Limbaugh and a Political Fluke

Well, if Rush Limbaugh was searching for a way to vet his advertisers for courage and political vision he certainly found it.

To hear MSNBC and their ilk tell it, Limbaugh's ad customers can't get off the boat fast enough in the wake of his calling a young female political activist a slut. Of course they'll come slinking back in a few weeks when they've wrung all the PC PR out of the situation. When they do I hope Limbaugh tells them to take a hike and announces their overtures on the air.

How did it happen? Were there some people out there unfamiliar with Rush and his plainspoken ways? Sort of yes. The trouble is that there are a lot of folks, quite a few of them women, who don't follow the day to day bloody work of politics close enough to know that this kind of thing goes on all the time, especially among the Liberal belligerentsia.

Regular folks, especially female and above a certain age, don't often tune in to Bill Maher or Ed Schultz, don't read Matt Taibbi, and  have probably never heard the crude locker-room commentary and ridicule directed at Sarah Palin, Michelle Malkin, Laura Ingraham and Michele Bachmann on the Huffington Post or the Daily Beast  or even Morning Joe. ("Mama gets her what-what." -- Eh? Just Google it.) Snark is more than a first language for these people; it's an art form. They can sonnet in it.

Check out a post by Nick Gillespie at Reason.com (http://goo.gl/euun9), and another by Kirsten Powers at TheDailyBeast.com (http://goo.gl/yaq5g) for short compilations of the kind of despicable rhetoric we get from the Left, even the mainstreamers. Gillespie makes the mistake of blasting both sides, Right and Left, but you'll look far and wide to find Right wing writers -- aside from the manic fringes -- managing the kind of originality, verve, and vile artistry produced by the Left when they take the pitchforks to folks who disagree with them. These people are weaned on vitriol -- straight, no chaser.

Those who swim in these waters know the sharks feed every night, but for most of the viewing audience now gasping at Rush's lampoonery, the 2008 campaign never got any rougher than a few sharp but funny Tina Fey skits on Saturday Night Live. They don't realize that the Left is like the angel child who polishes his halo while the adults are watching, and then spits in his sister's eye the minute they turn their backs. When she retaliates, he howls bloody murder, then enjoys two puddings as they haul her off to the correction corner.

Mad Women

That's what was happening when the Liberal tantrum machine got cranked up and made sure every family room in the nation got to hear Rush calling a young woman -- a law student! -- a slut. As a result a lot of regular ladies suddenly got the vapors, having something of a hair-trigger when it comes to that term. OK. There are also some one- or two-word gutter insults that most men would consider so base as to demand immediate satisfaction. Who would tolerate being called a Taibbi, for instance? Or worse, a Maher. And yet there are some who cravenly take it all day every day.

And of course it's plain that this Sandra Fluke is not actually a slut. The fact that she allowed herself to be politically prostituted by the Democrats was all about the propaganda battle, not her indulgence in "what-what." She wants to force Georgetown, a Jesuit college, to provide birth control (note: that really means abortion), which means she willingly put herself right in the barbed wire of one of the hottest battlefields in the culture wars. She's not a slut; she's a soldier who would stop at nothing, even describing her supposed contraceptive needs on national television, to advance her cause.

Some people just have no boundaries.