Resenting the handicapped parking spaces

Updated below.

Everything Rush Limbaugh says means the same thing.

The actual words he uses are irrelevent.  He might as well be talking gibberish (Yeah, I know.) or in code.  Whatever he says needs to be translated and is as easy to translate as pig-latin.

No matter what he says this is what he means:  "Rich white guys like me should run the country and be allowed to do whatever we want, and anybody or anything that gets in the way of that needs to be steamrollered in a hurry."

This isn't even a forumulated thought with him.  People like Limbaugh don't think.  Well, most people don't think.  They don't put together thoughts.  They have feelings that they attach words to without giving much care to what those words are and how accurately they describe the feeling.

Some people say the same words over and over even as the feelings they want the words to describe change.  Other people just keep changing the words, usually because they don't remember them from one day to the next.  The words were just sounds they gave to the feelings.

That's why it's next to impossible to cause people like Limbaugh to feel ashamed of what they said.  You can't hold them to their words.  Repeat their words back to them and they don't recognize them.  Their own words on paper or said by someone else or even said by themselves on tape or on video aren't attached to the feeling that was behind the words when they said them.

So when Limbaugh makes fun of Michael J. Fox and accuses Fox of going off his meds or exaggerating the effects of his Parkinson's disease or of pretending to how much he even suffers from it---Limbaugh did all of those at once; self-contradiction is a breeze when you don't care what the words you're saying actually mean---and to every decent-hearted and right-thinking person sounds as if he's making fun of Fox for being sick and by extension mocking everyone with Parkinson's and even everyone with an illness or a disability, he wasn't saying anything really.

He wasn't expressing his feelings about Parkinson's, Fox, illness, or disability.  He wasn't giving us his true opinion of the morality or efficacy of stem cell research.  My guess is that he has no feelings on any of those subjects, one way or another.

Although I'm sure he got a sadistic thrill out of mocking Fox, Fox doesn't matter to him as a person.  Fox is just another obstacle to the one thing Limbaugh feels strongly about, which is as I said, that rich white guys like him should run the country and be allowed to do whatever they want.

Fox's offense was making campaign commercials for candidates who will vote to expand and fund stem cell research, but Limbaugh doesn't care about that.  What he cares about is that those candidates are Democrats who will also vote to make it harder for rich white guys like Rush to get away with whatever they want to get away with.

Rush's anger and outrage are real; the words he used to express them weren't.  This is why if the Republicans find a disabled person to "exploit" his disability in a campaign commercial for them or if they get a bunch of their own celebrities together to make a hysterical ad (and I don't mean funny hysterical, I mean expressive of hysteria) about the evils of stem cell research based on ignorance, superstition, and lies, Rush won't care and you wouldn't be able to get him to feel a twinge of remorse about his hypocrisy and double-standards.

Because the feeling behind his mocking of Fox and his indifference to Republicans doing the things he claims Fox is wrong for doing is the same.

Whatever interferes with the rule of rich white guys is bad, whatever advances it is good.

Inside, Rush feels like a man of integrity and principle.

Within himself he is consistent.  He is true to his guiding star.

Now, the difference between someone like Rush and most people who don't think but feel is that he has an inkling that his words and his true feelings don't line up.  He covers for this by calling himself a performer and by encouraging his defenders and fans to describe him as if what he's doing is political satire.  He's just being funny, folks.  Exaggerating for emphasis.

But most of his listeners do not know that they don't think.  And they do not know that Limbaugh's words are just sounds carrying an emotion.

The great evil that Limbaugh does is that he gives his listeners words that both help them express their hatreds and resentments and hide from themselves the fact that they hate and resent.

"Rush is a smart guy, he must be, he's famous and he's rich and people I hate hate him, and he uses these words, so if I use these words I'll be saying something smart."

And so now we've got a whole bunch of people who think they're being smart when they mock the disabled and the sick.

But while Limbaugh probably doesn't give people with disabilities a thought when he's not using them to stir up the pot on his show, a lot of his listeners do in fact resent and hate the disabled.

They resent and hate anyone who seems to be getting the kind of respect and consideration they feel screwed out of themselves.

Limbaugh has one "idea" to push, put and keep the rich white guys like me in charge.  But most of his listeners are not rich white guys.  They are financially struggling white guys.

Putting and keeping the rich white guys in charge is of course the guiding "principle" of that wholly owned subsidiary of Big Business Inc, the national Republican Party, but this has been a problem for the Republicans since William McKinley's time.  This is supposedly a democracy.  Everybody's in charge.  And most everybody is not a rich white guy.

Asking people to vote to put the rich white guys in control is asking them to vote against themselves and their own interests.

So the Republicans have developed a secondary message.

Put us rich white guys in charge and we'll make sure you become a rich guy too.

We'll invite you to join the club.

The rich white guys have been in charge for decades now, though, so how come we're all not rich?

This question was anticipated by the rich white guys.  The rich white guys had to anticipate it because they don't really want the people who vote for them in their club.

The reason we haven't been able to make you rich is that Liberals keep us from doing it.

It's because Liberals keep giving everything you've earned and deserve to their special interests.

You're out of a job or you're attending your third choice of colleges because some black guy got your place instead.

You're not getting ahead no matter how hard you work because your company is strapped because of all those environmental regulations it has to meet or all those frivolous lawsuits it's had to fight off or all those rules the corrupt union bosses tricked the guys down on the factory floor into demanding.

Your marriage has gone bust, your son is gay (You're gay!), your daughter's knocked up because of Feminists, special treatment for gays, all that sex in all those movies and TV shows Hollyweird Liberals produce and force you to watch.

Your town's falling apart, your neighbors are moving out, your store's going under because the factory had to close, the company's moving operations to the South because all those brown people the Liberals keep letting in the country will work for slave wages.

The middle manager being escorted out the door by security, his few personal belongings hastily packed in a cardboard box, downsized---rightsized---his boss told him because the company's had to cut back, passes the carpenters at work installing a ramp for that woman in accounting who's in a wheelchair, what's he going to think?  That the company has money to make her life easier but not money to see that his kids eat next month?  On his way through the parking lot he walks by six empty handicapped spots before he gets to his car which he can no longer afford to make the payments on, what's going through his mind?

The "smart" words he's been handed by Rush and the other peddlers of resentment to attach to his feelings.

Over at Tapped yesterday, Ben Adler was speculating that the Republicans "have it in for the disabled."

I don't think that's true, although for a fact the judges Bush has been appointing are not of a stripe to look kindly on any disabled person's claiming rights that get in the way of Big Business Inc making gobs and gobs of money, as much of it as BBI desires and in any way it wants to make it.

And even though a Republican like Jim Sensenbrenner has worked to restore the civil rights enforcement powers to the Americans With Disabilities Act, George Bush is not going to appoint anyone to his Justice Department to actually go out and enforce it.

Whatever the feelings and intentions of individual Republican Congressmen and Senators might be, they belong to a party that is led by George Bush and controlled by Big Business Inc, and the upshot is that the Republican Party might as well have it in for the disabled for being disabled, because it has it in for pretty much all of us, because we are in the way of BBI making gobs and gobs of money, as much as it desires and any way it wants.

But because the Party has adopted a strategy of exploiting resentments and hatreds in its rank and file, mocking the disabled and giving people the words to do it with it is useful and easy.

And the brilliance of it is that because the words contradict themselves the people adopting them don't even have to know that's what they're doing.
__________________________________________________

Update:  Shakespeare's Sister follows up:

To say that Limbaugh probably isn’t, in real life, the monster he plays on the radio isn’t a particularly nice thing to say about him, though it may seem so. In reality, it’s rather the opposite. I firmly believe he has the capacity to be a decent person (most people do); that he chooses to shed that decency as soon as a microphone is put in front of him speaks to the depth of his lack of character. It’s one thing to be the kind of person who truly hates the disabled by virtue of ignorance or masked fear or plain, old-fashioned intolerance; it’s quite another to affect that hatred in spite of knowing better to make money from the devotion of people who really do, by inflaming their repugnant beliefs.

Hat tips to, Shakes, Lemieux, Maha, and Kuusisto.

Shakes has a link to the video of Rush rubbishing Fox.

Cross-posted at the American Street.

If you pay for airport parking reservations then no one can resent you parking in their spot.

Comments

[Ken Rasak]

This is the best explanation for Limbaugh's comments that I have read. People seem shocked, but it seems entirely consistent with the Rush we've come to know.

[Daniel DiRito]

See a tongue-in-cheek visual that gives Rush Limbaugh a dose of his own medicine...here:

www.thoughttheater.com

[Susan]

Once again, you have *nailed* it.

Thank you, Lance!

[MH]

Good post. The only places I've ever heard Limbaugh on the radio are cabs and airport shuttles driven by white guys (e.g., white guys doing jobs they don't think white guys should have to do).

[Linkmeister]

The first time I heard Limbaugh was in the 1980s when I was driving around the West on vacations. At the time he hadn't anywhere near the influence he does now, and I just thought he was amusing. I remember thinking "what kind of talk radio is this? The guy never takes any calls from the audience (might have been one or two per hour back then), and I thought that was the point?"

Little did I know he'd become the (ostensible) voice of the disenfranchised white guy by the time Clinton took office.

Very good analysis, Lance.

[Campaspe]

The only thing that keeps me from wanting to put my foot through the computer screen watching Limbaugh and that smarmy reply ad is the thought that this is desperation, as the looming election turns the Republicans into a version of the "Shark Massacre" chapter in Moby Dick. Had to re-read the passage after reading your post, in fact:

"They viciously snapped, not only at each other's disembowelments, but like flexible bows, bent round, and bit their own; till those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again by the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound. Nor was this all. It was unsafe to meddle with the corpses and ghosts of these creatures. A sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality seemed to lurk in their very joints and bones, after what might be called the individual life had departed."

[Dugas]

Some people say the same words over and over even as the feelings they want the words to describe change. Other people just keep changing the words, usually because they don't remember them from one day to the next. The words were just sounds they gave to the feelings.

Great post. I'll be forwarding this on to my mates.

[Molly, NYC]

Put us rich white guys in charge and we'll make sure you become a rich guy too.

Limbaugh owes his credibility with those resentful, financially struggling ignoramuses he has for an audience to the fact that he genuinely hails from that class himself. And he has become a rich guy. His life is what they aspire to, underage Dominican hookers and all.

[Paul]

Excellent, excellent post. I don't have much to add as you said it so clearly.

Just one comment. I had been seeing on all the MSM yesterday that rush had apologized. Today I heard on Air America Rush saying he stands by everything, it is what he thinks, what he beleives, what he is led to know. I know, I know, just words, gobbledegook, but in reference to how Rush likes to pass it all off as a joke or an act, he is not even trying to here.

And anyway, why was the MSM apologizing for Rush before Rush even apologized?

[merciless]

Wonderful post. Couple things: I have read several times that Rush is (1) not actually all that smart (he never managed to get through college, even though his father is a lawyer and fairly big chesse in Missouri); (2) not very personable. His wives and those who tried to work with him at ESPN (including Olbermann) described him as colorless, uninterested in reading or debating anything, whose only pastime seemed to be sitting on the couch watching sports.

So for him to see himself as an entertainer is really true, just as George Bush sees himself as Abraham Lincoln. There's no there there. It's all an act.

[Neal]

What a great post. You are the first person that nailed the absolute contradiction. Rush's audience is lower middle class to poor whites and I cant understand why they vote/support rich white guys! They support people who make money off oil, pharma, insurance, yet they believe that the $200 check that they received due to a tax break is equivalent to bringing their job back that they have lost to globalization.

This is the biggest conundrum and hats off to Rush for fooling these whities all the time.

[Roxanne]

Rush's audience is lower middle class to poor whites and I cant understand why they vote/support rich white guys!

Because those people want to be rich white guys (and gals).

On a related note, if you want to get to Rush, go after his advertisers.

[KathyF]

To paraphrase what I just told Avedon: You said what I said (yesterday, and again today), only better and not as succinctly. There cannot be enough words printed on how vile this man and his actions are, imo.

Also I'd add: Rush probably doesn't give a hoot about blastocysts either, and if he had an illness that could benefit from their demise, would be first to sign up for treatment, you betcha. But since Democrats, i.e. Liberals are aligned with stem cell research while Republicans are lined up against it, he's four square against it.

And let's not even go into the ironic territory of how MJF played a Republican on TV!

[Paul]

Rush Limbaugh and some others like him (Left and Right) think that what they say means something to someone who doesn't have the time or audacity to think for his,or her, self ! Pundits are a dime a dozen and about as usefull as an umbrella with a hole in it. Moral-think for yourself !

[Comandante Agi]

But Matt Lauer said Rush was simply expressing what we all felt inside. So...Rush has to be right. He's a visionary, a prophet, a artist of the ignorant mind.

[Deep Thought]

"But while Limbaugh probably doesn't give people with disabilities a thought when he's not using them to stir up the pot on his show..."

Yeah, sure - the deaf guy never thinks of the disabled. Brilliant insight.

[Lex]

[[The great evil that Limbaugh does is that he gives his listeners words that both help them express their hatreds and resentments and hide from themselves the fact that they hate and resent.]]

Precisely. Because most people still desperately want to think they're decent at heart, not full of hatred and resentment.

Wonderful insight. Reminds me of the great line from "The Usual Suspects":

"The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist."

[Gentlewoman]

Excellent post, as always. Just one point: Rush is not in fact, from a lower-middle class white family. His family in SE Missouri is a distinguished one; his father was a judge and I think they are about to, or have, named a courthouse after him. There is a MO Supreme Court Justice named Limbaugh; I believe he is Rush's brother. So basically, Rush may very well be considered the underachiever in his family, as I don't think he ever finished college.

[Kit Stolz]

To people who have only heard of Limbaugh, and not encountered his devoted fans, this post might seem broad. It's not. I have a good friend who went to Berkeley in the l970's and for many years was a fairly typical California liberal. Then he didn't become the success he wanted to become (in part because he couldn't deal with liking men sexually, and in part because he couldn't stop drinking) and turned to Limbaugh for succor.

David's not a stupid guy, in fact he has a PhD in statistics, even though he's now been homeless in Las Vegas for many years. We have often remarked in phone conversations on the irony that even though economically I should support Republican candidates who (at least in theory) would cut my taxes, and he should support Democrats who (at least in theory) would make some provision for the poor, in fact David is a hard-right Republican who repeats the latest Limbaugh talking points devoutly. It's crazy, but it's true.

As Lance so astutely points out, Limbaugh's audience desperately needs to believe that they are being denied their due; logic or even politics has little to do with it. This is what drives them, and this is why they love the bragging of Limbaugh, the "fun" he says he's having at the expense of the other, the thrill they take in his success. It's the modern equivalent of the KKK, I think, keeping in mind that in its heyday (the l920's) the KKK was a respectable organization with millions of members, and even a President (Harding) who was inducted into the KKK in a secret initiation.

But to say that Limbaugh doesn't think underestimates him a little bit, I think. Limbaugh is very very good at telling Big Lies. He crafts them consciously, I believe. Here's an example. If you heard any of his show yesterday, you heard him taking calls on the M.J. Fox case. (He wanted to put it behind him, but callers wouldn't let it go, which shows he's not in control of this issue.) What did he say? Well, we don't have time for a full forensic examination, but
his central point was that if you watch a Democratic ad, such as the Fox/Parkinson's ad, you have to keep in mind that it was funded by Democrats, scripted by Democrats, etc. Of course, there's a grain of truth in that, but note the bigger truth. Fox simply looked at the camera and said what he thought about the issue and suggested a vote for the Democrat. The anti-Democrat ads in Tennessee, in contrast, were a highly crafted collage of racist hints and sexual allegations, written and shot and edited with a master propagandist's verve.

It's all propaganda to Limbaugh. He's is far more cynical even than his audience realizes. If the love of the dittoheads for Limbaugh ever begins to fade, do not surprised if he turns bitter. He can't reject them, for obvious reasons, but the truth may out nonetheless...and if it does, it will be a spectacular moment.

[CJColucci]

Best takedown of Rush ever.

[DaveL]

Really excellent post.

[Dugas]

"What is most marketable is absolutism and attitude undiluted by thought."

[from Wendy Kaminer's critique of Camille Paglia which I lovingly lifted to throw on to Rush]

[KC45s]

Outstanding. I dub thee Zeus. Thanks for articulating some thoughts I've never been able to sort out. Limbaugh has grimly fascinated me for years. Back in the early 1990s I worked at a bookstore when his first bestseller was atop the charts. Customers came in all the time telling me (or a colleague) how great this guy was, that I could read his book and learn a lot. (If I was in a good mood I would respond, "Oh, I don't read, man.") This was a cigar and tie-clip crowd. It was a cigar and tie-clip neighborhood. And ever since I've wondered, what do you guys have to be mad about? I mean, I knew, you dig, but now it's a little clearer in my mind.

[harry near indy]

great post, lance.

rush does speak to the lower-middle-class white male, the one group in the united states that i truly hate and wish would all die and go to hell -- the sooner the better.

in the past, if these lower-middle-class white males didn't climb the social/economic ladder to the same level as the upper-middle-class white males, at least they were above others -- a lot of them black, native american, and women.

the south from the 1860s to the 1960s used that to keep the lower-middle-class white males in their place, more or less.

btw, men with that mentality/outlook, in germany in the 1920s, were among the first followers of hitler. that's why i hate them -- they are nazis in embryo.

[Deep Thought]

Harry near Indy,
How sad it must be, to be filled with such overwhelming hatred of other you don't know because they are so... filled with hate... potentially.

Too bad that A) those days of the 1860's to 1960's were when the South was solidly Democrat and B) the South is the *least* racist area of the country

Really! Check here:
http://andune.blogspot.com/2006/08/rednecks-white-power-and-blue-states.html

And how does it feel to live 'near Indy', historically a stronghold of the Klan?

[Longhairedweirdo]

Inside, Rush feels like a man of integrity and principle.

Within himself he is consistent. He is true to his guiding star.

No, that's the common fallacy about Rush. Rush thinks he's an entertainer, saying whatever gets his listeners to keep listening. That's it. He doesn't need to be factual, because he's not a journalist. He doesn't need to be consistent because he's not a commentator. He just needs to be entertaining, and he's happy.

I'm not saying this to excuse him; he's making huge gobs of money by peddling hatred, and that's evil and wrong. But do not think that he takes himself seriously. Don't think you can debate him and show the flaws in his argument. Don't think you can do anything to change him, except by hurting his ratings.

[Wonder George]

For the record, Rush, why don't you REALLY explain what you were doing with a bottle of Viagra in the Dominican Republic?

And while we're at it, Rush, were you having affairs with children in the D.R.?

Maybe even - GASP! - boys????

Hello, Rush? Rush, are you there?

Now how do you like that, the MFSOB hung up on me! I hope he gets his - preferably, similar to the fate of one Paul Gadd, better known as Gary Glitter!