When Politicians Rush
By Chad A. B. Wilson
Published April 7, 2007, 5:40 pm in News, Voting & Partisanship, Rhetoric.
When Officials Rush
Rush Limbaugh is the kind of guy I would like to have at a dinner party. I bet he would be a heck of a lot of fun. I mean, this is a guy that can pontificate on any subject in the world; he's bound to make any dinner party interesting. Even if the rest of my guests are Democrats, I bet they would still like Limbaugh to be there becuase he can speak on any subject. Imagine him on Hollywood--Michael J. Fox is faking his disease--or on Iraq--we need to kick their terrorist butts. Sounds like a good time to me. At least it wouldn't be boring.
Now imagine if you got Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney at your dinner party. Cheney has always reminded me of the evil mastermind featured in every action flick: ruthless, cunning, quiet, and brilliant. Perhaps he's really like Jafar in Disney's version of Alladin: he works behind the scenes, but he actually runs the whole show. And Limbaugh obviously loves the guy. In Limbaugh's mind, the Bush administration, of which Cheney is a key player, can do no wrong. Limbaugh loves them, for they're so much like him--conservative to the point of alienating everyone. One response to a New York Times article said this about these two:
"Rush and Cheney are a pair. Rush is a holier than thou Christian conservative, who just happens to be a convicte [sic] felon for acquiring thousands of oxycontin pills illegally. Cheney has profited from Haliburton contracts. That is why we are in Iraq. Rush and Cheney have as much credibility as Mutt and Jeff."
Now none of those statements about this couple is quite fair or perhaps even accurate. Yes, Rush Limbaugh did take Oxycontin, but that doesn't mean that we can't believe or trust him. It doesn't make any sense to dismiss everything someone says because they happen to have a prescription drug problem. Drug problems are diseases, not moral weaknesses, so I don't think it's fair to discount someone for that. The problem is that Limbaugh's conservatism makes him such a target for this kind of attack. The guy believes in a strong DEA, so it's easy to call the "you also" fallacy on him, to tell him to get the "log" out of his own eye before turning to the twig in someone else's.
And Cheney, well, it's true that he was still getting $1 million a year from Halliburtun after becoming VP. I agree that he should not have been able to do that, that it may be a conflict of interest. But that isn't quite the same thing as saying "That is why we are in Iraq." I do not believe that we went into Iraq because Cheney stood to benefit from the business Halliburtun would get from a war. That's just beyond belief. It doesn't mean that it cannot be true, of course, because stranger James-Bond-esque things have happened, but it means that there's no proof to it, so I can't support it.
But the statements about Limbaugh and Cheney still hit on something that makes sense. These two have lost their credibility. Another comment on the same article (by D'Arggh, a great name) says that no one takes Limbaugh seriously anymore:
"What could be more absurd than the Vice President of the United States of America cavorting with a figure as ridiculous as Rush Limbaugh? Not even serious conservatives take Limbaugh seriously - just yahoos. This nation and the administration has sunk to new lows."
I don't know about the yahoos comments, and I would have stayed away from saying that, but this comment gets at something interesting about Dick Cheney going on the Rush Limbaugh radio program. It's a weird public relations move. I understand going on "Meet the Press" or the "Jim Leher News Hour." I understand wanting to explain positions to the world, and I wish members of the administration would do that more often. But the Rush Limbaugh show? Two problems there: 1) it's preaching to the choir. As the comment above put it, "not even serious conservatives take Limbaugh seriously - just yahoos." Only the most conservative of conservatives listen to Limbaugh, and they already think that the "libs" are all evil and the Republicans should bring this country back to its glory. 2) Limbaugh won't challenge Cheney. Part of the reason to get these people on these shows is to give them the difficult questions and them listen to and watch them wrangle.
I want to ask Cheney questions like "Do you regret supporting the invasion of Iraq now that over 3000 American soldiers have died?" Or "Exactly what is your role in the Bush administration?" "How do you respond to the negative image of you and your office that emerged over the course of the Libbey trial?" Those questions are interesting. Those are the things I want to know from our all-too-quiet VP. But Limbaugh? He asks, "Well, how much damage has [Nancy Pelosi] done by conveying to Assad that Israel is ready for peace talks when Israel is not ready for peace talks, as Syria is currently constituted?" Oh, now that's a tough one, isn't it. Talk about playing into one's fantasies. But what about what Cheney would have said to the Syrian president?
According to another response from Dan Stackhouse, "Cheney’s approach to Syria is more like ‘Go $%&@ yourself’. Rush would have offered them some Oxycontin probably, or claimed they were faking being Islamic."
Now that's funny. Perhaps what I really need is to get Limbaugh, Cheney, and this Stackhouse guy all over for tea and dessert. Now that would be a good time. Although I wouldn't put it quite as he did, that really is the Bush administration's approach to Syria. To look at it from afar and say, "You know what you need to do if you want to be our friend." It's as if we're the cool kid on the playground. Everyone used to love us, but now we've sort of fallen from favor. We still think everyone loves us, though, so we think everyone wants to be our friend. So we sneer at the guys who have their own group. Their groups aren't as powerful as ours, but they seem perfectly content. And we yell at them from across the playground, "You know what you need to do to hang out with us!" But in reality, they don't care anything about hanging out with us. Sure, they'll deal with us as they can, and they secretly plot ways to bring us down, but really, they laugh at us when we tell them what to do. They're the ones telling us to "Go $%&@ ourselves."
Maybe we need to adjust our playground strategy. After all, that's what political strategies are.
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