They're having a "pass the popcorn" moment at the Daily Kos imagining that we're all watching the Decline and Fall of Limbaugh. The Kosmonaut known as "Killer of Sacred Cows" is calling it "Rush Limbaugh's McCarthy Moment."
"Watching the implosion of right-wing hate talk radio as 98 advertisers pull their support not just from Rush but from Hannity, Beck, Savage, and other programs deemed to have 'content... deemed to be offensive or controversial,' I am reminded of the denoument of the McCarthy trials," Cow Killer wrote, "and what finally shocked the nation into realizing that they hadn't been listening to actual facts but just the ravings of a demented, paranoid madman".
It's always amazing/amusing that leftists can never acknowledge that reality has an anti-communist bias on the question of Communist Party infiltration of the federal government (and the Communist Party USA's funding from and obedience to the Soviet Union). It would be one thing to pretend before the demise of the USSR that this was fiction. To deny it afterward is a display of profound historical ignorance. That's not to say McCarthy never needed a fact-check or a manners moment.
But Cow Killer is on an Animal House roll:
Joseph McCarthy's famous (perhaps I should say infamous?) witch-hunts of Communists during the 1950s created a neologism based on his name: McCarthyism, which in part means making poorly supported accusations, using demagoguery, and creating mass hysteria and moral panics through these methods. Yep. Sounds like Rush to a T. [Italics his.]
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. It makes it hard to explain to them what's really going on. A Rush listener, as Lefty Coaster describes, has drunk the Flavr-Aid in a big, big way - and believes everything that Rush and Fox "News" tell them.
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?
The imagined decline is too precious a thought to consider that it won't happen. They've no doubt had these moments of bravado before, only to be crushed by disappointment. Even in the Obama era, they consider themselves oppressed by El Rushbo:
McCarthy was never again elected to public office. Rush may never recover from this loss of corporate support. Eisenhower quipped that McCarthyism was now "McCarthywasm." Might we say that corporations are "Rush"-ing away from Limbaugh?
Either way, it's the same. Rush has reached his McCarthy moment. It's over, and he knows it, his posturing all aside. McCarthy postured too - to empty halls and zero press.
And, like Americans did after McCarthy was off the air, perhaps the country will now begin to come to its senses. Maybe now we can have some hope that things will actually get better.
Like I said, pass the popcorn. We've all waited for this for a long, long time.
[Hat tip: Peter DeLuise Watchdog]
