Letting Rush Off the Hook: the Incivility Copout

      Much as I hate to say it, Charles Pierce may be right:

      "The counterattack from the defenders of porcine junkie sex-tourist Rush Limbaugh seems to be occurring on two fronts at once. The first is that Sandra Fluke deserved everything he said about her, hardy-har-har. By and large, this is coming from the mouthbreathing fauna of the wingnut blogosphere. However, the other front has opened up recently in more respectable quarters, and that is the argument that our whole national dialogue is too corrosive these days, and everybody does this sort of thing, and what about Bill Maher, huh? Huh?"

    http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/rush-limbaugh-sandra-fluke-reaction-7161506?hootPostID=8ab05e20ae59f5c06287c827439f07b2

      The key as Pierce suggests is respectable quarters-the David Brooks of the world-are giving Rush a pass by claiming that sure what he said was wrong but it's partisan for liberals to focus only on him, he's just one more voice in the general cultural morass of "intemperance."

    I mentioned David Brooks, but how about Michael Kinsley? As Pierce suggests Kinsely is sort of David Brooks for the eggheads-I for one have read a lot of Kinsley and can barely stomach Brooks.

    "Michael Kinsley, a man who has dedicated his life to bringing Olympian insufferability to an art form. Kinsley is what you'd get if you infused David Brooks with the madcap humor you find around the doughnut cart at The New Republic. You see, says Michael, everybody involved in this is just a big fake because nobody really believes anything anyway, and oxen are always being gored, and it's all a silly stupid game, so suck it up, Sandra. Tell your folks about the marketplace of ideas."

     Listen to Kinsley givng Limbaugh a pass:

     "Nevertheless, the self-righteous parade out the door by Limbaugh's advertisers is hard to stomach. Had they never listened to Rush before, in all the years they had been paying for commercials on his show? His sliming of a barely known law student may be a new low — even after what he's said about Nancy Pelosi and Michelle Obama — but it's not a huge gap."

     As Pierce observes,

     "This is Kinsley being deliberately stupid, probably because he figures that's the only thing the lesser orders out here understand. We can't do the right thing now because we didn't do the right thing then? We couldn't criticize George Wallace for being a racist in 1963 because we didn't criticize James Vardaman for being one in 1918? Murrow's broadcast on Joe McCarthy was somehow illegitimate because he hadn't been doing one a week for the previous three years? Watergate doesn't count because LBJ bugged Nixon's plane? The concept of critical mass is just another "insincere" function of our politics? And, I am sorry, but what he did to "a barely known law student" is the whole goddamn point. Kinsley's imperial disdain has led him into a cul de sac of glibly arrogant misanthropy."

    What Pierce may be right about is this:

     "They're closing ranks now. Limbaugh will lose a few more sponsors but the tipping point, I fear, has passed."

     So Krugman's very serious people may be all set to give Rush a pass. The one thing to watch out for is this ideology you hear a lot from so-called liberals lately that, it's unfair and partisan to go after Rush here or demand he be taken off the air. After all, didn't Ed once make fun of Laura Ingraham?

    The problem is that there no comparison between what he said about Ingraham and what Limbaugh said about Sara Fluke. One big difference is that Ingraham unlike Fluke is no "civilian" to the political and cultural wars. What Ed said about her may not be very nice but when you contrast it with what she has said about others through the years his words hardly seem so outrageous.

    It was Laura after 9-11 she called for making only Muslim men being subject to invasive searches and long lines at airports-after all she reasoned we all know that a white woman like her would never commit a terrorist act so why should she have to wait along with "swarthy" Muslims.

   Interestingly though as we saw above when conservatives try to point to an example of some double standard they go to Maher. Yet he has actually wasted time this week chiding liberals for not forgiving Rush.