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!

The 'United States of Tex-Ass"? Don't Make Me Laugh!

In the lead up to the framing of Lee Harvey Oswald, it's documented how a paid Oswald impostor arrived at a Dallas car dealership in March, 1963 and remarked to a salesman (after denigrating American -made cars): "If someone wanted to give America an enema, all they'd have to do is stick the nozzle right here....in Dallas, Texas!"

The Oswald impostor certainly got the salesman's attention and probably went overboard, though the authors of the new book, Dallas 1963, document how Dallas had become a cesspool of KKK, John Bircher and Confederate hate by late 1963, thanks to the likes of "leading citizens" - such as Ted Dealey (who ran The Dallas Morning News as a prominent, anti-Kennedy hate rag), Bill Criswell- Baptist Preacher who made a thing of preaching racial and political hate, and H.L. Hunt - the oil tycoon - who used his "Facts Forum" as one of the first radio hate platforms, against Catholics, Blacks, Jews ....oh and the Kennedys. (The Reich wing kool aid drinkers at 'The American Spectator' insist Dallas "was never a city of hate" - but then they didn't read the same book I did!)

The authors also noted the level of hate crimes in the city including the practice by Dallas cops of grabbing black men off the streets, hustling them blind -folded into some garage, removing their pants then using thick belts on them and daring them to name the person wielding them. All this perhaps a prelude to several cases where - just before JFK's arrival in November, 1963, one black man was dragged out of his home, had gasoline poured all over him and was set on fire by the "upstanding" disenchanted, anti-liberal yahoos of good ol' Big D.  Of course, this itself was preceded by the infamous incident in which Adlai Stevenson, on a UN visit in October, was smacked with placards and spat upon by anti-UN protestors.

When asked by a reporter from the rival Dallas Times Herald if he hated Dallas, Stevenson- after wiping off a gob of spit and blood from a head wound - replied:

"I don't hate the people of Dallas, I just want to educate them."

Of course, he then warned Kennedy not to come on his planned November trip.(Which was intended to shore up a split between the Texas Democratic party's liberal faction led by Sen. Ralph Yarborough, and the conservative faction led by Gov. John Connolly).

All this is a prelude to the question of whether Dallas and Texas have changed much in the intervening years, at least to the level of minimum civility. Also, how it is that the latest issue of TIME magazine features a 'puzzle' map of Texas on its cover, with all 50 states jack-screwed into it, and the header 'The United States of Texas'.    And then in the sub-header we read:

"Why The Lone Star State Is America's Future"

And I then looked askance, wondering what manner of ignoramus or half-idiot could write such dreck. It either had to be Rick Perry, or some libertarian jackwad who probably just got high on some kind of rope. Well, it turned out it was the latter, a libertarian prof from George Mason University named Tyler Cowen.

Cowen's piece was fairly readable and at least he's honest in parts. It also helps (in the other parts of the article)  if you don't easily have the wool pulled over your eyes by Libertarian propaganda and nonsense about "self reliance".  As I said before in other blogs, if the Libbies really believed this bullshit they'd have their own defense departments and health departments. (Btw, Libertarian icon Ayn Rand's answer was for all communities in the country to "buy enough insurance" to protect themselves from rapes, murders, arson and ordinary accidental fires .)

Is Texas more civilized now than it was in '63 when black men were snatched off the streets and beaten in the dark by white apes with badges and KKK hoods hidden in their trunks? You be the judge. Here are some markers of modern Texas from the pen of Cowen himself (p. 32):

- The state's social services are thin and welfare benefits are skimpy

- Roughly a quarter of residents have no health insurance.

- Texas schools "are less than stellar" and rank in the bottom quintile of U.S. education.

- Rates of murder and rape, as well as property crimes are among the nation's highest.

- Texas  "led the nation as the place the most people got punched or kicked to death in 2012"

Wow! Sounds like Tex-Ass really really progressed since 1963! The place where most people get stomped to death or punched to death! But he left out a number of other aspects such as:

- Half the state is a chemical -fracking nightmare, especially in the region known as "the Barnett shale" where most fracking is ongoing. People are having such problems (respiratory, skin lesions, brain dysfunction etc.)  that it's affecting their health - causing them to move from homes and engendering flammable water (as shown in Gasland II.) Water testing of wells - when it is done, which is seldom - shows: boron, methane, strontium, benzene, and  toluene.

- The state is ground zero for the new "normal" as climate change accelerates to a new tempo. People in the  state will face the same massive fires the Aussies (in New South Wales) are enduring now.  This past summer 97% of the state was in persistent drought.

- As Rachel Maddow noted three nights ago, the new Texas Voter ID law will disenfranchise nearly 1.4 million already registered voters in the state, of whom only 50 so far- may have succeeded in getting what they need before next year's mid terms. Democracy? Hell no!

- A new anti-abortion law passed in Texas will limit abortion clinics to barely 13 across the state. Women who need it will be forced to take a "Mexican prescription" of assorted herbs and chemicals to try and induce abortions themselves - as Rachel Maddow also pointed out. In other words, yeah ladies, go ahead and move to Tex Ass but just hope and pray you don't get raped there and become pregnant! Or at least you can get some of that Mexican concoction if it happens!

- Texas is another one of the states that's disallowed the Medicaid expansion that would have provided health insurance to some 4.3 million needy people mainly in poor families. Now they will have to fend for themselves.

- On the educational scene, Texas is an abomination - leading the charge for textbooks that attempt to deny climate change and evolution, as well as rewriting parts of American history to make it more favorable to the Johnny Reb traitors.

A more recent outrage, as highlighted in a recent piece in salon, is the adoption of a curriculum known as "ResponsiveEd"   founded by Donald R. Howard, former owner of ACE (Accelerated Christian Education). ACE is a fundamentalist curriculum that teaches young-Earth creationism as fact as well as teaching the crappola that Darwin’s theory of evolution was adopted by Hitler ("survival of the fittest") and was responsible for the Holocaust. These morons don't even know that "survival of the fittest" was never used by Charles Darwin but by philosopher Herbert Spencer - who attempted to (falsely) extrapolate evolution to social regimes.

Anyway, Cowen makes sure at least we know (in his own way) that the minimal social  safety net of Texas is what awaits the rest of America if we don't fight now like rabid ferrets to make sure the Neoliberal asswipes don't destroy what's left of the Middle Class. That includes preventing them from cutting the prime programs that now support most of the elderly Middle Class: Social Security and Medicare.

Texas, or what Cowen writes Marshall Whitman once called "America's America" (sic) "is already one of our most unequal states" and "its safety net was already built frayed".  But hey, don't despair! Americans are moving to Texas at the rate of 106,000 a year (net migration) because the cost of living is cheaper! You can buy more home for the buck, and there are no state taxes! Ah, but unsaid is that the wages are generally lower for most paid work, and there are few or no job benefits- so you damned well better have that "untaxed" money saved up in case you need to buy your own health insurance!


Entrepreneurial wannabes also are flocking because the state features "a less regulated climate in which to do business". Cowen invokes this regulatory "freedom" to point to Texas' phenomenal growth (p. 35) as well as it's relatively low (6.4%) unemployment. But who is he fooling? Only the unread.


What is Texas' secret? Economists have summarized the template thusly:

"low wages, low taxes and light regulations"

In other words, applied to the first, wages for most are kept at just state minimum wage level, meaning most Texans with such jobs lack benefits and have to find at least another gig to make ends meet ...to pay their mortgage, buy groceries or get health care.

As for the second, any corporations entering to set up business are given passes on property taxes and other (state) income taxes while those burdens are passed on to the state's citizens. Meanwhile, in order to pay for them, cuts are made to programs including education, school meals, and Medicaid. (Another reason why Rick Perry insisted on no Medicaid expansion.)

The third means that new companies are free to pollute to their hearts' content including chucking toxic runoff (i.e. dioxins, chromium III, potassium perchlorate, toluene etc.) wherever they want and no reg cop will look, as well as easing up on the labor safety regs - so workers may be forced to work under risky conditions and well....if they lose a hand or foot...they will have to take care of it themselves!

Not surprisingly, Texans' health issues have exploded, and as many as 100,000 new cancers are forecast over the next five years, most of which (cancer of the breast, liver, lungs, prostate, bladder) citizens will have to take care of on their own with precious little in the way of medical insurance (which they can't afford given the low quality of 85% of Texas' 1 million great jobs).

The most loathsome thing about this whole hyped up sham is how Perry has not just let many companies go tax-free, but actually showered largesse from his "slush fund" for setting up shop! For example, The Dallas Morning News reported three years ago this October that more than $16 million of Perry's special fund had gone to companies with substantial links to some of Perry's campaign backers.(Ibid.)

Perry himself is a throwback neo-Confederate almost in the old Ted Dealey mold, who - after Obama was re-elected- had also been espousing secession like his Confederate ancestors. The guy is also best known - or perhaps maybe just from my perspective - for issuing hidden threats regarding Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke coming to Texas a couple years ago.  See, for example:

http://branespace.blogspot.com/2011/08/degenerates-may-let-perrys-comments.html

 Cowen's last observation bears repeating:

"Americans heading to Texas and other cheap living states are a bit like the mythical cowboys of our past, self-reliant for better or worse."

Actually, the cowboys existed in a truly more self-reliant world where mega-corporations hadn't yet taken over the food supply with industrial genetic farming, Monsanto techniques, etc. and there still existed wide open spaces- which hadn't been compromised by fracking wells, or corporate redoubts - not to mention million square foot properties owned by rich oilmen, corporate honchos earning 50,000 times more than their workers, and mountains debased to make room for immense play areas for the investment bankers and celebrities.

Today's Americans running to Texas for relief, remind me more of  Tom Joad-  the forlorn, dispossessed share cropper in The Grapes of Wrath. Unable to afford barely a  pot to piss in, his family's only recourse was to try to make it to California where they at least might have a chance.

In short, Cowen's prescription of "moving to Texas" signals a submission and a surrender to the Neoliberal imperative that citizens are no longer entitled to any protections, and the world and nation is owned by the corporatists, the capitalists and their war monger and security spawn. At least I am glad I will likely not be alive to see how this morose narrative fully plays out.  In the meantime, I suggest that we not give in so amicably but fight like Devils so as not to become the lowest common denominator symbolized by Texas and its misplaced priorities.