The Real Point of the Left’s Uproar over Limbaugh

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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URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/03/05/the-real-point-of-the-left%e2%80%99s-uproar-over-limbaugh/

Rush should point out the similarities between Ms. Fluke’s ascension to prominence, and how Barack Obama was elevated to the White House.

There were lies about who Ms. Fluke was, until it was too late. She was not vetted by the media at all, in fact aided and abetted. She purported to be someone we now know she’s not. Her background, her age, her ideology, all were obscured to get her into position to damage the right.

It should not surprise us that Obama called her, they have so much in common.

The game is over only when we admit defeat.

In case you didn't notice Rush issued an apology. That in anyone's book constitutes admitting defeat.

As for the vast reserves of sponsors, Rush's own actions answer that question. If he had sponsors waiting in the wings he wouldn't have backed off so fast.

Look at what has happened in the last seven days. Rush has been silenced. Santorum got mike checked into silence by the Occupy crowd. Andrew Breitbart is dead and there is nobody around to replace him. We are being silenced. If you are not allowed to speak there is no debate.

I guess you should have listened a bit more carefully then.

I'm calling you out. Back it up with some facts unless you're just a blowhard. Give me the quotes from Fluke's statement.

I didn't just listen once. I've listened to the video again (with a vomit bag handy). And I've read the transcript more than once. And I'm not the only one on FR and in the media to point out that Fluke didn't address her own sex life and contraceptive needs.

Fluke said she was there to be the voice of other women, and she told the stories of six other women.

Now. I listened carefully. YOU listen and read carefully. Find the transcript and the video. You tell me where Fluke said that stuff about her sex life.

Or are you just a blowhard who doesn't need the facts?

Have they silenced you? That is the question.
Yes Rush apologized and that was probably a
mistake. Yet that is what civilized people do
and that too is probably a mistake when dealing
with ruthless liberals, for they see it as a sign
of weakness. Much like our situation in Afghanistan
with the koran.

I dont support Ms Fluke politics - but I agree 100% with your assessment.

I was going crazy yesterday trying to find evidence of some of the assertions people were making. I dont like to repeat stuff I haven't seen evidence of.

The thing about her age - people claiming she lied - no evidence. Just a blown fact in one NBC report.(as far as I have been able to determine)

Another article yesterday portrayed it as a secret that she was a law student and former president of Georgetown Law Students for Reproductive Justice...nonsense!

2nd and 3rd sentence of her testimony:

"My name is Sandra Fluke, and I’m a third year student at Georgetown Law, a Jesuit school. I’m also a past president of Georgetown Law Students for Reproductive Justice or LSRJ."

But Democrats strategy is to make this a fight about Republicans trying to stop women from using birth control which would be a pretty unpopular position to take.

And although it is not true, Obama would use that fear to label Santorum as the man who would outlaw birth control, and I do not believe Santorum is nimble enough to fight that effectively.

This is good but it needs to be even more elementary (in order to get down to liberals level): There is no "right to healthcare". Access to healthcare and access to healthcare insurance are two entirely different things. Although you do not have the right to either one, no one in this country is being denied access to healthcare.

And of course, when you get right down to it, just because you want something doesn't automatically mean that you are entitled to it.

I thought we went over all this....in kindergarten?! ;-)

Have they silenced you?

Darn straight. Oh I might bitch on a message board, where there is some level of anonymity. But become a conservative public figure in this environment, no Flukeing way. When I put conservative lawn sings out in the last election my house got vandalized. Cook county cop's response, well that sort of thing happens. As an individual you are always vulnerable, especially when the other side controls the press and the police unions.

Would you go public and stick your head into that meat grinder? Why do you think our candidates are so poor? Anyone who dares to challenge the establishment is destroyed. What ever you think of Newt or Santorum they were smashed by the liberal media.

The only time we did well was when we were putting large numbers into the streets. At the height if the Tea Party it was OK to be a conservative, because they knew there were more of us than there were of them. An individual can be attacked and destroyed. Millions on the mall is simply another matter.

Of everything I’ve read about this today, your post is the closest to how I felt yesterday when I heard of Rush’s backing down...
he, of all on our side, has always stood for NOT backing down...and on top of the loss of our Warrior, Andrew Breitbart this week, I feel we have been de-clawed, emasculated, intimidated and rendered ineffective.
We are screwed...

RE :”And although it is not true, Obama would use that fear to label Santorum as the man who would outlaw birth control, and I do not believe Santorum is nimble enough to fight that effectively.”

I saw Chris Wallace interview RS yesterday and Wallace drive that point that Dems are making, When RS said that the Blunt Amendment was a bill addressing Religious liberty not birth control or women specifically, Wallace struck back that RS is personally against the use of contraceptives. That put him on the defensive.

Newt does not have the same vulnerability on the issue and was able to maintain the offensive against David Gregory yesterday on the Blunt amendment.

“Much like our situation in Afghanistan
with the koran.”

I have several theories as to what Rush is up to. Since he is smarter than congresscritters and lefty “poster people” I still believe he knows exactly what he’s doing. His apology will not calm the left and will never be enough for them.

Will you be listening today to Rush? Maybe his will be a brilliant chess move you and I haven’t conceived...don’t give up, if Rush fails we can lick our wounds a little but then you and I will have to be smarter and work harder

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