By the way, does anybody have a suggestion for a better title? I was having trouble coming up with a good one.

Mega-dittos to you.

Flush Rimjob does a disservice to each and every word he utters.

Even junkies are sad to see the shadow of disrepute he's cast over the abuse of OxyContin.

Seriously, I love how Limbaugh himself (aka spric) is taking the time to troll my blog.

Actually, I have most often referred to him as Rush Windbag : : :

Hey Super, if ww says you are good at wordsmithing, she knows from whence she speaks.

The word "Christian" needs to be reclaimed. It has been very hard for me to get that word back to what it meant for me when I was a young child.
The Repugs have claimed it and changed it to mean "selfish, fearsome, Constitution-hating, homophobic, holier-than-thou, woman-trashing, panty-sniffing, window-peeping, war-loving A_HOLE"

Yes, reclaiming our language is important because we've allowed wonderful words such as "liberal" to be turned into pejoratives. This is something best accomplished en masse. Singling any one person for or against is pointless.

Rush Limbaugh is an ass. We can't reach him. We can't reach those who still listen to him. His listeners are the x% that still loves Bush. Our energies are better spent elsewhere.

Andrew Sullivan is a fool. How someone so smart can be such an idiot astounds me (see: Thomas Friedman). His batting average sucks. He'll hit a beautiful long single now and again but he'll rarely make it around third to score.

Sullivan is untrustworthy -- both intellectually dishonest and classically dishonest. He's repeatedly lied about his inability to become a US citizen because of his HIV status. It's just not true. Andy can afford to pay an immigration lawyer to push his case through. He'd rather play the martyr instead.

It's worked so well for him. Remember, Sullivan was originally largely irrelevant. Mainstream conservatives never accepted him. Andy was an oddity: The "gay" conservative pundit.

Sully's much ballyhooed "conversion" followed months upon months of enthusiastic drum beating for Bush and war. After his "come to Jesus" moment, Sullivan's embrace by "liberals" made him far more relevant & marketable. It's no coincidence he landed in the pages of Time.

Look. He's one man crush away from changing his stripes. If the right candidate came along Andrew Sullivan would flip sides so fast he'd throw his hairy back out.

-AF
Andrew Sullivan Is A Fraud

Traditionally, both liberalism and conservatism in America were both two sides of a relatively conservative outlook on government and society. The two viewpoints had disagreements but weren't all that far apart in reality.

In the wake of the economic collapse that brought on the Great Depression, conservatism as previously known and understood became an anathema in American politics. Those who kept the conservative label fell into two camps. The traditional conservatives who favored big business and the banks (who comprimsed the majority of the Republican Party) and the rabid, right wing, reactionaries (who were totally disreputable).

The traditonal conservatives continued to exist with it's main pillars being the banks and industries mainly in the east that clung to old ways. The fundamental pillar of their viewpoint was essentially to do as little as possible. They believed in the idea of preserving or "conserving" that which exists. Their belief was that sooner or later the economy would come back, that panics had happened in the past and would happen again so let well enough alone and don't start messing things up even more. These notions were totally outdated, out of synch with the population and essentially cruel. The people rejected these ideas soundly by 1932 and didn't even consider them again until about 1966 when a racism mixed with a new strain of virulent right wing politics.

The extremists who were considered a joke and absurdly outside the bounds of propriety and eve reality remained a complete laughing stock with no hope of ever gaining power for about 20 years or so. Then Buckley started his right wing magazine and started putting a respectable intellectual patina on the rotten, extremist ideas of the right wing who began calling themselves "conservative" because by that time even conservatives didn't want to be labeled with the word because it was so unpopular. They proudly wore the label and the scorn they received made no difference to them because they were despised in most polite company anyway. Most people who held the views of a right winger like Buckley or their fellow travelers in the John Birch Society did not advertise their allegiance to this unpopular point of view.

Liberals, who continued their incremental march toward a more progressive, equal and fair society ignored the threat to their right believing that they had killed America's version of Lord Voldemort and there was no need to worry. Democrats and liberals clung to incrementalism so as not to get too far ahead of the nation on anything and they made these changes typically with a substantial dose of traditional Republican support. This support was a large reason for the Democrats letting down their guard. They believed it would continue. But with the advent of schism in the Democratic Party over race in the 60's the Democrats becamse vulnerable and were unable to protect their right flank from being breeched in 1966, 1968, 1970 and 1972.

The traditional conservative Republicans made an unholy alliance with the extremist right wingers and went head over heels for Nixon's racist southern startegy and it's broad appeals to racism outside the south using the issues of "crime" and "lawlessnes" to frighten middle class and ethnic blue collar whites and it worked very well because the intellectual and moral defenses of liberals did not have nearly the appeal to racists whites as did the emotional and powerful fear of black people and other minorities. The liberal viewpoint was tagged as unrealistic, idealistic and dangerous with increasing use of Madison Avenue advertising techniques on the part of Republicans led by Haldemann's team of ad men. Democrats were behind the curve and didn't realize that their old methods of appeal weren't as effective as the emtional appeals of the right. Combined with the adoption of war mongering over Viet Nam Nixon's amoral new Republican strategists then stole the banner of patriotism and made support for colonial war a test of whether one was a true 100% American. The right understood what the Democrats did not and that many of them still do not understand: all you have to do is make the sale on one day. The rest of the time it doesn't really matter of the electorate is on your side. It's nice, but not necessary. W and Rove proved that all round. Sure it has it's risks but that's the way things work.

The once reviled right wing extremists, who had reared their ugly heads in 1964 with Barry Goldwater as their standard bearer now represented the shock troops of the Republican Party and provided much of the energy for the Nixonian reaction of 1968-1974. By 1969, Nixon's rise made right wing extremists like Buckley and his ilk seem respectable for the first time in decades. People like Orin Hatch and Jesse Helms started coming out of the political woodwork and twisting the entire political process in Washington further and further toward their extreme, once discredited viewpoints.

The rest of the tale is all too familiar for most us. But the important point here is that as the out of touch liberal Democrats maintained their traditional, relatively conservative approach to governing, the right screamed louder and louder that this was radical leftism and socialism, etc... when it clearly was not and is not. Nonetheless, as we saw in spades since 2000, the big lie works and the overall population had it's view of the very incremental and slow changes of American liberals as dramatic and extreme. Foolishly, some of the more conserative Democrats, in fear for their own political hides, began to ape the Republican line instead of having the guts to fight the lies and distortions of the right. They aided and abetted the right wing extremists and gave comfort to them all through the 70's, 80's and 90's.

During all that, however, liberals remained pretty much in the same place and thus being concerned with preserving what works and is good in our society have become the only remaining conservatives on the American scene (when properly understood in the traditional sense). Having come full circle and with holding power for too long, the Repubican extremist wing, still calling itself conservative instead of protofascist which is far more accurate, has once again completely wrecked the economy and propose doing little more than aiding the rich in response to that calamity. Finally, the electorate, no longer able to ignore the extremism of the so-called conservative Republicans, rejected them in November in place of a maintstream Democrat. But this time the nation finds itself in a much more grave situation because the extremists have weakened our national defense, nearly destroyed the value of our once rock solid currency, left us fiscally weak and vulnerable due to irresponsible borrow and spend policies designed to cripple the federal government and all this while destroying our reputation abroad.

Any responsible and nuetral evaluation of the political landscape as we attempt to recover from the hangover of this extremist binge of the last 8 years will recognize that the Limbaughs, Hannity's, Coulter's, Savages, et al are not conservatives in the true sense at all but rather the most putrid, right wing wackos who are short-sighted, racist fear mongers at best. They and their ideas endanger the America we all love and they must be put down once and for all. Never again should liberals, in defense of the traditional and sacred beliefs and mores of our nation, allow these fringe elements to endanger us or our posterity. Nuetral observers will note in history that the conservative defenders of American ideas, ideals and values were and are the liberals and the left of center on the political spectrum because we fight not to prreserve the status quo. That isn't what traditional conservatives really believed in and they don't believe in that today. What they believe in is conserving the best of our nation, our practices, our mores, our values and our beliefs and institutions and slowlly adding on and strengthening those things for our benefit and the benefit of generations to come.

I just hope we are successful in rescuing the nation from the precipice the extemists wolves in sheeps clothing have led us to.

My own favorite pejorative for Limbaugh's minions is "Limmings."