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Posted on 03/05/2012 5:18:47 AM PST by SJackson
Rush Limbaugh has got the progressives pitching a fit over some remarks on his radio show about a Georgetown University law student named Sandra Fluke. Fluke had made the preposterous claim, while addressing House Democrats over President Obama’s rule forcing Catholic institutions to pay for contraception, that the cost of birth control was prohibitive for Georgetown law students. Limbaugh responded by calling Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute” who is “having so much sex, she can’t afford the contraception; she wants you and me – the taxpayers – to pay her.”
Progressive dudgeon hit the stratosphere. Democrat Representative Louise Slaughter wrote a letter that decried Limbaugh’s “sexually charged, patently offensive, and obscene language” and “atrocious and hurtful words.” MSNB’s Jonathan Capehart called the comments “hateful” and “rude,” and said they were “low” even for Limbaugh. Democrat “strategist” Krystal Ball (sic) called Limbaugh “despicable,” “disgusting,” and a “loathsome individual.” The Washington Post’s Jamila Bey called the remarks “hate speech” and claimed they “crossed into the realm of sexual harassment.” The president of Georgetown said the remarks were “misogynistic, vitriolic, and a misrepresentation of the position of our student.”
And in the midst of crisis in the Middle East and the ticking entitlement time bomb, President Obama found time personally to call Fluke and deplore Limbaugh’s “inappropriate personal attacks.” Following the loss of some advertisers, Limbaugh apologized for what he called his “attempt to be humorous.”
I’m not interested in Limbaugh’s comments or whether or not they are “appropriate.” When you enter the political kitchen, as Fluke did, you should be ready to get scorched. As always, more interesting is the reaction to the comments. And that reaction once again reveals the monstrous hypocrisy of progressives. The folks who proclaim their sensitivity, nuanced thinking, therapeutic concern for the tender sensibilities of others, and open-mindedness have always been the most vicious, bigoted, narrow-minded, crude, dogmatic, conformist people on the planet. Take everybody’s exhibit number one, the HBO blowhard Bill Maher, who’s on record calling Sarah Palin a “c—t” and inviting Jon Huntsman to “suck my d—k.” I don’t remember the President calling Palin or Hunstman to regret “that our political discourse has become debased,” as his flack Jay Carney put it. Nor is anyone demanding that Obama-supporting superpac Priorities USA Action should return the million bucks Maher gave it. Why should they? Remember when Obama called the Tea Party folks “tea-baggers,” a vulgar sexual term? “Appropriate” and “debased” are in the eye of the progressive beholder, and depend on the ideology of whoever is being attacked.
Of course, in the progressive hysteria we are also subjected to the “chilling free speech” charge, as when Fluke on the Today Show Friday said that Limbaugh’s comments were an “attempt to silence me.” She apparently doesn’t think that her threat to sue Limbaugh––the left’s favorite WMD when it comes to destroying free speech–– might be an attempt to silence him. In fact, rather than “silencing” her, Limbaugh’s comments have given an obscure law student the biggest platform on the planet, at the same time Limbaugh’s apology suggests that it is his free speech that’s been “chilled.” And are the media so dumb that they don’t see the absurdity of a guest on the Today Show claiming to its 5.6 million viewers that someone tried to “silence” her?
More important than occasioning a display of progressive hypocrisy is Fluke’s claim that law students at a prestigious private school can’t afford birth control. If Fluke could produce one of her colleagues who doesn’t have an I-phone, an I-pad, an I-pod, a high-speed internet connection, or cable television; who doesn’t spend $20 a week at Starbucks, or has to eat ramen every night, or never takes a vacation, never eats out, never goes to bars or concerts; or who has parents on welfare who can’t contribute to her education, or works part-time at a burger joint, or has any other characteristics of someone so poor she can’t budget for birth control pills, then maybe she’d have a point. But even then, condoms are available for free at numerous clinics and even at some retail stores. And God forbid we should suggest that the young lady just say no.
The cost of birth control, though, is just a smokescreen. More pernicious is the assumption that, as Fluke puts it, “This is about women’s health.” In other words, unplanned pregnancy is a disease, something that like breast cancer just sort of happens to a woman, and for which she bears no responsibility. That’s how House minority leader Nancy Pelosi sees it. Speaking of the failed Senate amendment to allow religious organizations not to fund contraception, Pelosi said that the measure was “part of the Republican agenda of disrespecting women’s health issues [by] allowing employers to cut … basic health services for women, like contraception, mammograms, prenatal and cervical-cancer screenings.”
Since pregnancy is a disease, then, someone else should pay the premium for insuring against the consequences of a woman’s risky, careless behavior. She shouldn’t even be responsible for grabbing some free condoms at the clinic and taking care of the risk herself.
Look even closer, and we see the real progressive agenda at work: increasing the power and reach of the federal government and its bureaucratic minions by discrediting and marginalizing any other source of authority over our behavior, especially institutions of moral authority such as churches. That way the government can aggrandize its power by relieving people of the responsibility for their choices through palliating their damaging consequences while making others pay for them. Tocqueville noticed 150 years ago this tendency of centralized power to expand by infantilizing the citizenry. Centralized governments, Tocqueville remarked, act as “if they thought themselves responsible for the actions and private conditions of their subjects, as if they had undertaken to guide and to instruct each of them in the various incidents of life and to secure their happiness quite independently of their own consent.” Moreover, this insidious paternalism corrupts the people, who “invoke its assistance in all their necessities,” and who “fix their eyes upon the administration as their mentor and their guide.” But all for a price: the diminishment of our freedom and autonomy, both of which require accepting the burdensome and sometimes painful responsibility for the consequences of our actions.
Our modern progressives, however, have added a new twist to this process. Removing sexual behavior from the strictures of traditional authority, and then taking responsibility for the consequences of careless sex like pregnancy, make state-subsidized sexual pleasure a seemingly cost-free distraction from the erosion of freedom and autonomy, as Aldous Huxley foresaw in Brave New World. Sexual freedom now trumps political freedom, and sexual pleasure is the honey that sweetens the bitter poison of diminished freedom. Hence the progressive’s elevation of contraception and abortion into “rights,” which puts the necessary discussion of the obvious destructive consequences of sexual promiscuity out of bounds. But these “rights” have nothing to do with “women’s health” and everything to do with the progressive government’s aim of consolidating and increasing its power at the expense of other authorities, like churches, that might have something to say about the personally and socially destructive price of those “rights.” That’s the real significance of the uproar Rush Limbaugh caused: not his crudity or insensitivity, but calling attention to the centrality of sexual libertinism to the progressive agenda of increasing government power at the expense of individual freedom.
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Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com
URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/03/05/the-real-point-of-the-left%e2%80%99s-uproar-over-limbaugh/
Absolutely true.
And that fact by itself highlights their hypocrisy.
There are many, many people out there who go to state and local colleges because they can't afford to go elsewhere - not because they can't get in elsewhere. They made a personal choice to go to a non-private, possibly less prestigious university because they didn't want to owe a huge amount in student loans (and/or didn't have parents willing or able to pay for a private college). Any student at Georgetown who is upset that they don't have enough money for contraceptives could have gone to a state school instead (not that I buy the contraceptive ‘hardship’ issue anyway).
Of course not. But the story just broke and the presentation was credible. We know the MSM isn’t going to report on the findings of fraud and forgery but Rush, having millions of listeners, could do a lot of damage by getting the story out there. I think it was a pre-emptive strike on free speech. You probably won’t see any talk radio host going after the Arpaio story now. They’ve been warned.
I had the same thought. Rush’s first hour today should be a ratings bonanza.
Of course nothing is ever made of Bill Maher’s referring to Sarah Palin as c-—, or Schulze referring to Laura Ingrahm as a slut. What else can be said when an unmaried woman sleeps around town with every Tom, Dick or Harry? Then she wants to get taxpayer reimbursement for her sexual activities. Bottom line, Rush is tough but he is right!!
Do you think Rush will broadcast today, or will he have a sub?
” How did Boehner respond?”
The same way as other gutless, spineless pubbies such as Romney, Santorum, Paul, Issa et al. They all threw him under the bus.
What position does she prefer?
ping
Sandra Fluke, You ignorant slut!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k80nW6AOhTs
Fluke's degree from Cornell is in Policy Analysis & Management and Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies (which explains going to law school - that undergraduate degree is really, really useful on its own < /sarc &gr ). At Cornell, she protested a pro-life display when she was an officer of Cornell's Students Acting for Gender Equality (SAGE). At Georgetown, she got involved in Law Students for Reproductive Justice, the International Women's Human Rights Clinic, the Women's Legal Alliance, and the Journal of Gender and the Law. That $3,000 public interest job she mentioned in her statements to the Democrats in Congress was at the Womens Lawyers Association of Los Angeles.
When her photo was posted at FR, people joked about whether she was straight. That resume above would normally cause people at FR to make similar suggestions.
And we don't know, because in her statement to the Democrats, Fluke never mentioned her own sex life or her own past, current, or proposed use of contraceptives a single time.
Fluke said she was going to be the voice of other women and proceeded to tell the story (some outrageous, and with no guarantee any of them were true - and she wasn't under oath) of six other women. Generally women who had some medical need for birth control pills but couldn't get them paid for under a medical plan. The stories were outlandish - a woman who had orders from a physician for a medical condition, but an insurance company interviewed her and decided she really wanted them for sex, so it denied coverage; a woman who didn't seek medical assistance for rape because she knew contraceptives weren't covered and assumed that any medical care having to do with her ya-ya wasn't going to be covered.
Limbaugh could have attacked Fluke's stories as preposterous, or something that happened once in a hundred years, or something based on the stupidity of the woman (the rape story). But he chose to go after Fluke and to call her a slut and a prostitute? Over and over and over. He kept saying she claimed she was having lots of sex, and that she was having lots of sex and wanted to be paid for it, or that she was having so much sex and she wanted somebody else to pay for it.
He claimed Fluke said she was having so much sex having so much sex, 'it's amazing she can still walk.'
He pulled her parents into it, asking if they were proud that they daughter "testifie[d] she's having so much sex she can't afford her own birth control pills." Limbaugh used every possible iteration, and they were all about Fluke testifying that she was having lots and lots and lots of sex . . .
And so people on FR think that Fluke said she did. And people on FR think Fluke testified that her birth control cost $3,000 per year, and that she couldn't afford it.
But Rush blew it by not focusing on the BS that Fluke actually DID say and instead going personal on Fluke's own sex life and promiscuity and calling her names.
Because Fluke never mentioned her own sex life a single time. She never mentioned her own birth control a single time. She never mentioned the cost of her birth control, or any financial burden on herself. She held herself out as some 30-year-old expert on other women. And for that, she should have been torn to shreds, but not personally attacked with made-up stuff about stories she never said about her own sex life.
And the next time the question of whether Rush Limbaugh is a blowhard comes up in the media? They can point to the fact he spent four days claiming lefy Fluke talked about her sex life and contraceptive needs to Congress, and personally attacked her for it, when there was no factual basis for Limbaugh's attack on her.
He’ll be there. I’m sure he spent the weekend formulating his exact words/strategy. There is a method to the madness and the left may get more than they bargained for.
Collapse of Rush?
For every sponsor that pulls out,another is waiting
to take their place.
What we are seeing here is the pileing on liberals do
when they can’t defeat a conservative any other way.
I will be listening to Rush today and every chance I get.
The game is over only when we admit defeat.
Freep-mail me to get on or off my pro-life and Catholic List:
Please ping me to note-worthy Pro-Life or Catholic threads, or other threads of general interest.
I am sure the apology was the work of his syndicator (Premiere) and not Rush himself. He may be a very highly paid contract employee, but he is an employee nonetheless.
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