Facts Are Stupid Things

I was recently driving back to Colorado from Iowa when somewhere west of North Platte, Nebraska, I exhausted my musical choices and could no longer stand to listen to the incessant hum of dialogue and action seeping from the movies my son was enjoying in the backseat. I searched in vain for an FM radio station that was not playing both kinds of music - country and western - but I was unsuccessful, so I switched to AM. And there in crystal clear signal was the grating voice of Rush Limbaugh. I needed a good laugh, so I kept listening.

He lectured his audience on history that only happens in his mind, claimed he knew where his private jet was at all times, bragged about burning as much jet fuel as possible on Earth Day and beat an inappropriate joke into the ground when a female caller made a slip while trying to say she was going to pop the cork on some champagne because Senator Arlen Specter had left the Republican party.

What he said after that truly frightened me. He said that he was glad Arlen Specter had left because the Republicans needed to get all of the liberal Republicans out of the party. He went on to say, "If this is to be the order of the day, next to go could be Senator McCain and his daughter, Meghan. Get them officially moved over and it just facilitates reality."

In his reality, the conservative ideology is infallible. Moreover, someone cannot be fiscally conservative and socially liberal because then they are betraying the ideology. Just today, there was a story written about how Jeb Bush thinks that Republican party needs to begin looking forward and stop waxing nostalgic about Reagan. Limbaugh, commenting about this story, said "[W]hen you see anybody...when somebody says you gotta leave Reagan behind, the era of Reagan is over, however it's said, it is said by Republican politicians who don't believe in conservatism, pure and simple. They don't believe in conservatism, they believe in something else. They can't explain what they believe in, but they believe in something else."

This disconnect with reality is what scares me. Reagan may have believed in conservatism, but he didn't practice it at all. He raised taxes every year he was in office (13 total take hikes) except his first and last year and he tripled our debt. Moreover, he may have prolonged the Cold War by arming our country to the teeth when it was obvious that the Soviet Union was teetering, he was responsible for selling arms to South American guerrilla fighters and supplying weapons to both sides of the Iran-Iraq War, he ignored the AIDS crisis, he stiffened laws on minor drug offenses that has overpopulated and bankrupt our prison system, and he did nothing on the energy front despite the tell-tale signs that burning fossil fuels was damaging to the environment and that our oil addiction made us vulnerable.

Despite the evidence, Reagan is celebrated by the Republicans. The celebration of his presidency relies on one solitary fact: he cut income taxes on the top earners from 70% to 28%. In Rush's reality, this is the only thing that matters. You can add on the pro-life sentiment, the right to have a gun, etc., but it's all dollars and sense - his dollars and his followers' lack of sense.

The title quote come from the

40th President of the United States of America.