Rush Limbaugh, the 20th Century Pundit

[elfs]

This afternoon, I had to drive out and buy new headlamps for my car. While I was tooling around, I played with the radio and stumbled upon Rush Limbaugh putting forth from his pulpit. The man sounds completely detached from reality, but two things he said caught my attention.

The first was that he had heard that the blogosphere was now open talking about the possibilty of McCain's death while in office had become a talking point. "I was waiting for this," he breathed into the microphone, every syllable dripping with disdain. "You know there was someone in the Obama campaign who came up with this, and they were just looking for a way to get it out of there without anyone being able to trace it back to the campaign.

The other was while discussing the whole "Jesus was a community organizer, Pilate was a governor" meme that went around in response to the Republican hatefest last week, Rush blathered that "Someone in the Obama campaign, some Democrat operative, came up with this."

Uh, no, Rush. Actually, it came out from the bottom and sped around the Internet pretty quickly. If I'd bothered, on the first day I saw it I could probably track down who wrote it first, probably in a comment on a blog somewhere, some off-the-cuff that the rest of the Internet took in and said, "Oh, that's good." And we're perfectly capable of looking at John McCain's age and Sarah Palin's unreadiness and asking the obvious question: what if he keels over?

It's almost as if Rush simply cannot imagine a collective intelligence, an organization that is other than top-down, brainstormers deciding what will be said and the rest of the world simply sheepishly following along. He cannot grasp that it's not "operatives" coming up with this stuff, it's ordinary men and women enjoying the freedom of the press that the blogosphere has. He has unutterable contempt for the "little people," pitying those on his side, loathing those who aren't, but respecting both sides not at all.

Comments

[danceswithlife]

Word. Some of the seemingly most intelligent ideas for Obama and Biden I see are coming from blogs, not from his operatives. If they were smart they would assign one really smart volunteer to each follow something like LJ and lift good ideas from it. Free consulting :-)

[neoteny.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's not Rush's lack of imagination, but the best FUD defense against those memes that he (or _his_ operatives) can devise.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

*nods* I think that's it. Rush can't grok the idea of government actually *by* the people instead of some secret cabal of operatives actually running the show.

Only problem is, it's the secret cabal we've *got* right now, and government by the people we *need*.

Gripping hand, the tighter they close their fists, the more star systems will slip through their fingers.

[cyber-pagan.livejournal.com]

The Jesus/Pilate comment came from Susan Sarandon to a reporter who asked what she thought of Sarah Palin and Obama's relative experiance in government and community affairs. Apparently the comparison was that Obama had been a community organizer, and Palin had been a governor. Its on you tube, not hard to find.