Daily Kos Week in Review: Rush Madness

Long before Sandra Fluke became a household name, Kossacks often blogged about Rush Limbaugh, the (allegedly) racist, sexist menace to all that is good and decent. This past week, one really put the rhetorical pedal to the metal, suggesting that Limbaugh's show might have inspired an American soldier's massacre of sixteen Afghan civilians. 

As usual, each headline is preceded by the blogger's name or pseudonym.

Killer of Sacred Cows: Limbaugh is the new Joe McCarthy...

...Like McCarthy in the 1950s, Rush has made his fortune and his name on having no sense of decency. He attacks people all the time, and his listeners, who are just as paranoid and angry as he is, eat it up like ice cream on a hot summer day. They just can't get enough of it, poorly supported and demagoguic [sic] though it is.

But it also impairs their ability to think and reason...

When Edward R. Murrow discussed McCarthy's ongoing diatribes towards suspected Communists, he described McCarthy's "primary achievement" as "confusing the public mind". Isn't that what Rush is doing, and has been doing, for the last fifteen to twenty years?...

Constance Hilliard: ...whose bigotry may have led to mass murder
 
...Today we have a ghastly news account of a U.S. soldier shooting dead sixteen Afghan civilians...What if the perpetrator had not turned himself in? Might the American public have ignored or dismissed Afghani insistence that this horror was not only intentional, but also the work of an American soldier as crazy paranoia? Maybe...probably...ah...yes. This is where Rush Limbaugh comes in...
 
The Rush Limbaugh Show is being broadcast to troops on bases all over the world. However, America has too much at stake, to allow this seedy, ugly-spirited man to roll around in the minds of vulnerable young men. These soldiers are thousands of miles from home, getting shot at by an enemy indistinguishable from our Afghan allies, for a war whose rationale nobody even remembers any more. They need something better than an education in anti-Muslim hatred... 

MinistryOfTruth: All the right needs is hate...

...[W]hat binds the conservative movement at this point is hate, hate of government and socialism and liberals...[A]t this point, being a conservative isn't a political philosophy, it's a personality disorder...
 
...[T]here are only two places in America where a bunch of sexually repressed white guys can be legitimized based off of their net worth alone in a place where women have no voice for their rights, and that's at the Republican National Convention and a gay strip club...

LaFeminista: ...especially of women

...[T]he present Republican crop...really cannot be explained without taking a walk o[n] the dark side of cretinism...
 
...Obama...is mainstream center right wing American when viewed from [Europe]...[T]he current Republican crew is the loony marching with the sandwich board declaring "the end of the world is nigh"...

...[W]e talk about others as being religious fundamentalists and how they hate women.

Excuse me.

Hate women?

Isn't that what this whole republican campaign is about, hating women?...

Vyan: The Republicans' delusional cult exposed
 
...Everything coming from [the GOP] is simply a pack of self-aggrandizing delusion.  It's Pathological, and it's been like that for years...
 
It's like the Mad Men on Mescaline School of Governing.  Rather than study what is real and adapting to that, they would craft a message for people who are willing to believe it, and their belief will bring it into reality...
 
I'm not saying they're mentally ill or insane - hardly, the GOP has become more like a Cult...
 
...[T]here are people who want to hear what Sarah [Palin] is saying. They want to believe it. And Sarah's more than willing to pander to their fear, loathing, paranoia and hate.  She feeds the delusion. The deeply deluded are her Base as much as the 1% is Romney's base.

And her flock, fearful and angry are turning increasingly to join and form a record number of Hate Groups as documented by the Southern Poverty Law Center...