Thursday, March 5, 2009

More On Rush Limbaugh

If you haven't seen it yet, the DCCC's Rush Limbaugh apology generator is pretty cute. I think it could use a couple more entries (maybe an outlandish one involving zombies or something).

Part of what we're seeing here is the inability of an out-of-power party to control the media narrative. Lacking a powerful elected leader to be their representative, the Republicans can't really stop us from nudging that position into the hands of an egotistical and stupid talk radio extremist.

We had a similar problem in the '03-'06 years, lacking high-wattage leaders to speak for us, other than John Kerry for a few months, and he wasn't the best at speaking. Of course, the Republicans couldn't do the exact same trick on us -- if they tried to pick on Michael Moore or somebody like that, our party leaders would just run away from him. But the problem was that Republicans had control of the media narrative until external events like Katrina or out-of-control Iraq violence took it away. Remember when John Conyers tried to hold a hearing about Iraq War intelligence, and they wouldn't give him a proper room so he had to hold it in some kind of basement, and even Jon Stewart made fun of how a woman sitting in the background was breast-feeding during the hearing? That's what it looks like when you're out of power.

2 comments:

Nick Beaudrot said...

Wow, I hadn't caught that label. That's hilarious.

nimh said...

Oh yes, I remember. And that was just, what - four or five years ago? A reminder of how quickly political fortunes can be reversed. (One reason why I'm not joining the bolder predictions that the GOP is surely out of power for 10 years now.)