Right-wing radio takes a side (Hint: It's not you)
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! Whatever else the global financial crisis, puctuated by the highly justified outrage over the obscene and unwarranted bonuses paid to executives of taxpayer bailed-out insurance giant AIG, brings our way, it has done one thing. It has yanked away for good that longstanding (although rather transparent, in my humble opinion) curtain, to reveal the Rube Goldberg-like array of levers and pulleys which Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and their ilk have used to manipulate their populace. And just like the mythical land of Oz, it turns out there was really no wizardry, no magic. Just an illusion -- that they were on the side of "the people."
It worked for nearly 20 long years, didn't it? Like any slight of hand, the gimmickry of right-wing talk radio was really quite simple. Take the anxieties of millions of working-class Americans -- over the slowly eroding American dream, the disappearing pensions, the struggle for adequate health care and to pay for college. the need to work two, three four jobs in a household merely to stay even -- and use smoke and mirrors to deflect attention away from where all that wealth was really going, steadily drained uphill to the wealthiest Americans, to CEOs who went in a few short years from making 42 times what a rank-and-file worker made to more than 400X.
It used to be so easy to whip up resentment at everyone else -- at the poor, at minorities, at undocumented immigrants (though that one did get a little tricky because their CEO pals from the country club did need the cheap labor), at the handful of journalists who still had the chutzpah to report on this theivery of the American Dream, or pointy headed academics and their increasingly dated practice of a belief known as "rationality," or Hollywood actors because...well, who were they to have views on anything besides acting?
But the con is finally over. America is waking up. While the nation remains deeply divided over whether we have to remorsefully continue these gut-wrenching bailouts to protect the global economy and the innocent victims of Wall Street's treachery and stupidity or whether to just blow the whole thing up, there is finally one thing that liberals, rank-and-file (i.e., non-country-club) conservatives and centrists can all agree on: Raw, unbridled rage at the CEOs, the financial charlatans, the fortunate sons who in the words of John Fogerty, "when you ask them, how much should we give?/Ooh, they only answer more! more! more!"
The world of right-wing talk radio has to choose a side: The 20 million "dittoheads" who've been faithfully listening and paying the bills, or their real friends from the Capitol Grille and from the clubhouse at Augusta National. They had to choose, and now we all know where the radio talkers stand.
And it's not with the people.
You may have heard that GOP party boss Limbaugh is actually defending the bonuses paid to AIG executives, one of few people in America, in any public veniue, to actually do so. His main reasoning seems to be that the people -- his listeners -- aren't really feeling anger in their gut, that it's actually high-ranking Democrats whipping up the masses into a lynch mob.
Said the self-annointed El Rushbo:
"A lynch mob is expanding: the peasants with their pitchforks surrounding the corporate headquarters of AIG, demanding heads. Death threats are pouring in. All of this being ginned up by the Obama administration."
Really? If that were true, the Obama administration isn't so bright, because a lot of folks are mad at them, too. No, the public's anger at AIG is real, and it's spectacular, and it's about about to make Rush Limbaugh's head explode, because from minute to minute he's trying to channel the nation's rage and reject it, often in the very same monologue. The other day Limbaugh was actually trying to say (I think) that it was OK to be angry at AIG and their executives, but not because they gambled away a nation's treasure and are still trying to cash in their chips, not because they benefitted from the greatest upward torrent of wealth from the middle class to the upper class since the Gilded Age. No, be mad now at AIG and at rich business people, Limbaugh says, because now they're really closet Democrats, elitists, just like the professors and the journalists and the actors. Check out this utterly incoherent rant:
Let me tell you: these are the people who fund the Democrat Party. That's who's being bailed out. Let's put it that simple. These are the people who fund the Democrat Party. They live in Manhattan. They live in the Hamptons. They live on the Main Line of Philadelphia. They have giant penthouses in San Francisco, atop Knob Hill and so forth. They live in Hollywood. They are the heart and soul of the Democrat Party. The really super-rich parts of our country are heavily Democrat now. We don't grudge them. We don't begrudge them their wealth. We don't begrudge them their success. But they begrudge us, and these are among the people who now are being bailed out by the Obama administration, because the elitists and the eggheads are hanging together.
Huh?
But they're largely Democrats. They're largely eggheads. They're largely Ivy League elites. That's who's circling the wagons to protect themselves with all this, and when Obama comes out and trashes these people, he doesn't really mean it -- and they know it. They know he's just got to sound populist to sound like he relates to you. But again, the bonuses are one-tenth of 1% of all bailout money so far, roughly.
Heh, indeedy. "They know he's just got to sound populist to sound like he relates to you." This from a man who lives in a mansion in Palm Beach, for crying out loud. I try -- not always successfully -- to avoid cliches when I write, but has a pot ever called a kettle blacker than this? But of course, the world of right-wing radio and blogs is taking its cue from Boss Limbaugh, as documented by the people at Media Matters who listen to a ton of conservative radio so that you and I don't have to.
Sean Hannity, twisting the attack on AIG into an assault on tax-and-spend Democrats:
"Whether you like the AIG bonuses or not, think about this: They're going to make a law, and they're going to tax every single penny of it, virtually all of it. In other words, we're going to just steal their money. And they're not going to be able to do a darn thing about it, because we're the government, and if we decide we can confiscate all of their wealth, we're gonna do it."
Glenn Beck, who just a week ago was trying to foment an anti-Obama insurrection with a kick from Chuck Norris but suddenly is quite worried about mob rule:
"But what I really, really don't like here is the idea that we are willing to give in to mob rule, and that's what this is....I mean, the only thing they haven't said is, 'Bring out the monster.' It's mob rule. They are attempting to void legally biding contracts."
And so on and so forth.
Just think, a couple of weeks ago Limbaugh was flying so high, the king of what's left of GOP World, with CNN and Fox hanging on every sweaty word that he delivered. And now, just a couple of weeks later -- if you'll allow me to mix my "Wizard of Oz" metaphors here -- it's crashing down as fast as a ranch house in a Kansas tornado. Because even dittoheads won't say "ditto" when it's bailing out Limbaugh's golf partners. And Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck and the others are going to learn the same lesson that a certain wizard once learned in living Technocolor back in 1939, that once you've ripped away the curtain you can't pull it back.