Sluts, Rush Limbaugh, and The Dickening of America

Radio host and noted motherfucker, Rush Limbaugh, caused a stir last week when he called a young woman a slut and a prostitute because she uses birth control. There are not two sides to this debate. Rush Limbaugh is a whale-cock. He is as intelligent and attractive as a cyst on Osama Bin Laden’s asshole. I want to give him a break because a 400-pound meth addict could theoretically keep Kentucky’s economy afloat for years, but I can’t. If you are reading this and you are Rush Limbaugh, fuck you.

But he is not irrelevant. Sure, I’d love to dismiss him, and say, “He’s just doing it for attention. Ignore it and it will go away.” But Rush Limbaugh declared himself the leader of the Republican party, and he wasn’t lying. Al Franken famously wrote a book called Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot (he wasn’t lying either), but Franken is a lowly Senator from a big state; Rush Limbaugh could singlehandedly swing the Republican primary if he chose. Republicans make up approximately half of the country. Laugh at Rush Limbaugh, but respect the game: this motherfucker’s got sway. So we need to ask ourselves, “Who is Rush Limbaugh?”

Let’s start by getting over our squeamishness. No one likes being called a slut, but it’s just a word. It’s not the verbal equivalent of burning a cross in Ms. Fluke’s yard. Feel free to get horrified if you’ve never called anyone a slut, a whore, a dick, a pussy, a whale-cock, a skank, or any variation thereof. Your wounded pride and Rush Limbaugh’s maid will buy you hell of a buzz, but nothing else.

This is not to excuse what Rush said. He slandered a woman because she disagreed with him. In so doing, he bullied her and impugned the character of women like her (women who use birth control. Who, by the way, are like 90% of women. Have I mentioned, Fuck Rush Limbaugh?). But the problem is his hatefulness and his bullying, not his language. Watch for the Republicans to make this shift. “Sure, Rush called a woman a slut, but Bill Maher called Sarah Palin a cunt.” Maher is talking about Palin; Limbaugh is talking about women. I don’t care about dirty words, and I suspect you don’t either. I just called Rush Limbaugh a motherfucker, and I don’t mean he actually had sex with his mother. From what I understand, they mostly did oral.

But we’re getting sidetracked. Who is Rush Limbaugh? He’s a gaping asshole. But that’s not really fair. Obviously, he’s an asshole. He’ll tell you he’s an asshole. He’s a morbidly obese pill junkie who lectures people about personal restraint. He’s been divorced three times, and he lectures us about traditional marriage. Him using Viagra (covered by insurance) is A-OK, but if a woman wants insurance to pay for birth control (which is a better way of reducing abortion than overturning Roe vs. Wade) she is a slut. You could walk in on him blowing a donkey, and he’d accuse you of blowing a donkey.

This is where Rush Limbaugh gets special. He doesn’t care. I often listen to Rush Limbaugh, and I’m sure I’m not the only liberal who likes to raise his blood pressure as he’s driving to work. (Liberals, for whatever reason, drive to work from noon to 3.) His callers don’t converse with him, they say “Dittos” or, in extreme cases, “Mega-dittos.” Senator Al Franken (D. MN), in his previous career, called them “Didiots.” For you youngsters, dittos are copies—the assignments your teachers gave you in school, but they were blue and got you a little high if you sniffed them. These people wanted to be copies of Rush Limbaugh.

And who wouldn’t? He may be a fucker, but he’s the American dream. He’s fat, he’s mean, and he shoves people around. He doesn’t live a remotely Christian life, but hundreds of thousands of Christians hold him up as a model. His partner in sex-crime, Sean Hannity, routinely asks President Obama, in the exact same tone that a petulant sixteen year old scolds his mom, “What part of American exceptionalism do you not understand?” To which I would reply, “How an adult can believe in it.”

American exceptionalism, for those of you in the dark, is the theory of things. Specifically, things that come from America are better than things that come from the rest of the world. You want me to be more specific than that? Sorry, not happening. American things are better than your things. Suck it, Ireland. Seriously, no one who is functionally literate can honestly believe in American eceptionalism.

Before you hammer and sickle me, let me say: I love, love, love America. We’re the land of revolution, of religious freedom, of first in flight, Thomas Edison, of Hollywood, Martin Luther King, of the microchip. We are, I believe, the first country to elect one if it’s own racial minorities as president. You say America, I think Abe Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, FDR, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Muhammad Ali, Duke Ellington, Woody Guthrie, The Kentucky Wildcats, Leadbelly, and Bob Fucking Dylan. We can more than hold our own in literature, politics, music, movies, and history. But none of these people or things are great because they’re American. They’re just great. And they happen to be American. But according to the afternoon radio hall-monitors (“radiots” as Al Franken didn’t say) that’s not good enough.

You can’t just believe that America is great because it does great things. For them, everything America does is great because America is America. Call it dumb, call it circular, but you can’t call it rare. This is the Republican Party as of right now. We can blow smoke in your face. We can call you a slut for having sex and then ask for you to give us a sex tape, so we can jerk off to you slutting around. Meanwhile, we call ourselves Christians in the least interesting version of the word. Is there hypocrisy there? No. Because this is Rush’s version of exceptionalism.

Rush Limbaugh is an asshole. So are you. So am I. It’s because we’ve bought into the idea of American exceptionalism. We can do whatever we want. It will never change until we do battle with the final truth that Limbaugh and Hannity don’t want you to hear: America doesn’t give value to you—you give value to America.

We need to resist the dickening of America. The problem isn’t that half the country prefers Romney/Santorum/Gingrich/White Candidate D to Obama. Some people don’t like Obama and God bless them. The problem is that much of the country thinks they deserve the president they want because they are Americans (and people who disagree with them don’t count). It’s not that Rush Limbaugh is a selfish asshole—it’s that he’s turning America into a land of selfish assholes.

But, hey, I’ve given Rush a hard time. In the spirit of making peace, I’ll offer the following. He called Sandra Fluke a slut and made much of her “recreational activities”, which I assume means taking birth control. Here’s a video that talks about his recreational activities, about the pills he likes to take.