Sunday, March 01, 2009

Limbaugh Addresses CPAC and calls liberalism a 'psychosis'.



CPAC have finally been addressed by their new leader, Rush Limbaugh.

Apparently, Liberals actually, "do believe they have compassion, they do believe they care" but the result is always the destruction of poor families, "by breaking up those families, by offering welfare checks to women to keep having babies - no more father needed - he's out doing something, the government is the family; they destroy the family, we are not supposed to analyse that, we are not supposed to talk about that, we are supposed to talk about their good intentions".

It's simply hysterical to watch Rush attempt to put himself on the side of poor families. Families who are being punished by help. Far better to offer no help at all and so encourage independence. To keep giving tax cuts to the most wealthy in society to spur the poor into taking affirmative action to better themselves.

And, at a time when only the government can actually bail us out of financial disaster, Rush tells CPAC that, "big government is not the answer". At a time when even committed capitalists like Henry Paulson are issuing warnings that the government needs to intervene swiftly, warnings which US lawmakers who he appealed to described as so serious that they found it "chilling", Rush insists that Obama is simply, "spending a nation into generational debt".

I presume that Limbaugh imagines that Henry Paulson has suddenly transformed himself into some kind of woolly liberal and that his "chilling" messages are simply an overreaction.

He then states:

It is not their task, it is not their right to remake this nation to accommodate their psychology. I sometimes wonder if liberalism is not just a psychosis or a psychology, not an ideology. It's so much about feelings, and the predominant feeling liberalism is about is feeling good about themselves. And they do that by telling themselves they have all this compassion.
Rush appears to see compassion itself as some kind of sign of weakness, and liberals in general as "unhinged". But it's Rush who sounds unhinged here. Here, he has managed to twist compassion into something which is "cruel".

In Rush's ideology, it is "cruel" for the government to help the poor in any way, it is a cruelty disguising itself as compassion.

And he tells his audience that, "there is no need to be afraid of these people, for why in the world would you be afraid of the deranged?"

In my view, the deranged person is the one who equates compassion with cruelty. And that is where conservatives now find themselves. Actually arguing publicly that help is a form of cruelty.

The Republican message has become so toxic that this is actually what they have been reduced to. To publicly celebrating their lack of compassion and attempting to sell this as a virtue.

God help them, they are in bigger trouble than I thought.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I can't do it. I can't watch that video this early in the morning.

Rush doesn't seem to have a problem with the poor when he goes to the Dominican with a bag of Viagra. His ideas on what should happen to drug users don't seem so extreme now that he has been caught with both hands in the candy jar. How he convinces millions of poor Republicans that trickle down economics is good for them, I don't know.

The failure of liberalism isn't in an unrealistic sympathy for the poor, it is in the belief that government is benign in nature. That government by the rich for the poor can exist at all.

Kel said...

Rush doesn't seem to have a problem with the poor when he goes to the Dominican with a bag of Viagra.

Amen.

The failure of liberalism isn't in an unrealistic sympathy for the poor, it is in the belief that government is benign in nature.

I don't think either Republican or Democratic governments are benign in nature, but they both represent the interests of entirely different groups of people.

Bush seemed to look after big business, Obama appears to want to help the middle class.

I know which I prefer.

Anonymous said...

Yes, we have done an excellent job on settling for the lesser of two evils.

Kel said...

I am not sure that looking after the interests of the many rather than the few is, "settling for the lesser of two evils".