Kind Hearts and Bitter Enemies

posted at 1:05 pm on December 31, 2009 by Doctor Zero

As of this writing, Rush Limbaugh is resting comfortably, after being admitted to a hospital in Hawaii for chest pains last night. For Rush’s fans and well-wishers, it proved to be a tense evening of Tweets and frequently-refreshed web pages, filling the Internet with hopes and prayers.

For many on the Left, it was an evening of vicious gloating and death wishes.

I won’t link to any of the cesspools that pass for liberal discussion forums. You can find them yourself, if you feel like dumpster diving. You can check out the Twitter topic for Rush Limbaugh to see a lovely holiday assortment of sweets and nuts. No level of desire to be polite or even-handed will ever lead me to pretend the Left and Right are equally vicious when it comes to high-profile figures grappling with their mortality. To be sure, there are plenty of individuals on the Right who reacted to the death of Ted Kennedy with curses and mean spirits. The collective depth of their bitterness is a pond beside the vast sea of hatred that defines the modern Left. You won’t have to look hard to find sweaty rants from liberals who hoped that being blocked from NFL ownership would prove to be a fatal condition for Rush.

Why is Limbaugh so hated by liberals? He makes fun of their leaders and punctures their objects of worship, but there is no shortage of commentators or entertainers who do the same thing to conservatives… in spades, and often cloaked in the guise of “hard” news. It’s instructive that liberals had to fabricate the smears they used to deny Limbaugh his lifelong dream of owning a football team. After all those years of whining about how terrible he is, they couldn’t find any real quotes to condemn him with. They don’t hate him for what he says. They hate him because he can say it without becoming the hobgoblin they fervently want him to be.

It’s not pleasant for the Left to realize that one man can push back against the tide of a popular culture they have controlled for decades, and topple the thrones and altars built by reverent news anchors with good cheer, and a profound lack of venom. Limbaugh has shown some anger and exasperation during his many years on the air, but he’s never been vicious. Compare that to the way liberals were casually vicious to Sarah Palin… often without seeming particularly angry at her.

Our political and cultural disagreements have, inevitably, become more corrosive as the size of the State expanded. There were plenty of hard words flying around between the political opponents of prior generations – the “flame wars” of the Republic’s first century sometimes ended in pistol duels. In the modern era, bitterness has become horribly pervasive. The luxury of discussing politics as a matter of high-minded philosophy is denied to the citizens of a super-State… whose jobs, moral beliefs, and very lives have all become chips on the table, in a high-stakes game played at cable-news speed.

The venom displayed by the people who spent last night wishing Rush Limbaugh would die in that hospital is regrettable, and despicable… but it’s not entirely unreasonable. After all, those who cursed him have been told that anyone who opposes President Obama’s health-care plan wants poor people to die. Anyone who opposes massive taxes and gigantic social programs is a heartless miser. Those who speak out against the excesses of radical environmentalism are the paid operatives of shadowy corporate interests. Those who criticize the awful record of Democrats on national security are inhuman warmongers who thirst for the blood of foreign devils. Anyone who would champion a minority or woman who was officially excommunicated by the civil-rights or feminist elite is a racist.

Rush Limbaugh does all of these things on a daily basis, and he does them better than anyone else. He is the paramount champion of ideas that liberals have been instructed to hate, without hesitation or reflection, and his success delays the coming of a utopia they have been promised all their lives. Do you enjoy playing a few casual hands of poker for pennies with your friends? Would you play the same way if your entire life savings were part of the ante? What if you were told innocent strangers would be made to suffer for every hand you lost? That is the type of game we are compelled to play, when we discuss the politics of the monstrous and incompetent government we have allowed to grow in Washington.

Beneath the tribalism that leads some to declare their hatred of Rush Limbaugh with the same bloodless ferocity they would announce their spite for a rival football team, lies the hot fury of liberals who believe Rush Limbaugh is making fools of the brilliant saviors who stand only a few trillion dollars away from defeating injustice, and soothing the pain of need. Influencing a total State requires absolute commitment to all-consuming politics.

Anyone who believes in socialist government should reconcile themselves to a future where today’s moderates become tomorrow’s Enemies of the State, just as yesterday’s JFK liberals would be dismissed as right-wing maniacs today. The stakes for political and cultural discourse will continue to rise, as more of our lives and wealth become scarce resources to be allocated by the State. To keep that system going, you will need to silence people like Rush Limbaugh. Get used to the people who wanted him to conveniently expire in that hospital room last night. You will soon enough find yourself under the table of our command economy, fighting with them for scraps… and your success will be determined by your ability to designate enemies, and hate them with sufficient dedication.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org

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