News from the West

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By Auntie Establishment, from the December 2002 Newsletter

I’ve been thinking lately that what the world really needs is a retroactive form of birth control, something that would allow us to go back in time fifty or sixty years and stop Rush Limbaugh’s father from giving Rush Limbaugh’s mother that Hershey bar and new pair of nylons. Imagine if someone could go back and just slip a condom into Mr. L’s pocket, or whisper a word about abstinence into Mrs. L’s ear—an ounce of prevention could mean three hundred pounds worth of cure.

Perhaps it’s a sign of my advancing cynicism, but I’m no longer surprised by the number of people who listen to Mr. Limbaugh and find him informative and entertaining. I lost my innocence years ago when I caught my dear grandmother watching World Wide Wrestling. She was sitting in her rocking chair yelling, “Give him the chair!” As a nation, we forgot the difference between polemic and invective around the time Jerry Springer took the talk show crown from Phil Donahue. Nevertheless, I am not yet so jaded as to be completely unshockable. As reported verbatim in the online magazine Salon.com, one of Mr. Limbaugh’s recent rants gave me the sort of all-over puckering experience I usually associate with drinking Drano or watching Touched by an Angel. It made me want a hot bath and a cold compress.

Mr. Limbaugh accused Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle of “hoping to politically benefit with the next terrorist attack.” This is the sort of statement that drives one to clean one’s ears with one’s car keys and ask wasn’t it the deliberate strategy of Mr. Bush and the Republicans to benefit politically from the last terrorist attack? Karl Rove, George W’s political advisor and personal Rasputin, made the War on Terrorism the centerpiece of the mid-term elections. No need for conjecture here—a computer disk detailing Mr. Rove’s campaign plans that found its way from the White House to the media last February made this strategy explicit. Mr. Rove’s blueprint called for playing up fears of further terrorist attacks, rattling the sabers on Iraq, and damning the Democrats as weak-kneed, lily-livered, and unpatriotic. And it worked. That’s why Trent Lott is measuring the drapes in Tom Daschle’s old office.

By having a clear agenda, however blatant and odious, Rove and company managed to dominate the political discourse. It’s a truism to say that appearances can be deceiving, but it’s another thing to recognize that appearances can be all important. In one of the more depressing outcomes of November 5, Saxby Chambliss, a man who escaped military service in Vietnam by pleading a “trick knee,” defeated Georgia Senator Max Cleland, a triple amputee who lost three limbs on the battlefield. Declaring that Cleland lacked “the courage” to pass a homeland security bill, Chambliss won the endorsement of Georgia’s Veterans of Foreign Wars—proof that in some places irony is not only dead, it’s been drawn and quartered and had its head stuck on a pike.

The Republican train that ran into that school bus full of Democrats rode the very rail Mr. Limbaugh accuses Tom Daschle of riding. What we need to know now is why that bus was stalled on the tracks and no one was wearing seat belts. We need to know why Mr. Limbaugh feels free to ask Senator Daschle, “What more do you want to do to destroy this country than you’ve already tried? . . . What do you want your nickname to be? Hanoi Tom? Tokyo Tom?”

While it’s a shame that this is now what passes for substantive debate, the Democrats no longer have the luxury of taking the high road. They need to start coming up with some snappy answers. “Hanoi Tom” should be met with “All You Can Eat Limbaugh,” and “Tokyo Tom” with “Old Country Buffet Rush.”

Think of it as aversion therapy. If we trade cheap shots for low blows, maybe we can all get it out of our system. At least until someone invents that birth control time machine.

Auntie Establishment is the pen name of Joan Opyr, who would be happy to address your questions and comments. Criticisms will be addressed by her other alter ego, Say Uncle.

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