A Slow Rush to Judgment

When Rush Limbaugh first took to the national radio airwaves back in the late ’80s we found his shtick somewhat amusing, and during many of the controversies he deliberately provoked over the years we came to his defense. He was espousing what were then mainstream conservative views, which we usually agreed with, and we found it slightly amusing how apoplectic the left would become over it.

Since the nomination and election of President Donald Trump, though, Limbaugh has taken an infuriating turn toward a more newfangled conservatism. Limbaugh was once an outspoken advocate of the North American Free Trade Agreement and free trade in general, he defended President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq and Bush’s presidency in general, and railed constantly against the federal government’s mounting debt. Trump called NAFTA the worst deal ever and started protectionist trade wars with just about every country, accused Bush of lying America into the Iraq War and said it was the worst foreign policy decision ever, and is racking up the national debt at an unprecedented pace, but Limbaugh has capitulated to Trump on every issue.

We usually sleep late and don’t drive around with the car radio on these days, so we only occasionally hear Limbaugh’s broadcasts, but when we have we’ve become very disenchanted. The first time was when a video showed a high school girl losing a state track championship by stopping to help a fellow competitor who had stumbled, which went “viral” as an example of sportsmanship, and Limbaugh castigated for her compassion and lack of a win-at-all-costs ruthlessness, which is now inconsistent with the newfangled conservatism, which don’t much like. After that he assured his listeners that whoever was sending pi0e bombs to Democratic politicians and various media would surely turn out to be a lefty trying make Trump look bad, and when the feds arrested a guy whose van was covered in pro-trump decals he embraced his callers’ conspiracy theory that the decals weren’t sufficiently faded so it must have been a “deep state” conspiracy.

One day we happened to be listening Limbaugh asked if any of his listeners had seen and heard the press conference by several women who allege that Trump had sexually assaulted them, and by coincidence we had, so we were interested to hear his account of it. He said that one of the “babes” had complained that Trump asked for her phone, and wondered what’s wrong with a world where a man can’t even ask for a woman’s phone number. He said another was a contestant in of one Trump’s beauty pageants who complained about being ogled, and remarked that the being ogled whole point of beauty pageants. Limbaugh didn’t mention that the first women alleged Trump was grabbing her and kissing her without consent, as Trump bragged about doing on the infamous “Hollywood Access” tape, and thought the request for her phone number added insult to injury. Nor did Limbaugh explain that the beauty pageant contestant said Trump’s ogled her in a state of undress when he invaded her dressing room, as he had bragged about doing on Howard Stern’s pornograahic radio show.

Limbaugh proudly claims to be a fearless truth teller, but on that day he was flat out lying to his 20 million or listeners, and exactly the sort of sexist pig that all of his critics have long alleged.

He later told a caller who was concerned about the growing national debt that it’s no big deal, and that he and other conservatives never really cared about it and only used it as an arguing point with Democrats. That pretty much ended our regard for his commentary, but last week he went on air and said that Trump shouldn’t be heeding the advice of government experts about the coronavirus epidemic, as they’re part of a conspiracy to undermine his presidency, so we’re now done with him entirely.

Limbaugh has bravely announced that he has stage-4 lung cancer, and we’re hoping and praying for his recovery, as we don’t wish that on anyone. Even so, we won’t be listening to his daily diatribes.

— Bud Norman

Might As Well Grab ‘Em By The …

By this unpleasant moment in such a crazy presidential election year, our best advice to the Republican nominee is to go right ahead and proudly proclaim that he’s a sexist pig. To borrow an infamous phrase from the equally despicable Democratic nominee, what difference, at this point, does it make?

In case you’ve been fortunate enough to have been living in a cave without cable television or internet access or even old-fashioned newspaper delivery for the past several days, last Friday saw the release of an 11-year-old outtake from a celebrity gossip show that featured Donald J. Trump boasting about how his reality-show stardom allowed him to not only kiss any attractive woman he might encounter but also to “grab ’em by the p***y.” Even in this crazy election year, and even at this late date in our long cultural decline, when the unregulated cable news networks and the more daring newspapers are quoting the obscenity without the expurgating asterisks, the story had legs that carried it into Sunday’s presidential debate.

After an uncharacteristic apology for his remarks, which he laughably insisted did not reflect who he is, Trump tried to further mitigate the damage by dragging out three women who could plausibly testify that the Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s ex-president husband was an even worse cad. During the debate he tried to dodge a question about whether he had actually done what he bragged about, then finally insisted he was merely all talk and no action, but anyone who familiar with the reality show genre should not be surprised that at least four women are now plausibly testifying that he acted exactly like he had bragged about acting. There are also some former beauty pageant contestants testifying that Trump invaded their dressing rooms while they were undressed, which Trump indignantly denies but is nonetheless plausible given that he also bragged about being able to get away with that during one of his frequent appearances on the shock jock Howard Stern’s radio show, and given the countless other eye-popping quotes he’s provided to the tabloid press over the years the sexist pig charge is becoming hard to deny. Trump and his supporters can cast aspersions on the women making the claims, just as they now indignantly note that Clinton and all his former and current supporters did, but that probably won’t help.

This isn’t likely to help Trump with the 60 percent or so of voters who had already reasonably concluded that he doesn’t respect women, but it won’t faze the 35 percent or so of the country that have stubbornly supported his candidacy from the beginning, and we’re quite sure many of them will regard it as a feature rather than a bug. When we tried to warn our fellow Republicans that Trump was a predatory sexist pig we were often told that he was the only bold enough to point out that so was the Democratic nominee’s ex-president husband, which we had to admit was true, even if he seemed the worst one of the candidates to make the case, and the fact that Trump had long been among those libertine Democrats making excuses for the ex-president’s predatory sexist piggery and casting aspersions on his victims proved unconvincing to Trump’s more ardent fans.

We were also told that Trump’s already well-known eye-popping quotes of sexual piggery were proof of how very “politically-incorrect” he was, and whatever the hell that means to someone in favor same-sex bathrooms it was somehow a big selling point at the time, and that it demonstrated what an world-beating “alpha-male” he was, whatever the hell that means in the context of a draft-dodging isolationist with a worrisome adoration of Vladimir Putin. So as far we understood it the theory was that a six-times bankrupt and self-proclaimed “king of debt” was such a brilliant businessman that only he could deal with the nation’s impending insolvency, that only a twice-divorced and boastfully adulterous and lately-married to an illegal-immigrant-nudie-model could defend our nation’s Judeo-Christian culture, and that the sheer audaciousness required to stand on a Republican debate stage and boast about his hand size and you-know-what-that-means and then grab ’em by the genitals would suffice to  slay America’s many foreign and domestic enemies, and that at least he’d be having affairs with more glamorous women than that loser ex-president could get. The theory also claimed that only he would get down in the mud with those awful Clintons, where we were told the battle had to be won, but at this point in such a crazy election year it doesn’t seem to be working out.

Which is a shame, because those Clintons truly are at least as awful, quite arguably more so, and we expect that just about any old boring beta-male or even downright female Republican who wasn’t such an undeniably sexist pig and spent all of his or her  time talking up the traditional Republican talking points about the sluggish economy and national debt and rapidly deteriorating foreign relations and free market alternatives to Obamacare and all that blather about sex-segregated dressing rooms and other pressing issues facing the nation would be leading by double digits rather than trailing by the six or seven points that Trump is currently losing. At this point that makes no difference, we suppose, but we’ll hold out hope that at some happier point in the future the Republican Party will remember this awful moment in history.

— Bud Norman