Justin's Political Corner

Blowhard Rush Limbaugh dedicated a lengthy diatribe on his radio show yesterday to the idea that there is a movement underway to try to “normalize pedophilia” by classifying it as a sexual orientation like heterosexuality and homosexuality. Limbaugh based his claims on anarticle in The Guardian that addresses questions science still has about the nature of pedophilia, but then he drew his own conclusions that normalizing same-sex marriage is similarly going to lead to normalizing the sexual abuse of children:

LIMBAUGH: There is a movement on to normalize pedophilia, and I guarantee you your reaction to that is probably much the same as your reaction when you first heard about gay marriage. What has happened to gay marriage? It’s become normal — and in fact, with certain people in certain demographics it’s the most important issue in terms of who they vote for. So don’t pooh-pooh. There’s a movement to normalize pedophilia. Don’t pooh-pooh it. The people behind it are serious, and you know the left as well as I do. They glom onto something and they don’t let go. […]

What is their objective? They want us to all think that pedophilia is just another sexual orientation.  You know who’s gonna fall right in line is college kids, just like they have on gay marriage, just like they do on all other revolutionary social issues.  Their own definition of the cutting edge, civil rights, freedom, understanding, tolerance. So I’m just warning you here. You think it can’t happen. “Impossible!  Don’t be nutso and wacko on us, Rush.”

From the 01.08.2013 edition of Premiere Radio Networks’ The Rush Limbaugh Show:

But pedophilia is not considered a sexual orientation. It’s considered a psychiatric disorder and a paraphilia. The issue with pedophilia is that the target of the sexual impulse is children, who can be physically and emotionally scarred by such contact. Pedophilia, like other paraphilias, violates the consent of another entity, whereas sexual orientations do not.

Limbaugh’s tirade is dangerous and unnecessarily conflates homosexuality with pedophilia, as opponents of LGBT equality have done for decades. There is no way to compare two loving consenting adults to harming a child.

h/t: Zach Ford at Think Progress LGBT

“Slut.” “Prostitute.” 

These words defined Rush Limbaugh in 2012 after he smeared Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown law student who testified before Congress about women’s health care. Limbaugh’s misogynistic attack, which spanned three days of his radio show, did incalculable, long-term damage not only to Limbaugh’s brand, but also to the right-wing talk-radio format he helped to build and the conservative movement he has shaped for decades.

Limbaugh’s attacks on Fluke led to a paradigm shift in talk radio, as advertisers reassessed their support for inflammatory hosts. Limbaugh’s toxic rhetoric helped shine a glaring spotlight on the broader conservative movement’s policies toward women, focusing public attention on the radical right-wing effort to dismantle reproductive rights and the social safety net.

Limbaugh’s unique brand of misinformation was not limited to sexist rhetoric. Throughout 2012, Limbaugh was an architect of the right-wing bubble that pushed conspiracy theories and denied reality, notably helping to create a false narrative that Mitt Romney was on the verge of winning a landslide election. As that right-wing bubble collapsed, so, too, did Limbaugh’s four-year campaign of hoping - and trying to ensure - that President Obama would fail.  

It is for these reasons that Media Matters recognizes Rush Limbaugh as the 2012 Misinformer of the Year. Past recipients include: Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. (2011); Sarah Palin (2010); Glenn Beck (2009); and Sean Hannity (2008).

On February 23, 2012, Sandra Fluke testified before a congressional panel about women’s health care and the benefits of insurance coverage for contraceptive care. During her testimony, she spoke about a woman who needed birth control pills to treat a medical condition, but who was denied coverage by her insurance company and couldn’t afford the medication.

On February 29, Limbaugh began a series of attacks on Fluke, pointing to her testimony and calling her a “slut” and a “prostitute.” In a complete distortion of Fluke’s actual testimony that was shocking in its ignorance, Limbaugh claimed that she was essentially asking to be ”paid to have sex”:

LIMBAUGH: What does it say about the college coed Susan Fluke [sic], who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex? What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex.

She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex.

Limbaugh continued his screed against Fluke the next day, saying: ”If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. And I’ll tell you what it is. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.” Over the course of the March 1 and March 2 editions of his radio show, Limbaugh spent nearly six hours directing a hate-filled tirade at Fluke, saying that she was “having so much sex it’s amazing she can walk,” saying that she had boyfriends “lined up around the block,” and saying that Fluke admitted she was “having so much sex that she can’t pay for it.”

Limbaugh’s sexist tirade quickly found support throughout the right-wing echo chamber. CNN contributor Erick Erickson wrote on his blog, RedState, that Fluke “really believes that American tax payers should … pay for her birth control pills so she can have sex.” Conservative talk radio host Dana Loesch wrote on Breitbart.com that Fluke was “testifying that she simply cannot stop getting it on and her inability to control her urges constitutes infringing upon everyone else for a bailout.” Fox News Radio reporter Todd Starnes posted more than a dozen comments on Twitter supporting Limbaugh’s attacks. Blog posts at National Review Online, Hot Air, and NewsBusters also defended Limbaugh’s points.

But outside the right-wing media bubble, Limbaugh was savaged from a variety of sources. Republican and Democratic congressional leaders as well as commentators from the left, right, and center all offered criticism for what Sen. John McCain called comments that were “unacceptable in every way.”

While Limbaugh began publicly denying that his show was suffering from the loss of advertisers, privately he was going into crisis management mode. The New York Times reported in March that he hired a reputation and crisis manager. And while Limbaugh was bragging about his ratings on the air, Politico reported in May that his show ”took a significant radio hit in some key radio markets” in the wake of his Sandra Fluke attacks.

Limbaugh’s partners were soon losing millions of dollars as a result of the loss of advertisers. The New York Times reported that less than two weeks after his attack on Fluke, Premiere Radio Networks had lost nearly $2 million in advertising revenue. In May, Limbaugh affiliate Cumulus Media reported losing several million dollars in revenue over two quarters. In August, Cumulus suggested it had lost more than $5 million on its top three radio stations alone due to factors related to the Limbaugh advertiser boycott.

As Daily Beast columnist John Avlon noted: “Rush Limbaugh made the right-wing talk-radio industry, and he just might break it.”

At the same time Limbaugh came under fire for his slut-shaming campaign against Sandra Fluke, it became impossible to separate his misogynistic comments from a larger critique of the conservative movement. 

In targeting Fluke, Limbaugh was specifically reacting to testimony about the benefits of using health insurance to expand access to contraceptive care. That testimony came as conservatives were fighting against efforts to require insurers to provide this basic health care coverage to women. Limbaugh, long identified as a leader of the conservative movement, explained the opposition by likening health insurance coverage of contraception to a woman knocking on his door in the middle of the night and demanding money so she could “have sex with three guys tonight.” Sean Hannity echoed Limbaugh’s explanation of the movement’s opposition, saying that requiring insurance companies to provide coverage for contraceptive care amounted to “the taxpayer bearing the cost of the sex life of students at Georgetown University law school.”

Throughout the year, as questions were raised about the negative effects fringe conservative positions would have on women, Limbaugh was at the forefront. In February, when conservative lawmakers in Virginia came under fire for pushing legislation that would have required women to undergo an invasive ultrasound prior to seeking an abortion, Limbaugh downplayed the concerns. When Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin came under fire for saying it was “really rare” for women subjected to “legitimate rape” to become pregnant, Limbaugh first called on Akin to put the country first in weighing whether to remain in the race. But as it became clear that Akin was going to remain in the race, Limbaugh was quick to move on, touting polling numbers suggesting the Republican Party had forgiven Akin for the comments.

“Everything - except the polls - points to a Romney landslide.”

So said Rush Limbaugh on the eve of the 2012 presidential election, an election that has come to be defined by the right-wing media’s absolute denial of reality and embrace of paranoid conspiracy theories in order to convince themselves that Obama would fail to secure a second term.  

When conservatives accused the Labor Department of cooking the books to make the unemployment rate seem lower than it was in order to help reelect Obama, Limbaugh was there. When conservatives warned that pollsters were colluding to unfairly bias their samples in favor of Obama, Limbaugh was there. Limbaugh pushed poll trutherism so far to the fringe that he began stoking fears of violence in the aftermath of a Romney election victory.

Rush Limbaugh did not react well to being proved so wrong and so all wet. The day after the election, he told his audience that “we’re outnumbered” and “we’ve lost the country.” He also suggested that “one of the most outrageous thefts of an election in the history of elections has taken place.” On November 15, Limbaugh declared that “freedom did not win in this election.”

But government did work. Obama’s 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has been credited by experts with increasing economic growth, creating jobs, and lowering unemployment. The auto rescue was only made possible with the use of taxpayer money to successfully shepherd the three big auto companies through bankruptcy — saving well over a million jobs. The Affordable Care Act survived Supreme Court scrutiny. And voters opted for four more years.

Rush Limbaugh may still rank at the top of the talk radio industry, but he has also undeniably weakened the very industry he has dominated for so long. The advertiser backlash did not just damage Limbaugh and his business partners short-term; the entire talk radio industry is still suffering massive financial losses due to his utterance of “those two words.”

Rush Limbaugh, the world’s most impotent man, took to the airwaves to discuss a very serious and important scientific breakthrough that not even noted scientist Rep. Todd Akin could discover: feminists (or ‘feminazis’ as Rush calls them) are responsible  for the current outbreak of shrinking male genitalia. If anyone knows about defunct and flaccid penis issues, it’s Rush Limbaugh.

It seems an Italian study found that the average male penis was 10 percent smaller than 50 years ago, though it must not apply to former Congressmen from NY. Regarding the factors that lead to embarrassing “a group of cheerleaders laughing at you” shrinkage, 

“I think it’s feminism,” he declared. “If it’s tied to the last 50 years — the average size of [a male’s] member is 10 percent smaller than 50 years — it has to be the feminazis, the chickification and everything else.”

From the 09.20.2012 edition of Premiere Radio Networks’ The Rush Limbaugh Show:

h/t: Michael Hayne at AddictingInfo.org