And Limbaugh's basic lie is just as great: a bully pretending to be a defender of the right.
So here's why it's good that America is looking at Limbaugh now. Limbaugh is displaying so clear the profound ugliness of the very same spirit that has made the Republican Party such a destructive force in America, a spirit to which the Republicans still submit.
The inability of the Republicans to repudiate this spirit is the point on which the lever of the campaign against Limbaugh should be applied.
Step one is to declare to America, "See what a ugly thing this Limbaugh is-- his wanting the president to fail in the midst of a national emergency, his arrogant and pugnacious strutting and shouting in his interactions even with the Republicans, his insistence on picking fights, his almost grotesque narcissism, his disdain for anyone who is not on his side.”
It shouldn’t be too hard to expose the ugliness in the spirit of Rush Limbaugh.
Step two is to use that image as a means to apply pressure to the Republican Party to denounce Limbaugh, and thereby to denounce the ugly and cruel, lying and bullying spirit, that, over the past two decades, has taken over the Republican Party.
The campaign against Limbaugh, therefore, is a means to achieve either one of two important purposes.
1) If the Republican Party cannot repudiate Limbaugh, and the spirit they’ve shared with him, then the manifest ugliness of Limbaugh –expertly displayed before the public—can be the means of further draining power from the Republican Party. What Limbaugh represents must be thoroughly repudiated by the American people, and if the Republican Party cannot separate itself from the Limbaugh millstone, it deserves to sink still deeper into obscurity and irrelevance.
2) Or if the Republicans can reject Limbaugh, and what he represents, this will be a useful exorcism on the path to restoring that party to a level of decency that this nation needs in BOTH of its major parties.
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