The two “whys” about which Rush doesn’t care (per the transcript) are why liberals don’t leave the country, and why liberals see the country in the manner that he alleges that they do.
So does misrepresenting what your opponents say. Unfortunately, that kind of misrepresentation is viciously attacked when it comes from one side, and warmly endorsed coming from the other.
Don’t believe it? Try a little experiment - start a thread misrepresenting what Barack Obama says, and “edit” a transcript of one of his speeches to make it sound worse than it is, and see how long you last.
Then why do you react so strongly to misrepresentations that are meant to make it appear that Rush does it, and not even twitch when it comes from Shayna and Der Trihs?
Since when is Der Trihs a famous figure with the ear of a huge number of liberals? And I don’t think I’ve ever seen Shayna take the “conservatives are bad no matter what” position. She argues for her side, not against the other, and she does it with more thought than “four legs good, two legs bad.”
Really, it’s a fool’s errand to compare voices on a message board with Rush. They influence far fewer people than he does, and he advocates a thoughtless, adversarial approach which people gobble up like candy. I don’t see how you can read him saying “They. Must. Be. Stopped” and try to argue that he’s being reasonable.
He isn’t. However, you have exactly the same options available to combat his bigotry as you do for Rush - Pitting and speaking out. And you are far more likely to counter his negative influence on the discussion on the Dope than you are to get Rush to give up his multi-million dollar gig.
Yet you choose not to avail yourself of them in the one case, yet do so with more enthusiasm than consistency in the other.
Oh yeah - she’s the voice of sweet reason all right -
So this is a terrible thing. Except when your side does it.
Conservative “freedom” means the freedom to make as much money as you can pull off. It rarely has anything to do with freedom to live your life as you see fit. Well, at least until you’ve amassed that mountain of money that makes you better than the masses.
N’enculons pas des mouches, actually. Corrected only because precision is, I believe, critical in all matters involving interspecies assfucking and the various folk idioms the practice has inspired. To my knowledge, the verb encouler does not exist in French except as a misspelling, but if forced at gunpoint to translate the original phrase I’d stammer out something like “let’s not flow into flies,” which sadly is patent nonsense, even for the French.
I would have thought you could have more influence on the tone of the debate on the Dope than on Rush Limbaugh, who I doubt has ever heard of the SDMB, let alone reads anything on it. YMMV.
OTOH, the only people I know of on the SDMB who listen to Rush Limbaugh are lefties looking for some reason to take offense. No harm in that. Just keep in mind that when one of the Usual Suspects [ul][li]posts a misleading thread title[]doctors the transcript to make it look as bad as possible []misrepresents and distorts what he actually said, and then [*]gets a lot of hoo-hah about how dreadful Rush Limbaugh is because he does exactly the same things[/ul] one should not be surprised if there is some slackness in the applause for one’s high-mindedness.[/li]
Regards,
Shodan
I think I’ve identified much of your problem. It’s that your thinking really is incredibly sloppy.
Two huge errors of thought jump out from this. The first is the way you talk about “liberalism”, as though it is a self-aware entity that makes choices, acts, and functions like a person. Liberalism is a label applied to certain kinds of ideas, and not even a consistent one, as my list of definitions readily demonstrates. So how does “liberalism”
-do good?
-be content or not
force remedies?
care about consequences?
put on the brakes?
And a host of other verbs you used? Verbs are actions, a label cannot act.
Secondly, you have apparently equated this phantom creature you call “liberalism” with socialism and/or communism, when it is neither. ( Of course, as we’ve just reviewed, it’s nothing at all as far as the way you describe it, but looking at it as what it is generally understood to be, a political point of view.) This is made most obvious by the last paragraph, which is applicable to communism.
I am a capitalist and a liberal. So is Warren Buffet. They can and do co-exist within one person’s belief system. They can co-exist as the framework of a government and political system.
And this does not even address the simple inaccuracies about liberal ideals, (which, again, come in many flavors. So it’s kind of meaningless to say that “liberalism” or even “all liberals” think any single way about anything.) such as your (tired, false) statement that liberals champion individual freedom yet wants society to provide for everyone and make us all serfs. That’s just… goo. Meaningless. Untrue. Distorted. IN fact, nothing you said in the above passage about “liberalism” applies to my political point of view. I doubt it genuinely applies to many people’s, seeing as how it is simply a dismissive pile of goo.
Anyway, all of this is just your way of dodging the fact that Rush equated liberals with rapists and murderers and in your attempt to deny it you confirmed it. But it does tell us why you felt the need to do that, though.