The Rush Limbaugh Questionnaire

The sort-of-apology for the words used towards Sandra Fluke while refusing to lose face with his core audience--it didn't stop the continuing loss of advertisers for Rush Limbaugh. So, here's a trio of questions about what the Titan of right-wing talk radio should do next: A. Should Rush have Sandra Fluke on as a guest to make a sincere personal apology? B. Can Rush learn enough about the non-reproductive uses of birth control to talk about it knowledgeably on-air? C. Would Rush be better off if he confesses that he's engaged in distortion and name-calling because he doesn't think his audience would stick around for intelligent talk about conservative beliefs? Feel free to add any further questions/comments to this post.

Rush Limbaugh and his latest outrage.

Link reprinted from the right-leaning ATLANTIC magazine website:
Why Does Rush Limbaugh Get Away With Calling a Young Woman a 'Slut'? - The Atlantic

From the article:
I run through this history -- there are more examples -- so that Limbaugh apologists cannot portray these latest remarks as an aberration. They are not. This is what the man is like. He is nevertheless invited to the White House by Republican presidents, praised by conservative magazines, given honorary titles by conservative think tanks and defended by conservative bloggers.What confounds me most about it is that Rich Lowry and Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review, Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard, Matthew Continetti of the Washington Free Beacon, Glenn Kessler of The Claremont Review of Books, Arthur Brooks at the American Enterprise Institute, Edwin J. Feulner of the Heritage Foundation, fellow talk-radio host Bill Bennett -- none of these people would ever dream of going before a national audience and calling a female law student half their age a slut and a prostitute. None of them would ever dream of joking that if she wants her health insurance to cover birth control she should put a sex tape on the Internet. If a deranged gunman held a loved one hostage and forced them to make those remarks, as if of their own volition, they'd feel deeply embarrassed and ashamed doing it. Yet when Limbaugh says these things -- when he said other things as indefensible in the past -- he remained and remains a frequently celebrated, seldom criticized figure within the conservative movement. The Dittoheads are kept happy, but discredit is brought upon the movement. No leader of the conservative movement is willing to defend Limbaugh on the merits. They just stay mum. It's embarrassing.

Regarding President Obama: it may be time for lowered expectations.

I don't remember exactly where I read it during the 1980s; a quote that's returned to my mind today may have been in ADVERTISING WEEKLY or BARRON'S or THE WALL STREET JOURNAL or perhaps THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS.

Here's the quote: "You cannot penalize successful people."

And, regarding President Barack Obama's approach to people in danger of losing their homes, he seems to not want to penalize lenders all that much. Here's two articles from NPR.org: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100834725
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100843174

Here's how I view the first month of the Obama Administration: Obama is being "business-friendly" and bending over backwards in the name of bipartisanship for the Republican Party, which, in turn, is still unrepentantly clanging away in Karl Rove/Rush Limbaugh scorch-the-earth propaganda mode--willing to dole out propaganda to the unthinking, preparing the party faithful for the Presidential clash-of-titans of Jeb Bush and Sarah Palin in the 2012 primaries.

The little people are having to wait their turn until the big people get their big money--and it's safe to say that Obama isn't emulating FDR (who wasn't shy about angering and challenging plutocrats during the Great Depression) all that much.

But there has been a fair amount of no-more-doing-it-George-Bush's-way symbolism to calm the public.

Regarding the War on Terror, however, Obama may maintain certain Bush policies--but (my guess) turn the volume down in hopes that the majority of Americans, worried about the horrible economy, won't pay much attention. Joan Walsh (someone I don't always agree with) of Salon.com articulates this fear: http://www.salon.com/opinion/walsh/politics/2009/02/19/obama_detention/