right: that Democrats are a radical, “Un-American” threat, and have to be stopped by whatever means. Everyone suspected of holding liberal or progressive positions is a “fellow traveler with the radical left,” as senator Ted Cruz put it; as part of the “militant left,” Democrats need to be treated as the “the enemy within,” according to senator Rick Scott; and Florida governor Ron DeSantis declared that Stacey Abrams winning the Georgia gubernatorial election would be akin to a foreign adversary taking over and lead to a “cold war” between the two neighboring states.

. . . Greene’s pedophilia accusations . . .  adhere to the higher truth of conservative politics: that Democrats are a fundamental threat to the country, to its moral foundations, its very survival. “How much more can America take before our civilization begins to collapse?” Greene asked last week. There aren’t many conservatives left who disagree with her assessment. That’s how they are giving themselves permission to embrace whatever radical measures are deemed necessary to defeat this “Un-American” enemy.

Once you have convinced yourself you are fighting a noble war against a bunch of pedophiles hellbent on destroying the nation, there are no more lines you’re not justified to cross. Greene and her fellow extremists are perceived to be useful shock troops in an existential struggle for the survival of “real” America. The right isn’t getting distracted by debates over whether Greene’s militant extremism or Mitch McConnell’s extreme cynicism are the right approach to preventing multiracial pluralism. They are united in the quest to entrench white reactionary rule.

I fear that . . .  we might have become a bit numb to how extreme and dangerous these developments are. Let’s not be lulled into a false sense of security by the clownishness, the ridiculousness of it all. Some of history’s most successful authoritarians were considered goons and buffoons by their contemporaries – until they became goons and buffoons in power.

What we are witnessing is one party rapidly abandoning and actively assaulting the foundations of democratic political culture. Every “Western” society has always harbored some far-right extremists like Greene. But the fact that the Republican party embraces and elevates people like her constitutes an acute danger to democracy.

Unquote.

Yet, if you believe the polls, Americans who are willing and able to vote are going to put these right-wing bastards in charge of Congress next year. Two years later, if given the chance, they’d put the treasonous conman who can only handle short sentences back in the White House. This is America in 2022, not 1952.

Radical Judges Running Wild

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It’s only getting worse at the Supreme Court now that six of the nine justices are Republicans. A University of Texas law professor explains:

Last week the Supreme Court, by a 5-to-4 vote, put back into effect a T___ administration regulation that [makes it harder for] states to [protect rivers and streams from being polluted]. The unsigned, unexplained order in Louisiana v. American Rivers came as part of a highly technical dispute over the scope of the Clean Water Act — and leaves for another day whether the regulation is a valid interpretation of that Nixon-era statute.

But the temporary decision cannot be ignored, especially because of the brief but blistering dissenting opinion written by Justice Elena Kagan. It’s not the first time that liberal justices have called out most of the court’s conservative [no, radical] justices for their increasingly frequent use of the so-called shadow docket — unsigned, unexplained orders like the one last week. But it was significant for being the first time that [Republican] Chief Justice John Roberts joined her (and Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor) in doing so.

With the striking public stance, the chief justice illustrated how concerns about the procedural shortcuts the other [right-wing] justices are taking . . . . He also made clear what many have long suspected: The Roberts court is over.

The term “shadow docket” was introduced by the University of Chicago law professor Will Baude in 2015 to describe the more obscure part of the Supreme Court’s work — the thousands of unsigned and usually unexplained orders that the justices issue each year to manage their docket. Those orders are in contrast to the merits docket, the 60 to 70 cases each year that go through rounds of briefing and oral argument before being resolved in long, signed opinions for the court.

Owing to its inscrutability, the shadow docket has historically received much less public attention or scrutiny. Most shadow docket orders are anodyne — matters as routine as refusing to take up an appeal or giving a party more time to file a brief.

But far more than ever before, the court is using procedural orders on applications for emergency relief while appeals work their way through the courts to resolve disputes affecting the lives of millions of Americans — whether in blocking a rule from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration on a vaccination mandate for large employers, refusing to block Texas’ ban on most abortions after six weeks or putting back into effect congressional district maps that two Alabama lower courts struck down as violating the Voting Rights Act.

Time and again, the [Republican] justices are ordering lower courts to treat these decisions as precedents — even when, as in last week’s ruling, the order includes no analysis to apply to other cases, which often makes the precedent difficult for lower courts to apply.

Unsurprisingly, these rulings have provoked increasingly strident dissents from the court’s liberal justices. Last September, when the justices refused, by a 5-to-4 vote, to halt the patently unconstitutional Texas abortion law, Justice Kagan criticized the majority not just for the substance of its ruling but also for what that ruling said about the shadow docket. She wrote, “The majority’s decision is emblematic of too much of this court’s shadow-docket decision making — which every day becomes more unreasoned, inconsistent and impossible to defend.”

Last week, by freezing a district court injunction despite a lack of evidence that it was harming the complaining states, the majority once again defied the requirements for the very emergency relief they granted. Justice Kagan wrote that that renders the court’s “emergency docket not for emergencies at all” but rather “only another place for merits determinations — except made without full briefing and argument.” In other words, the principal justification for shadow docket orders — the need to intervene early in litigation to prevent a party from suffering irreversible harm while the appeal unfolded — was nowhere to be found.

Chief Justice Roberts voted with Justices Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan in dissenting from six previous shadow docket rulings. But the Clean Water Act dispute was the first time he joined in the procedural criticism that the other conservatives were not just using the shadow docket but abusing it. . . .  By publicly endorsing the charge that the conservative justices are short-circuiting ordinary procedures to reach their desired results without sufficient explanation, Chief Justice Roberts provided a powerful counter to defenders of the court’s behavior, [such as hard-right] Justice Samuel Alito. . . . 

What is especially telling about Chief Justice Roberts’s dissents in these shadow docket cases is that, unlike Justices Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan, he’s often been sympathetic to the results. In February’s Alabama redistricting ruling, for instance, Chief Justice Roberts agreed that the court should reconsider the interpretation of the Voting Rights Act under which Alabama’s maps had been struck down; he just believed that any change in that interpretation had to come through the merits docket, not the shadow docket.

At least on the shadow docket, though, that’s no longer up to him. Instead, the court’s destiny increasingly appears to be controlled by Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. She implored an audience at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library just last week to “read the opinion” before jumping to any conclusions about whether the justices are acting more like politicians than judges. Two days later, she joined the majority’s unsigned, unexplained order in the Clean Water Act case, in which there was no opinion to read. Justice Kavanaugh, too, [is] troubled by criticism of the court’s behavior, [not] the behavior itself . . . . 

The court’s credibility [is wearing out]. The justices have long insisted — as Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy and David Souter [all nominated by Republican presidents] put it in 1992 — that “the court’s legitimacy depends on making legally principled decisions under circumstances in which their principled character is sufficiently plausible to be accepted by the nation.” The proliferation of principle-free decisions affecting more and more Americans — and with a clear, troubling tendency of favoring Republicans over Democrats — calls that legitimacy into increasingly serious question.

It’s understandable, then, why Chief Justice Roberts would finally speak out. . . .  If even his objections can’t persuade the other [Republicans] to stop abusing the shadow docket, then that may signal the willingness of the court’s [radical right] majority to go even further in the future and to use the shadow docket to resolve even more significant and contentious constitutional questions.

It Would Be So Un-American If It Wasn’t So Historically Popular

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The article’s subtitle is “Republican lies about voter fraud are giving way to naked grasping for power”. From Joyce Vance for MSNBC (links in the original):

We’re living in a time where one political party openly believes it’s more important to win elections than it is to let Americans choose their own representatives in free and fair elections. And whether they’re going to get away with it is shaping up to be one of the most important issues the country faces.

The Supreme Court isn’t a venue where you typically expect to hear the quiet part said out loud. But that was what happened Tuesday, when an attorney for the Arizona Republican Party, Michael Carvin, advised the court that provisions that made it easier for eligible Americans to vote put “us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats.” He was implicitly characterizing laws that make voting more difficult for likely Democratic voters, often people of color, as the difference between winning and losing elections.

Carvin was, of course, not the first person to say out loud what has become increasingly obvious to anyone paying attention: Republicans’ support for laws that make it more difficult to vote has little to do with their boogeyman — voter fraud — and everything to do with winning elections despite the will of the voters.

The former president did the same when he told “Fox & Friends” last March that Covid-19 mitigation proposals that included provisions that made it easier for more people to vote safely would mean “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

Historically, restrictive voting measures have been justified as necessary to keep a shadowy group of people who are allegedly intent on casting fraudulent ballots from stealing elections. But those people never seem to materialize, and we’ve watched that narrative implode over the past few months as claims of fraud in the election were definitively rejected in over 60 lawsuits.

Similarly, after the 2016 election, [the winner of the Electoral College] established a so-called Election Integrity Commission to prove the existence of “widespread voter fraud.” It was forced to shut down just months into its work when it was unable to find evidence to substantiate that claim. Still, the fraud lie is routinely used to burden minority voting rights.

This happens despite the conclusion by the Brennan Center for Justice, based on the data, in December that “voter fraud is extraordinarily rare and our system has strong checks in place to protect the integrity of our voting process. These are the facts.”

It was in this landscape that the Supreme Court heard oral arguments Tuesday in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, in which Democrats sued Arizona under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The plaintiffs argued that a policy that kept otherwise lawful ballots that had been cast in the wrong precincts from being counted, as well as a law that broadly restricted people from having other people turn in early ballots for them, amounted to unlawful voter suppression. The court seemed inclined to approve both of the Arizona provisions; the Court of Appeals had ruled that they unfairly burdened Black, Latino and Native American voters.

When the Supreme Court issues its ruling, what’s really at stake is whether its holding will affect more than just the Arizona provisions. Brnovich gives an increasingly conservative court the opportunity to adopt a standard of proof in Section 2 cases that would make it easier for Republican legislatures to enact policies that make it more difficult for people of color to vote, simply by claiming they are guarding against voter fraud. Brnovich might result in a strict test that would apply to future cases — like those that may need to be brought if some of the more than 250 bills Republicans have offered to restrict voting pass in their legislatures.

It’s clear that Republican operatives and legislatures have adopted voter suppression through restrictive legislation as a political strategy. Now that a lawyer has confirmed before the Supreme Court that it’s really just about winning elections, what’s a constitutional republic to do?

It’s probably too much to hope that the court will have a moment of righteous indignation. This is an even more conservative court than the one that gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg accused the majority of taking away the umbrella that protected us in the middle of the rainstorm because we were still dry while using it.

It seems like it would be easier to go out and compete for votes with attractive policies and ideas than to engage in complicated legislative shenanigans and expensive litigation, but some Republicans seem to be as afraid of voters as a kid headed home to his parents with a bad report card.

So the only real solution to protect the right to vote is for the Senate to pass the For the People Act, which the House cleared Wednesday night, and for both chambers to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. Those laws would restore the protections of the Voting Rights Act and remove barriers that make it difficult for eligible people to register and vote. If passed, they would restore the mechanism to challenge unduly restrictive state practices.

Unless the Supreme Court does something unexpected, this is the only path forward.
Otherwise, next year and beyond, a party that controls its state’s legislature can impose rules that make it confusing and difficult for some people to vote. It can create an array of last-minute changes and restrictions that defeat your right to vote, for instance by changing your polling place and rejecting your ballot if, unaware, you go to the previous one.

While your choice of whom to vote for may be political, the right to vote itself isn’t. Instead, it’s a fundamental right that defines who we are as Americans. In part, the story of America has been about expanding groups of people who can exercise the franchise. We celebrated the 100th anniversary of women’s gaining the right to vote last year. Important parts of our history are about people who persisted in demanding the right to vote and the dignity that comes with it for Black people, including the Selma march and the use of dogs and fire hoses against protesting schoolchildren in Birmingham. If we become a country where the right to vote can be restricted through political machinations, then who are we?

People who are afraid of the results of elections in which everyone who is eligible to vote can vote are people who don’t believe they have a good case to make to the voters — people who think they’re going to lose because they haven’t governed well. In the words of the lawyer in the Brnovich case, “Politics is a zero-sum game, and every extra vote they get … hurts us.” But voting is about our rights, not about gamesmanship. Elections should be decided by the people, not by slick efforts to make it harder for some people to register or vote.

American Politics Today: A Case Study

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One America News Network (OAN, not OANN) is where you go for “news” when you think Fox has become way too liberal. Somebody posted this screenshot today:

Untitled

Yes, we all remember how the former president “went and fought every weather crisis”, like that time after Hurricane Maria when he personally launched paper towels — or was it toilet paper? — to a roomful of Puerto Ricans and then decided to delay millions of dollars in financial aid.

So why is that cowardly weakling Joe Biden “hiding in his basement”? Biden may have immediately declared a state of emergency in Texas and authorized the federal government to send generators and other supplies, and and he may have spoken to Gov. Abbott yesterday:

President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. spoke this evening with Texas Governor Greg Abbott about the severe winter weather situation facing central and southern parts of the United States, including Texas. [He] conveyed his support to the people of Texas [and] reiterated that the federal government will continue to work hand-in-hand with state and local authorities in Texas to bring relief and address the critical needs of the families affected. He also shared his intentions to instruct additional federal agencies to look into any immediate steps that could be taken to support Texans at this time. The President also expressed that his administration was at the ready should the State of Texas or any other impacted region need additional federal disaster support or assistance as severe storms move across the US.

But what has Biden done for Texas lately? Damn liberals.

Meanwhile, Paul Krugman of The New York Times tells what occurred after the disaster struck:

For a while, the politics surrounding the power outages that have spread across Texas looked fairly normal. True, the state’s leaders pursued reckless policies that set the stage for catastrophe, then tried to evade responsibility. But while their behavior was reprehensible, it was reprehensible in ways we’ve seen many times over the years.

However, that changed around a day after the severity of the disaster became apparent. Republican politicians and right-wing media, not content with run-of-the-mill blame-shifting, coalesced around a malicious falsehood instead — the claim that wind and solar power caused the collapse of the Texas power grid, and that radical environmentalists are somehow responsible for the fact that millions of people were freezing in the dark, even though conservative Republicans have run the state for a generation.

This wasn’t normal political malfeasance. It’s the energy-policy equivalent of claiming that the Jan. 6 insurrection was a false-flag Antifa operation — raw denial of reality, not just to escape accountability, but to demonize one’s opponents. . . . 

Like many states, Texas has a partly deregulated electricity market, but deregulation has gone further there than elsewhere. In particular, unlike other states, Texas chose not to provide power companies with incentives to install reserve capacity to deal with possible emergencies. This made power cheaper in normal times, but left the system vulnerable when things went wrong.

Texas authorities also ignored warnings about the risks associated with extreme cold. After a 2011 cold snap left millions of Texans in the dark, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission urged the state to winterize its power plants with insulation, heat pipes and other measures. But Texas, which has deliberately cut its power grid off from the rest of the country precisely to exempt itself from federal regulation, only partially implemented the recommendations.

And the deep freeze came.

While Texas’s Republican governor was blaming wind power, other state officials admitted that power plants and pipelines that deliver natural gas were the main source of the problem. (Besides which, wind turbines operate in places like Norway and Greenland all winter without breaking down.)

The Washington Post describes what actually happened this week:

Wind accounts for just 10 percent of the power in Texas generated during the winter. And the loss of power to the grid caused by shutdowns of thermal power plants, primarily those relying on natural gas, dwarfed the dent caused by frozen wind turbines, by a factor of five or six.

As the cold hit, demand for electricity soared past the mark that ERCOT [the Electric Reliability Council of Texas] had figured would be the maximum needed. But at a moment when the world is awash in surplus natural gas, much of it from Texas wells, the state’s power-generating operators were unable to turn that gas into electricity to meet that demand.

In the single-digit temperatures, pipelines froze up because there was some moisture in the gas. Pumps slowed. Diesel engines to power the pumps refused to start. One power plant after another went offline. Even a reactor at one of the state’s two nuclear plants went dark, hobbled by frozen equipment.

Krugman (who knows the answer) asks, therefore, “Why, then, the all-out effort to falsely place the blame on wind power?”

The incentives are obvious. Attacking wind power is a way for both elected officials and free-market ideologues to dodge responsibility for botched deregulation; it’s a way to please fossil fuel interests, which give the vast bulk of their political contributions to Republicans; and since progressives tend to favor renewable energy, it’s a way to own the libs. And it all dovetails with climate change denial.

But why do they think they can get away with such an obvious lie? The answer, surely, is that those peddling the lie know that they’re operating in a post-truth political landscape. When two-thirds of Republicans believe that Antifa was involved in the assault on the Capitol, selling the base a bogus narrative about the Texas electricity disaster is practically child’s play.

Greg Sargent of the Post concludes:

No doubt many Republicans expressing outrage at the failures producing this disaster — and calling for accountability and reform — are sincere in their intentions, though we’ll see how long those demands persist.

But it’s painfully obvious that in an important larger sense, many aspects of their reaction to the Texas calamity do indeed demonstrate the future they want.

It’s a future in which the default response to large public problems will be to increasingly retreat from real policy debates into an alternate information universe, while doubling down on scorched-earth distraction politics and counter-majoritarian tactics to insulate themselves from accountability. . . .

The thing is that Abbott knows renewable energy isn’t to blame. Elsewhere, he has admitted that natural gas and coal failures played a key role. Yet the lure of retreating into the Fox News universe — and spewing nonsense he knows will resonate there — is irresistible.

When a politician’s fundamental purposes in public life are to pursue power and maintain the economic and cultural status quo, it’s easy to lie with a clear conscience. As Gen. Sherman once said:

The lust for Power in political minds is the strongest passion of Life, and impels Ambitious Men to deeds of infamy.

The Late Molly Ivins on Limbaugh

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Talk radio blowhard Rush Limbaugh (1951-2021) is no longer taking calls from his devoted listeners. Texas writer Molly Ivins summed up Limbaugh for Mother Jones in 1995:

One of the things that concerns a lot of Americans lately is the increase in plain old nastiness in our political discussion. It comes from a number of sources, but Rush Limbaugh is a major carrier.

I should explain that I am not without bias in this matter. I have been attacked by Rush Limbaugh on the air, an experience somewhat akin to being gummed by a newt. It doesn’t actually hurt, but it leaves you with slimy stuff on your ankle.

I have a correspondent named Irwin Wingo in Weatherford, Texas. Irwin and some of the leading men of the town are in the habit of meeting about 10 every morning at the Chat’n’Chew Cafe to drink coffee and discuss the state of the world. One of their number is a dittohead, a Limbaugh listener. He came in one day, plopped himself down, and said, “I think Rush is right: Racism in this country is dead. I don’t know what the n____s will find to gripe about now.”

I wouldn’t say that dittoheads, as a group, lack the ability to reason. It’s just that whenever I run across one, he seems to be at a low ebb in reasoning skills. Poor ol’ Bill Sarpalius, one of our dimmer Panhandle congressmen, was once trying to explain to a town hall meeting of his constituents that Limbaugh was wrong when he convinced his listeners that Bill Clinton’s tax package contained a tax increase on the middle class. (It increased taxes only on the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans.) A dittohead in the crowd rose to protest: “We don’t send you to Washington to make responsible decisions. We send you there to represent us.”

[Note: If this sounds quite familiar, a Republican official from Pennsylvania was discussing Sen. Pat Toomey, one of the Republicans who voted to convict last week, and said: “We did not send him there to vote his conscience. We did not send him there to ‘do the right thing’ or whatever”. Now back to Molly Ivins.]

The kind of humor Limbaugh uses troubles me deeply, because I have spent much of my professional life making fun of politicians. I believe it is a great American tradition and should be encouraged. . . . So what right do I have to object because Limbaugh makes fun of different pols than I do?

I object because he consistently targets dead people, little girls, and the homeless—none of whom are in a particularly good position to answer back. Satire is a weapon, and it can be quite cruel. It has historically been the weapon of powerless people aimed at the powerful. When you use satire against powerless people, as Limbaugh does, it is not only cruel, it’s profoundly vulgar. It is like kicking a cripple.

On his TV show, early in the Clinton administration, Limbaugh put up a picture of Socks, the White House cat, and asked, “Did you know there’s a White House dog?” Then he put up a picture of Chelsea Clinton, who was 13 years old at the time and as far as I know had never done any harm to anyone.

When viewers objected, he claimed, in typical Limbaugh fashion, that the gag was an accident and that without his permission some technician had put up the picture of Chelsea—which I found as disgusting as his original attempt at humor. . . .

The reason I take Rush Limbaugh seriously is not because he’s offensive or right-wing, but because he is one of the few people addressing a large group of disaffected people in this country. And despite his frequent denials, Limbaugh does indeed have a somewhat cultlike effect on his dittoheads. They can listen to him for three and a half hours a day, five days a week, on radio and television. I can assure you that [cult leader] David Koresh did not harangue the Branch Davidians so long nor so often. But that is precisely what most cult leaders do—talk to their followers hour after hour after hour.

A large segment of Limbaugh’s audience consists of white males, 18 to 34 years old, without college education. Basically, a guy I know and grew up with named Bubba.

Bubba listens to Limbaugh because Limbaugh gives him someone to blame for the fact that Bubba is getting screwed. He’s working harder, getting paid less in constant dollars and falling further and further behind. Not only is Bubba never gonna be able to buy a house, he can barely afford a trailer. Hell, he can barely afford the payments on the pickup.

And because Bubba understands he’s being shafted, even if he doesn’t know why or how or by whom, he listens to Limbaugh. Limbaugh offers him scapegoats. It’s the “feminazis.” It’s the minorities. It’s the limousine liberals. It’s all these people with all these wacky social programs to help some silly, self-proclaimed bunch of victims. Bubba feels like a victim himself—and he is—but he never got any sympathy from liberals.

Psychologists often tell us there is a great deal of displaced anger in our emotional lives—your dad wallops you, but he’s too big to hit back, so you go clobber your little brother. Displaced anger is also common in our political life. We see it in this generation of young white men without much education and very little future. . . . Unfortunately, it is Limbaugh and the Republicans who are addressing the resentments of these folks, and aiming their anger in the wrong direction.

In my state, I have not seen so much hatred in politics since the heyday of the John Birch Society in the early 1960s. Used to be you couldn’t talk politics with a conservative without his getting all red in the face, arteries standing out in his neck, wattles aquiver with indignation—just like a pissed-off turkey gobbler. And now we’re seeing the same kind of anger again.

Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting [FAIR] . . . has a sweet, gentle faith that truth will triumph in the end, and thinks it is sufficient to point out that Limbaugh is wrong. I say it’s important to point out that he’s not just wrong but that he’s ridiculous, one of the silliest people in America. . . .

It’s important to show people that there is much more wrong with Limbaugh’s thinking than just his facts. Limbaugh specializes in ad hominem arguments, which are themselves ridiculously easy to expose. Ted Kennedy says, “America needs health care reform.” Limbaugh replies, “Ted Kennedy is fat.”

Rush Limbaugh’s pathetic abuse of logic, his absurd pomposity, his relentless self-promotion, his ridiculous ego—now those, friends, are appropriate targets for satire.