Rush Limbaugh: Fascist or Mentally Ill?

Posted by Good German on March 13, 2012

Or both?  Paul Rosenberg writes at Al Jazeera English:

Rush Limbaugh’s recent meltdown – his three-day sex-crazed rant/attack against Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke, whose congressional testimony made no mention of her own sex life — has a rich and strange collection of backstories to it, none of which include the sort of follow-on this story has had, complete with pseudo-apologies and the subsequent, ongoing loss of sponsors, which might even conceivably damage or imperil his career.

Of those backstories, his own shady past as a pill-popping sex tourist is only the most lurid, not the most instructive. That only goes to underscore what’s already self-evident: that Limbaugh’s diatribes are heavily implicated in what psychologists call “projection” and the rest of know as “the pot calling the kettle black”. Much more instructive, to get things headed in a more fruitful direction, is Limbaugh’s long history of similar sorts of vindictive, name-calling attacks.  Media Matters has provided several illustrative lists, such as  “Rush Limbaugh’s Decades Of Sexism And Misogyny“, “The 20 Worst Racial Attacks Limbaugh’s Advertisers Have Sponsored“,  “Ten Of Limbaugh’s Worst Advertiser-Sponsored Attacks On The Poor” , “Limbaugh’s Advertisers Sponsored These Ten Attacks On Unions” – and a more all-purpose list — ”15 Of The Worst Comments Limbaugh’s Advertisers Have Sponsored Since 2004“.  These collections served to illustrate how continually Limbaugh resorts to similarly themed name-calling, thus reinforcing the point Media Matters made early on, that Limbaugh hadn’t just used a couple of “poorly chosen words” to describe Fluke, he had engaged in three days of prolonged haranguingincluding 46 separate attacks…

Read more here.