El Rushbo and Roberts

Below is an e-mail conversation about Slow Limbaugh and the ongoing intellectual implosion of the conservative movement.

LA to correspondents, August 12:

Subject: El Rushbo on Roberts
From August 5 NYT:

Even so, reports of his involvement echoed on conservative talk shows Thursday, generating outrage and disbelief. “There’s no question this is going to upset people on the right,” Rush Limbaugh told his radio listeners. “There’s no question the people on the right are going to say: ‘Wait a minute. Wait a minute! The guy is doing pro bono work and helping gay activists?’ “

Why isn’t Rush HIMSELF saying, “Wait a minute”? Why is he only talking about how OTHER people will react? What about HIS reaction?

I don’t understand how conservatives can keep listening to him

First correspondent:

Today, I turned on Rush at the start of his second hour. Rush opened by saying, “Today is TGIB Friday. Thank God It’s Bush.” Then he spent half an hour on a salary dispute of a pro football player. “Childish,” Rush called the player. He said, “For those of you who hate sports, this is about economics.”

Then, Limbaugh did talk about the Able Danger affair. His angle is that everything is Clinton’s fault. He never admits that Bush continued the same policy of ignoring dangerous Arab would-be terrorists.

Most of Rush’s programs are made up of his trademark belly laugh, shopworn digs at the Clintons, and orgies of praise for Bush. He literally gets worse on the issues we care about every day.

Second correspondent:

I know just how you feel. I haven’t been listening lately but you tune in occasionally, thinking it’s the old days, thinking you’ll hear some cutting edge commentary, some traditional conservative commentary, on what’s happening and instead you get stupid filler stuff and avoiding issues and if he does mention the thing you’re most concerned about, it’s to run by it very quickly and usually unsatisfactorily if not stupifyingly disappointingly . He has got to be losing audience.

First correspondent:

Exactly right. Avoiding issues is what Rush does now, or running them by quickly. A few weeks ago, Rush said, “I disagree with the President on immigration.” Then he dropped the subject. I forgot to mention that Rush has used Roberts pro bono work in the Colorado case as proof that “conservatives don’t hate gays.”

His favorite subject, as I said a couple of years ago, is football. He really cares about that more than serious issues. When I first listened to Limbaugh around 1992, he was refreshing and very good. No more.

Second correspondent:

Yes, I caught that moment when Rush said the Left is revealing this stuff on Roberts because they think that conservatives, the Right, are so against gays. He didn’t even seem to realize what he was saying, that we’re supposed to be so not against gays that we help them advance their political and judicial agenda?.

LA:

I don’t understand. He said the left is revealing Roberts’s involvement with Romer v. Evans because they think it makes him look bad? Or because they think it will hurt him with conservatives? I also don’t follow your segue to the comment about Rush’s delusion.

Second correspondent:

The general feeling among conservatives who still support Roberts is that the revelation about pro bono work in Romer is a ploy by Left to divide Right. (This of course is looking at it solely strategically, and ignoring the substance of what he did.) Rush was trying to push that idea so that Right would hang together, although I’m not sure he was so convinced and easy about it himself. Then he tried the tack of saying the Left thinks Right will fall apart at this because they think we’re so anti-gay, and he implied that Roberts’s work shows we’re not, but he seemed a little stupid saying that because are we supposed to be so easy about gays that we can support their political and judicial agenda, or help them advance that, as Roberts’s pro bono Romer work evidently did, at least to some extent? So he almost seemed to be saying, see the Right isn’t as bad as the Left thinks, in fact, sometimes we can even join them in advancing their issues!!

LA:

Fantastic. This is a perfect example of something I’ve said many times, that today’s conservatives define themselves completely by their reactions to the left and have lost any principles of their own. Rush doesn’t ask, What do WE think about what Roberts did? Should WE support such a man? No. Instead, Rush says, since the left is (as Rush believes) trying to use Roberts’s pro-gay-rights record to harm him with conservatives, therefore …

… conservatives should support Roberts for his pro-gay-rights record!

For today’s “conservatives,” right and wrong are now defined solely by whatever is the opposite of what the left is doing or seeking, not by what the conservatives themselves believe or ought to believe.

[The discussion is continued in a later blog entry.]

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 13, 2005 12:48 PM | Send