Outrage Redundancy Syndrome: It's time to stop screeching at Limbaugh

The problem is that it’s tough to mobilize anyone around the real public-policy flash points. They’re lower profile and harder to understand and less sexy, and often exist at the less glamorous state and local levels. (I’m guilty, too! I’m writing about Limbaugh when I could be learning about how Medicaid works, or something.)

Limbaugh, on the other hand, is an utterly irresistible target, and fits right into ORS pathology: the disease tends to arise when its victims come face to face with big, socially prominent figures who elicit the sort of primal rage usually reserved for someone threatening your kids. But in this case, the level of rage dwarfs that figure’s actual influence.

It is very hard to internalize, but we should be repeating it like a mantra: Limbaugh isn’t the guy making it almost impossible for some Americans to get abortions. He isn’t contributing to the number of rapes that go unreported on college campuses. He has very little to do with the fact that women hold less than 17 percent of the seats in Congress. He’s a nonfactor, except among his ill-informed, right-wing listeners—and on those occasions when he bludgeons his way onto the national scene by saying something offensive and we respond obligingly with an ORS epidemic.