Der Limbaugh is finally, finally, at long last, getting at least a tiny taste of his richly-deserved comeuppance. But why now? I've been wondering why this didn't happen sooner. Why now?
How did he weather the storm surrounding "Barack the Magic Negro?" Or "I hope he fails?" Or any number of other sick things that have tumbled out of his mouth over the last 20 years?
Is it because it comes on the heels of the Komen Foundation debacle? Is it because birth control is a subject people just assumed was long-settled? Is it because of the Catholic Church's simultaneous hypocrisy on pedophilia and contraception? (To say nothing of abortion.)
It's not like Limbaugh has taken a turn to the right recently or anything. He's always been this extreme.
Maybe part of what's fueling the fire is that it's finally starting to dawn on people who should have known better that Rush Limbaugh is the sclerotic beating heart of the Republican Party.
In a way, Limbaugh should be the one running for President. No more proxies, let's fight with the real power behind the throne. Limbaugh has a claim on the leadership of their movement that The Four Dwarves (Greedy, Frothy, Cheaty, and Goldbug) combined can't compete with.
For some reason, this seems to be coming as news to a lot of people, and it shouldn't have been. Not just the highly influential, sensible-centrist, hand-wringing both-sides-do-it false-equating Brooks/Broder/Friedman pundit types. It's Limbaugh's advertisers and corporate enablers at Clearchannel. It's independent voters, who (anecdotally) seem to be paying attention at the moment.
It's worth looking back a bit to see how we got to this moment. In my mind, this all began when the Komen Foundation targeted Planned Parenthood (a frequent target for rightist attacks) over abortion, not birth control. This has been common enough in the last decade-plus to not really be terribly noteworthy, aside from the backlash that it inspired.
But then the regulation requiring employers to cover contraception was promulgated, and the Catholic bishops, already fired up over SGK vs. PP, cynically invoked "religious liberty." And the Republican party is in the middle of a drawn out primary process, requiring them to be introspective in a way that they are plainly not very good at. Santorum's recent prominence in particular is putting them in a bind; he has implied that he would like to overturn Griswold v. Connecticut, to say nothing of Roe v. Wade. In this environment, heavily influenced by strident purism (or Puritanism), the shouts of "religious liberty" caught fire, like a match struck in an oxygen tank.
Birth control ties in so well with so much other batty Republican rhetorical tropes--Crumbling American Morals, Family Values, Big Gubbermint Shoving [XYZ] Down Our Throats--that the whole party jumped on it en masse, like moths hypnotized by candlelight.
And then Darrell Issa's fateful decision to exclude Sandra Fluke from his hearing came back to bite not just him, but his entire team, when Limbaugh himself started free-associating about the fairly mild Congressional testimony of this totally unknown law student on air. Nothing that he said could be taken by a reasonable person as being fair in the slightest; it was obviously 100% self-serving fiction and pointless ad hominems. If Limbaugh had simply ignored Fluke, none of this would be happening.
Limbaugh didn't back down the next day, nor the day after, extending and enhancing the original commentary with even more inflammatory material. And then the advertisers (pack animals if ever there were any), for whom politics is but one means to an end (making money), got nervous. When the first one broke and ran, it made the entire pack more edgy, and others have since left; Limbaugh has not been totally abandoned, but the possibility of stampede has now been made clear. Limbaugh & Clearchannel know it, because of the silly non-apology issued over the weekend. Limbaugh certainly isn't going anywhere any time soon, but his long-standing aura of invincibility has worn off.
That's why these comments in particular caused such a huge firestorm compared to anything else that the man says in the 15 weekly hours of his radio show, it's the context (fuel) of the Komen Foundation story, and Santorum's fire-and-brimstone based lunge for the Not-Romney mantle. The shift in the dominant topic in the media from abortion to birth control is crucial, and is something that warrants further study from Democratic campaigns & pundits alike.
All that being said, I want to now turn to the title of the diary.
Every single Republican candidate at every level should be made to face a dilemma this fall. From Presidential candidates to state and local officials, all the way down to the dogcatchers; simply by being challenged about birth control, they are going to be forced to choose between the incoherent government-out-of-our-lives-except-in-the-bedroom people* and everybody else. They are going to be forced to choose between their holier-than-thou base on one hand, and the appalled indies and energized Democrats on the other.
Rush Limbaugh has provided the Democrats with both the perfect wedge issue and the perfect target. Limbaugh is the Id of the Republican party. He has driven their virulence and extremism for two decades. He is the mold from which all other conservapundits are struck. And now he has become, temporarily, radioactive. The more he is attacked directly, by name, by prominent Democratic and lefty sources, the better; the longer this controversy stays alive, the better. (James Carville, love him or hate him, was born for this moment. I look forward to the video of somebody like Erickson angrily stomping offset a la Novak because Carville's needling found a sensitive spot.) Obama's sympathetic phone call to Fluke was perfect.
Limbaugh represents simultaneously the Republican Party's greatest strength and its greatest weakness. Karl Rove infamously used this tactic very successfully; use the other guys' strength against them. Rick Santorum's insurgency has added momentum to Romney's rightward tack, dragging the entire party with it; Limbaugh is the single person most representative of, and most responsible for, that long-term rightward movement, and highlighting his extremism and arrogance will demand that conservative politicians either embrace Teh Crazy, run from Teh Crazy, or painfully tap-dance their way out of disagreeing with Teh Crazy without actually calling it "Crazy" (like Romney's reaction to Limbaugh's Fluke comments, which merely questioned phrasing, rather than substance). That third option is the one a lot of them will try to pull off, and it's too awkward to be effective in most purple constituencies. The right wants full-throated, unabashed Batshit; the mushy middle is not going to give any politician enough time to articulate such a complex, modulated response.
* (I love how Limbaugh's non-apology referenced this exact idea, in a crazy thru-the-looking-glass way: "I posited that it is not our business whatsoever to know what is going on in anyone's bedroom." Bullshit, Limbaugh; that undermines countless other things that you yourself have bleated about for decades.)
edited to add: if you haven't already, check out JohnKWilson's excellent and exhaustive summation of Limbaugh's Fluke-related rhetoric. A valuable document and one that should be referenced by any DK readers who will be making media appearances on this subject, not to mention Fluke's lawyers. It's not like this was a comment made in passing, it was a sustained three-day campaign to belittle and defame.