Over the Rainbow

I was at least partially on board with Glen Dean's defense of Rush Limbaugh against leftist attacks, telling them "If you don't like his show, don't listen." I agree--I don't like his show and don't listen these days, although I used to. I lost respect for Limbaugh in 1992 when he mounted the stump in support of George "41" Bush, revealing himself as little more than a partisan shill.

Focusing on the comments of one idiot who wants censor Limbaugh, Dean writes "to them, the 'people' are stupid and they need a strong government to control what type of programming they are able to view or listen to, and certain words need to be banned." Amen, I say.

He loses me when he says:

You "conservatives" and "libertarians", who have aligned yourselves with these type of people due to a shared opposition to the war, disgust me. It's like you all have been duped into the notion that these people actually care about civil liberties. Get a clue. Liberals do not care one iota about liberty. They don't care one bit about the free market. All they care about is a large intrusive government that forces their collectivist ideals on the masses. They may say this and they may that, but wake up people. They are nothing but a bunch of Stalinists.

Hmm. I wonder who he is referring to? Although I find that I have common ground with many leftists and liberals these days, I don't know of anyone on the antiwar right who is making common cause with the EricBs of the world in order to censor Rush Limbaugh. The American Conservative, a premier publication of the antiwar right, just published an anti-Fairness Doctrine article by the idiosyncratic libertarian writer, Jesse Walker.

As for the "free market," etc. that he pines for--it is somewhere over the rainbow between Oz and Never-Never Land. It is further away after the six years of disasterous Republican rule that was rightly tossed on the ash heap of history by disgusted voters last fall.