Readers have made some points about my Rush Limbaugh bit in Impromptus today, and a few of these points, I forgot to make myself. In particular, I should have noted this: One of the creepiest, most disturbing things about the “war on Rush” — particularly as orchestrated from the White House? Limbaugh is a private citizen. A reader wrote, “The same people who gasped because the FBI surveilled John Lennon are more than happy to have government employees — including Emanuel and Gibbs — conduct a campaign to demonize and diminish a radio personality for political purposes.”
Rush is a big boy, and he can handle it. But still . . . There is something creepy about bringing the weight of the government down on a radio host, even if that host is prominent, influential, and brave.
Couldn’t President Obama save this heaviness for Ahmadinejad, Assad, Kim Jong Il, and other real villains?
Also, weren’t we supposed to have a new kind of politics in the Obama era? Change and all that? A discarding of the bad old ways? And here we have Carville and Begala . . .
Well, let that same reader talk about it: “So who’s working on the Rush campaign? Perhaps the two most execrable individuals in American politics, Carville and Begala.”
That’s putting it a little strongly, but, still, that’s putting it — and the Obama era doesn’t seem so terribly new, except for the galloping socialization of the country.