Playing for Keeps in the Mainstream Media

How highly unusual it is that I would be sitting here writing an article in praise of something that came out of the mouth of Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing talker with “talent on loan from GOD,” according to his own advertisement. Right-wing radio has gotten a lot more entertaining ever since Obama took office – the cogs in the vast echo chamber are squirming and flopping about like fish out of water – and I can’t get enough of it.

Fascinating as it is to listen to an over-weight and uneducated man bloviate for three hours a day about the virtues of self-reliance and the evil that is government (except for when government is protecting us from our enemies by building enough destructive weaponry a year to destroy the species in a moment), I have to come out and say that the underlying message behind Rush’s recent antics are alarming to an atypical extent.

At the CPAC convention back in February, El Rushbo infamously declared that he wanted the new administration to fail. He went so far as to claim that this was secretly the opinion of all republicans, but that he, big, brave man that he is, was the only one with the guts to say so.

Limbaugh likened his desire to see the Obama administration fail to his desire to, since he is a fan of the Steelers, see the Cardinals fail in their performance at the Super Bowl. This analogy is both illustrative and instructive. I could not think of a more succinct and clear way to illustrate Rush’s feelings toward our democracy.

You see, to Rush and most other commentators in the mainstream media, political elections and the Super Bowl are very much alike – the ultimate end is victory for their preferred team, and the fruits of victory are non-tangible, amounting only to a personal sense of satisfaction – because, after all, Rush is and will be a multi-millionaire regardless of which team wins – in both the election and the Super Bowl.

His message, also keeping in mind his antics during the democratic primary which he dubbed Operation Chaos, is that victory for the Republicans is the ultimate end, thus rooting for the Democrats to fail is laudable, because victory for one’s team of choice is all that matters – elections have no real world implications

Perhaps most shocking is that millions of Americans are on board with Rush, most of them non-millionaires. Whenever you allow a person like Rush to convince you that his economic interests are your economic interests, you are basically grabbing his dick and shoving it up your own ass; the fact of the matter is, his economic interests are irreconcilably opposed to the interests of working-class people.

What doesn’t seem to be perceived is that politics isn’t a game. Hundreds of thousands have died needlessly in Iraq and Afghanistan, and for the families of the fallen, this “game” that Rush loves to play is not very fun. The economy has been wrecked through wreck-less deregulation, causing many honest people to lose out hard. Rush and his compatriots in the elite right-wing media seem to be far more concerned with winning the game the next time around than they are at attempting to bring new ideas to the table in cooperation with the other party. When elections between elitist parties amount to nothing more than a spirited competition in which both sides wish to see the other fail miserably, the common people will lose out, each and every time.