person Rush Limbaugh to the few people who don't understand or don't want to see them.

All I could think is that it might be like when someone who has abused you for 30 years--or cost you friendships, or cost you to lose respect for people who were really important parts of your life--dies, you actually do feel the need to say something, to take stock of the damage that person did to you and your country.

He was on the air for something like THIRTY YEARS. And if you were a person that enjoyed local talk radio, or even serious talk radio, he was the bleeding edge of the movement that totally destroyed talk radio in this country.

So I think that is why people feel a need to speak out. There are a lot of pent up feelings about this person that have not been expressed, and now seems a good time to express them.

I very rarely find myself in disagreement with your posts, but this time I gently and respectfully take issue.

His rhetoric irrevocably altered the neuronal structure of tens of millions of American minds, transforming them from free thinkers into lobotomized propagandists.

He attacked good and decent people, some of whom had nothing to do with politics whatsoever, and cultivated actual widespread hatred for them. He practically celebrated the suicide of Kurt Cobain.

There is also strong circumstantial evidence he traveled to the Dominican Republic on sex tours to take advantage of minors. So today I think about those kids too and wonder what has become of them.

And things that may now come to light now that he's dead.

that "worthless shred of human debris" and "junkie" according to Limbaugh, years before Rush admitted his opiate addiction.

By the way, that's this Rush Limbaugh:



But polite Dems don't go there.

https://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2006/06/digby_suggests_.html

from an actual political party that was for a set of ideas into an identitarian party that was only opposed to a set of ideas.

Gingrich probably deserves honorable mention here too.

I could see Limbaugh's influence on people I worked with in the mid 90s, and also on their spouses. I worked for a great guy who complained that his wife had become addicted to Limbaugh and that it was changing her. And he was a conservative Catholic, and even he was worried about it.

It might not be necessary to change our tactics if the GOP continues to disintegrate.

A month ago I was saying we should at least consider more drastic tactics, but we might be moving in the right direction of becoming a party that is coalesced around the idea of opposing the GOP as the party that opposes Democracy and has contempt for our founding principles and the Constitution.

The Republicans have become an identitarian party that is not seriously about issues (other than figleaves like abortion, "religious freedoms" and immigration) but simply opposing us. They are now clarifying who they are for all to see, and maybe we can coalesce around the idea of opposing them as fiercely as they oppose us. I thought for a long time this couldn't happen unless we actually made it happen, but it seems to be happening by itself. Voters motivated by anger at the other side, Ezra Klein argues (and IMO proves) in his book Why We're Polarized are consistently more reliable and turn out in greater numbers even in midterm elections. Voters like that do not "split the ticket." They vote straight ticket; they get out there no matter what.

At that point politics moves beyond policy and becomes about who we are as people.

No admission of defeat is allowed. No negative thinking is allowed. His lifelong pattern has been to spin devastating and embarrassing defeats into "victories." It's a kind of self-brainwashing, so he probably does believe it. On the other hand, his compulsion to exclude from his inner circle anyone who criticizes him or sees things a different way makes me wonder if deep down he can tell the difference between a failure and a success.

I'm puzzled by some of the posts I'm seeing on other threads, where people seem to be getting sidetracked on what I think are irrelevancies. The main point, the bottom line:



I can't understand why anyone in the Democratic Party would ever, for an instant, think of interfering with that dynamic, discouraging that possibility, or have a problem with that.

it is that it will enrage Trump and he will waste at least a week ruminating and planning his revenge.

The more sidetracked by rage and vengeance Trump is, the worse it is for his health. He is losing his grip on power, realizes it, and will become even more self-destructive as a consequence.

So two things can be true: Haley is a fraud. Haley throwing shade at Trump is a good thing.

be useful to their multi-various agendas (from the Christian Nationalists to the Mercers, the Kochs, fossil fuel, anti-government, anti-tax, anti-choice, climate change deniers, real estate moguls, proponents of deregulation, conservative think tanks, etc.) and pushed his opponents out of the way, and then outlets like Fox, Breitbart, InfoWars jumped on board. But I'm hesitant to leave it at that, since there were undeniably other factors. No doubt he made money for media interests, but so many powerful organizations and corporations had been waiting in desperation for an impressionable, easily manipulated, racist, apolitical charismatic leader who could be told what to do for decades and decades. He was a dream come true for a lot of scumbags.

Last but not least, Putin really liked the idea of an imbecile running the most powerful country on earth.

traditionally a training ground for creative fiction writers. Some of our great novelists taught and studied there (Cheever, John Irving, T.C. Boyle).

I really enjoy his writing and have posted some of it here at DU. But I think of it more like performance art than actual journalism. It's very pyrotechnical and filled with connections that may or may not exist. Critical theorists will probably come up with a term to define what he does. It's very novel and inventive. Post-truth semi-truthiness?

To me his value is that he challenges readers to contemplate many theoretical possibilities to explain the corruption that surrounds us. Part of his appeal is that he writes with such obsessive and fierce conviction, but how much of what he theorizes does he actually believe?