How The GOP Base Voters Have Become Demented By Right Wing Talk Radio

The porcine face of El Rushbo becomes flushed with anger as he pumps out non-stop vitriol for his puppet right winger toadie listeners.

It's somewhat amazing to me that anyone with a grain of common sense or an I.Q. at least in the upper quartile even tunes in to Rush Limbaugh any more. This guy demeans those who call in to his foolish show, and he demeans the whole country with his babble. Worse, his prolonged screeds can infect the weak brains of losers like Robert  Lewis Dear, the terrorist who opened fire on people in a Planned Parenthood Clinic here in Colorado Springs yesterday.

We already know COS is one of the biggest markets for Limbaugh's bloviated snark and assholinity - given it is the most right wing metropolis in the state. We also know Limbaugh has repeatedly attacked PP in his on air huff and puff and it is a sure bet a loser like Dear spent most of his days ingesting El Rushbo's right wing bunkum to the point it incited him to action - no less than ISIS followers have  been incited by their social media brainwashing.

 I still recall on one rare occasion when I tuned in back in 2009 (in the interest of keeping one ear on who hates liberals),  a guy from Ohio called up to say he wanted to know the best way to "get back at an over reaching government."  El Rushbo said: "Yeah! Stand on your own two feet and disavow any government benefits!"

The guy was clearly perplexed so asked: "What do you mean?"

The porky -faced one bellowed: "I mean not taking any benefits! No Social Security, NO VA, No Medicare, nothing! Each thing you take from the government is like crack which makes you dependent on the same government you want to get back at. It makes you like an addict for their free stuff."

He tried to interrupt: "B-but I fought in Vietnam! I earned those VA benefits!"

Limburger unloaded: "You can't earn anything from the government! What you 'earned' is coming back whole! And now you , YOU gotta do something with it! Make yourself independent of any government strings! Because those benefits can be reduced or taken back at any time!"

Could it be true this rash, brash, drug-addled fatso is largely responsible for the level of discourse in this nation hitting new lows? I was curious so had to excavate some further information and whether any other sane person found Rushbo equally objectionable. More to the point, what did it say about Limbaugh's followers?

David Horsey's (NY Times) take on whacked out GOOP voters is insightful and needs attention from the sane segment of the country - to see how batshit nuts these people have become, daily quaffing Rushbo's hateful kool aid.

Horsey notes that traditional conservatives and Republican Party operatives are "gobsmacked by the virulent, anti-establishment mood among Republican voters. They find themselves in a fight for the soul of the Grand Old Party — a fight they seem to be losing."

This is not amazing and the insight has been echoed earlier by WSJ columnists Daniel Henninger, Kimberly Strassel and Peggy Noonan. All have been appalled at how the Reeptard base has really descended into Reeptardation with essential losers (like Ben Carson) and blowhard, bombastic know nothings like the splenetic Trump gaining more favor among base voters than traditional pols like Jeb! and even Kasich (who these new voters find to be Milquetoasts")

Horsey observes that each new poll "ratifies the fact that nearly half of Republican voters favor either Donald Trump or Ben Carson, candidates who have never held public office and who tout their lack of political experience as a major attribute". Add on the numbers for Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas who has spent his time in Washington as a thorn in the side of the entrenched leadership and Carly Fiorina, another political outsider, and the anti-establishment vote goes well over 50%.

Horsey reminds us that there have been right-wing preachers and polemicists on the radio nearly as long as there have been commercial radio broadcasts. After World War II, Christian anti-communists, such as Billy James Hargis, Dan Smoot and the Rev. Carl McIntire, camped out on the far edges of the AM dial. Their ominous warnings about communist conspiracies and morally bankrupt, treasonous liberalism were dramatic, but so grim that they lacked appeal for a wide audience.

No less then H.L. Hunt went even further with his "Facts Forum" - castigating the Catholic Church and the Kennedys with assorted vitriol.  Oh, and leaving the worst hate for blacks and Jews. His mainly Dallas-based audience ate it up so no surprise Big D became the citadel of hate - where the security state would most easily find the accomplices it needed to eliminate Kennedy in November, 1963

We know that when "The Rush Limbaugh Show" went national in 1988, the game changed and with the Reaganites killing the Fairness doctrine, sane voices were muted - unable to even respond to his invective.. He made paranoia and vein-rupturing anger fun. Dispensing with the dense “documentation” proffered by the old-guard right-wingers, Rush riffed on the news, engaged in satire and sold himself as a personality. In the process, he became the biggest name in radio and turned himself into a major influence in Republican politics.

Limbaugh’s success spawned a legion of emulators. According to the trade publication Talkers, there are as many as 5,000 political talk radio hosts burning up the airwaves across America. The vast majority of them cater to a conservative audience. Most offer little in the way of sophisticated political insight; i,e, they do not want to emulate the  stuffy, nerdy George Will, after all. No, they want to be like Rush — all anger and attitude, "beat the shit out of 'em" bombast - something like .John McAdams dealing with JFK conspiracy researchers.

The Republican Party now has a large base of voters who have marinated their brains in the anger, distrust, paranoia and sneering belligerence of right-wing radio. Unlike the old days when their world view might be tempered by an alternative version of reality offered in the mainstream media, these folks are ideologically cocooned by right-wing websites and Fox News. Their feedback loop is hermetically sealed.

Worse, we don't know how many other reactionary brains like the COS terrorist are being "marinated" daily by this crap - but it's probably a goodly number. We have far more to fear from these degenerates who can purchase lethal weapons at any gun show than 10,000 strenuously vetted Syrian refugees entering the country!