Does it really matter what Rush does? It’s not like any of the Pubbies care about the disconnect between Rush’s deeds and his words–they’ve already shown themselves to be a party devoid of principles or ethics. Rush is their boy, so they will circle the wagons and defend his right to privacy.
Of course, if Rush had been in 3 gay marriages, then the Pubbies would drape themselves with the Bible and denounce him for being a promiscuous fag. It’s all right for Rush to be a serial hetero adulterer because, y’know, that’s normal.
FWIW…I haven’t seen any evidence (aside from guesswork by rjung) that Limbaugh was adulterous during his marriages. Unless there really is such evidence, I’d ather stick with the facts.
To ‘get’ Rush, you must first understand that his show is the professional wrasslin of politics. Getting worked up over Rush is like getting worked up over a spat between Steve Austin and Hulk Hogan.
This goes a lot further toward explaining why I don’t ‘care about the disconnect between Rush’s deeds and his words,’ than the peculiar explanation offered that I am somehow ‘devoid of principles or ethics.’ FWIW, IMHO the dearth of principles and ethics is relevant to the entirety of the professional political arena. It doesn’t seem that there’s a monopoly on the relative scarcity of these essential elements of a decent human being. YMMV.
Next, there’re nasty and possibly unfounded rumors that Rush has a taste for sexual adventures outside of what’s normally called hetero.
If you believe in the sanctity of marriage and don’t believe in divorce, then any marriage after divorce is adultery, since you are still “married” to your ex-spouse, cause you don’t believe in divorce. I’ve heard the term “serial monogamy” to describe marriage and divorce and remarriage and another divorce, etc.
I’m not sure if Rush believes this, but I kinda doubt it.
Well, maybe if he spins it right, he can blame it on gay marriage, since, you know, now that gays can get married and all, straight marriage obviously has to come crumbling down…
The only church that would have have a problem with post divorce marriages (AFAIK) would be the Roman Catholic church. Limbaugh ain’t Catholic…and his last marriage was presided over by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Actually I don’t know that Limbaugh is a practicing member of any religion…but thats a different story.
FWIW…even if someone IS Catholic and got a divorce (civil), they could still try for a church anullment, allowing them to remarry in the church.
I despise Rush while rather pitying him. From all I’ve read he’s not very socially adept at all, far from a carouser and slick ladies man. In fact most accounts I’ve read portray him as rather geekish. Most of his glibness and assurance are performance qualities. Assuming adultery is a huge leap into pure speculation, IMO.
I’d guess he’s just not very good at marriage. That isn’t all that uncommon. I sure know a few. The fame and pressures surely can’t help. It’s only remotely relevant because of Rush’s loud, very public pronouncements about the nature and value of marriage. Not to mention no mercy for drug addicts.
Anybody who makes a name in the public arena for absolute values runs the risk of getting sliced by their own sword sooner or later. Cries of “but this was different” are mostly sad. Reality check time! They aren’t different at all, just higher profile.
Oh well.
Veb
And many apologies for screwing up the merge. Sigh.
It’s lots of buttons, screens, pasted URLs all…put together. Whatever.
I have allergies, all right? Physically speaking I’m about as fragile as Mack truck but even Superman would get addled if his entire brain pan was flooded with, well, snot. There aren’t enough eye drops and antihistimanes in the world to even make a dent in this shit. Superman was wimp about Kryponite compared to this.
Do you think it’s EASY being sleepless, beseiged, eye-watering *and[i/] disgusting, even to yourself, and still hassle through all those damned screens, buttons and poster insanities? Huh? HUH? Do ya, punk? Just ask yourself: is this your lucky day?!
Whoa. Sorry, Albert, the Flonase ain’t cuttin’ it.
Veb
Actually I was just tweaking off beagledave. Have I gotten silky dog-lovin’ moments along with sips of his homemade brew? NO! That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.
Sorry I’m so late to reply. We took the twins to a petting zoo and carnival today.
I don’t talk in code words. Family values are just what they sound like, issues and values that affect families. This sort of thing cuts across the political spectrum. If the left refuses to address some of the issues involved, they’ll find themselves marginalized on this issue.
It seems like the only time I hear from the political left on the subject of the American family, it’s tied up with the feminism diatribe or with the recent gay marriage debates. I’m not saying these aren’t important matters to discuss, but they don’t really affect the bulk of American families.
What does affect American families, and lead to this sense of crisis:
Single parenthood is rampant, especially in the black community. This makes things harder on mothers, and has bad consequences for kids.
Divorce has become a permanent part of American culture. The rates seem to have stabilized, but they’ve stabilized at a depressingly high level, right around half. Given that it’s by now well proven that this can have bad consequences for kids, this is depressing indeed.
American families are poorly served by the educational system, which is not educating children well even in affluent areas. In poor areas, it is not educating children at all, to any appreciable degree. The Democratic Party has a particular problem addressing this deficiency because the NEA wields tremendous power within the party establishment.
Family law in America is broken. There’s no two ways about it. For every story of an innocent family harrassed by social service busybodies, there’s another one of a child allowed to die because they’d been returned to clearly unfit parents or sent to abominable foster homes. There are children who have disappeared, lost track of by the very bureaucracy charged to help them.
In a similar way, juvenile justice in America is similarly broken. A child who faces all of these societal breakdowns may well turn out a criminal, even a violent one. If he’s an adolescent, though, he clearly can’t be treated as a child, because he’s committing adult crimes. But an adult’s impulse control is lacking as well.
A way of dealing with adolescents that commit very violent crimes has to be devised. But our country has instead reacted by trying them as adults. This does not seem appropriate at all. And coming up with an alternate plan would take some of that courage I talked about.
You obviously haven’t paid much attention to the American left. If you did you you would know that the left is far more concerened with factors that actually affect families than the hollow platitudes typically espoused by the right. Education and health care for instance as well as social programs desigbned to help struggling families, single moms. etc. All stuff that is regularly opposed by the political right in favor of moralistic preaching.
What does single parenthood have to do with values?
The problem is not divorce but bad marriages. Divorce is the cure for a bad marriage. Divorce may be hard for kids but bad marriages are much, much worse. You can’t force people to love each other. What would be your solution to the divorce rate? Telling people not to get divorced? Making it illegal?
In both of your above cases, bad marriages and single parenthood, it seems to me that the real solution is not moralistic preaching but some fucking birth control. If we taught young people how to protect themselves instead of yammering at them about bullshit abstinence maybe there wouldn’t be so many single parents.
In fact, I think reproductive irresponsibility is the the foremost social problem we have with regards to families. Encouraging marriage at a young age is also a bad idea. Discouraging people from getting married and cranking out kids without knowing what the hell they’re getting into would seem to me to be a more effective- or at least less pointless- approach to stopping bad marriages (and the collateral damage to the offspring of those marriages) than carping about divorce after it’s already too late to stop the trainwreck.
One thing we can do is stop idealizing marriage in popular culture but that’s never going to happen.
This is completely fucking backwards and betrays a passive acceptance of conservative propaganda on your part. I have worked in the educational system and the problem is not the NEA but fucking budget cuts, poverty and a lack of support from parents. Teachers are working theirs asses off for low wages and benefits- often buying classroom supplies out of pocket- and they are often completely hamstrung as to imposing any sort of discipline or order. I saw classrooms where kids would get up and walk out of the room whenever they felt like it, talk on cell phones, swear at teachers, etc. and there was nothing the teachers or adminstrators could do about it except call the parents. The problem was the parents quite often didn’t give a shit. When there are no consequences at home, and the school is forbidden to do anything except send the kids home, there is absolutely no reason for the kids to follow any rules or conform to any structure.
Blame the parents for low educational standards (and cheating by students is also now through the roof, especially with the internet- and again, the parents don’t care) but blaming the NEA is just fucking uninformed demagoguery.
Again this is complete fucking bullshit. My wife is a social worker. The boogeyman of overzealous social workers harrassing innocent families is a total fucking myth. CPS workers try very hard to preserve families, not break them up and it’s extremely difficult to “harrass” a family since the standards for what would trigger an investigation are pretty high and the evidence required to remove a child has to be extremely solid.
In fact, it’s because the government needs such solid evidence that some kids remain in abusive or dangerous situations longer than they should. You actually have to prove a kid is in danger before you can remove it from a household. That isn’t always possible no matter what CPS may suspect but I guaranfuckingtee you that they are not callously returning kids to bad situations out of negligence or laziness.
These are people who aren’t getting rich either, btw. They do this job because they care about kids and it goes with the territory that they will have to deal with mistrust and paranoid, ignorant stereotypes which paint them as wanting (for some unexpalined reason) to rip kids away from innocent parents with no provocation.
Oh, one more thing. Social workeres do not make decisions about whether kids get removed. Judges do. Judges make decisions based on evidence. In cases of child abuse that evidence can be hard to come by. What do you think judges and social workers should do differently?
This happened once actually, in Jeb Bush’s Florida. It’s not an epidemic.
I don’t have a quibble with any of this, and indeed, politicians seldom have the courage to address any criminal justice issue without pounding the table for more and more serious punishment. Anything less and they’re tarred as being “soft on crime.”
I welcome, always, the opportunity to debate the topics on hand here on the boards. I dislike, though, doing so with people so filled with smug assurance that they have all the answers.
Diogenes the Cynic is a wonderful example of the last.
I’ll reply to most of his uncited assertions later. But I couldn’t let this one go.
To my statement that child welfare agencies had lost track of children, he had replied that it had happened only once, and blamed it on Jeb Bush. First of all, the problems in the Florida CYS predate the Bush administration, and could as easily be blamed on his Democratic predecessors. I think there’s plenty of blame to go around here.
Second, Rilya Wilson isn’t the first child to vanish out CYS control, nationally. She’s just noteworthy for her youth.
The cited article stated that “Duffey’s unit already had found eight missing foster children, including girls ages 13 and 15 said to be working as prostitutes in Detroit.”
That’s way more than one. Just in Detriot. Just in 2002. So, on this point, Diogenes is just wrong.
He might have found this out if he’d just talked to his wife. I’m sorry he had to find this out from me.
How are runaways the fault of social services? You’re comparing apples and oranges. Kids running away from foster homes is quite a different kettle of fish than the Rilya Wilson case.
I said, Diogenes, that social service agencies had lost track of kids. That they didn’t know where they were.
You said this happened only once. Clearly, this wasn’t true. And, in my original post, the reasons for the kids being unaccounted for weren’t mentioned.
C’mon, Diogenes, the Pew Charitable Trust just released a huge report about how fucked up the foster care system is. Pretty much everybody agrees that it’s broken. I can’t believe you’re trying to defend it.
I’ll have you know, too, Diogenes, that I have family and close friends that work as teachers and social workers. I wouldn’t dream of denigrating their jobs.
I think, though, that the system in which they work is broken in certain fundamental ways.
It’s a similar feeling you have when you think about military personnel, I’d bet.
So please don’t interpret my comments as anti-teacher or anti-social worker. They aren’t intended as such, by any means.
I agree with you that the foster care system sucks and I agree that SS systems lose track of kids when they run away from foter care, I just disagree that social services can be blamed for kids running away from foster care.
I take your point about social workers and teachers. My wife and I both have had to frequently battle misconceptions and villification of those professions. I’m sorry if I overreacted. Even though we may personally acknowledge beaurocratic problems in both fields we tend to bristle when we here the canards about social workers trying break up families or any of a litany of tropes against teachers and the NEA. These fields may indeed be like the analogy you drew to the military. WE can bitch about it all we want but when someone else does it we get pissed, especially when some of the structural and institutional problems (in the military, in education or in social services) get generalized to some sort of moral failing by the rank and file.
You may not talk in code words. Much of the right does. Much of the left also does but what’s under discussion here is the one the right has raised to an article of faith, “family values.”
With respect, if you haven’t heard the left address the issues you mention, then you’re not paying attention to the left. I haven’t heard too many “feminism diatribes” lately so I can’t really speak to them, but the reason you hear about gay and lesbian families from the left is because the right doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of these families as families, let alone worry about how to strengthen and protect them.
Otto, I already said this is a worthy debate. However, it is tangential to most American families. And the issues that affect them are caused by a social breakdown that the Left does not address, except to apologize for.
The Left cannot, and does not, criticize and condemn single parenthood. Yet this “lifestyle choice” has caused tremendous misery, especially in the black community. When fathers are seen as a check-writer, at best, children suffer.
Likewise, divorce, especially casual divorce, has harmful effects on kids as well. It leads to tremendous issues with trust and attachment. It removes a father figure from the home. Divorce often escalates conflict, instead of de-escalating it, putting the kids in the middle of a stressful situation. It also, as above, removes a father figure from the home and turns him into a check-writer only.
Both of these things contribute tremendously to issues of poverty and child care in institutional settings. But the Left only addresses these issues, without talking about the social problems at their root.
Conservatives may not have all of the answers. But right now, we’re about the only ones talking about the harm casual decisions about family life will have on the family.
I’d like to see a better dialogue about this, but the Left has completely surrendered on this issue. They’re caught in a bind here between their libertine impulses and the damage those those same attitudes have on poor women and children.