THURSDAY, MARCH 17, 2016

Remembering Some Of The Bad Old Days

Responding to Tuesday’s “Politics At The Polls” E-dition, where The Blower said it was like “Déjà vu All Over Again,” Debra From Anderson says in the ’80s, we did not have a Fox News channel.  We got our news from the Big Three networks and my husband and I spent most of our news viewing rolling our eyes, throwing up our hands, and occasionally yelling at the screen. Ronald Reagan was president, and you can believe that was a big problem for Brokaw, Jennings, and Rather.  The nightly broadcasts could be broken down thusly: Women suffering, Reagan’s fault, remarks by NOW president Eleanor Smeal;  Black people suffering, Reagan’s fault, remarks by Jesse Jackson;  homeless suffering, Reagan’s fault, remarks by Cynthia McKinney.

But I found a ray of hope when I discovered Jan Mickelson on WCKY.  Finally, someone who spoke our language in a public forum!

But it would be 1988 before “normal” people who knew that they had been shoveled loads of s**t every night by the Big 3 found a champion on a national scale in the person of Rush Limbaugh. He spoke to and for millions of Americans who had been, at best, ignored and, at worst, vilified and acknowledged us for what we were and are: sensible, hard working patriotic people whose labors kept the damn lights on and who were mad as hell at the treatment we received at the hands of a biased media and an elitist political class.  Rush didn’t make us angry.  He recognized our anger and told us that we had a right to it.

Oh how the Liberal Establishment despised Rush and his listeners.  He was excoriated in the halls of Congress.  Legislation or regulation was proposed to weaken his influence.  His audience was, by turns, ignorant hicks or dangerous insurgents.  Rush himself was either a dangerous demagogue or a charlatan snake oil salesman.  And worse, he was fat.

Rush’s detractors, in typically ungrounded-in-logic fashion, predicted that the election of Bill Clinton in 1992 would douse Limbaugh’s flame.  Apparently, he was supposed to accept the election as a personal failure and meekly fade away.  But Limbaugh didn’t get the memo and forged, with Newt Gingrich, the Republican Revolution of 1994. 

Then came the Oklahoma City bombing.  It was open season on Rush Limbaugh.  No less than the President himself placed the blame on Rush’s rhetoric.  Alarmed by their boss’s words, numerous Clinton aides hurried to assure that Clinton wasn’t really blaming Limbaugh.   McVeigh himself identified the disaster at Waco as his inspiration. 

But the liberal media had no time for such distinctions. Declaring that they were facilitating a national conversation, the question was “Does Rush Limbaugh bear responsibility for the Oklahoma City Bombing?” Never mind that the question itself was loaded with insinuation that he was culpable.  This national conversation turned out to be, as do all of these pseudo-earnest exercises, loading the Sunday chat shows with DemocRATS agreeing with their willing accomplices in the press.  Yes, Rush was to blame and while no one loves the First Amendment more than we do, speech with which we disagree is dangerous.

So here we are nearly 20 years later and it’s deja vu all over again.