Eric Boehlert, Media Matters: Limbaugh And The Right-Wing Nervous Breakdown

[highplainsdem]

http://mediamatters.org/blog/201203050003

For a Republican Party already suffering from a yawning gender gap, Limbaugh's hijacking of the news cycle last week must have been unwelcome news. But this is what happens when Republicans sponsor an irresponsible media Noise Machine that's designed to offend and attack and is designed to dehumanize its political enemies. This is what happens when the wheels fall off in spectacular fashion, like Limbaugh spending three days smearing, by name, a Georgetown University Law School student as greedy nymphomaniac having so much sex "it's amazing she can still walk."

-snip-

The truth is the conservative movement in America has become a media-based one, delegating an absurd amount of influence to bloggers, cable channels and talk show hosts. In turn, that movement suffered a collective collapse last week. Incapable of self-reflection, player after player, including those at Fox News, rushed forward to condemn the law student and/or to insist the AM talker had done nothing wrong by, A) insulting the young woman, B) mocking her parents C) demanding she post videos of herself having sex online, and D) suggesting she was using condoms when she was in elementary school.

-snipping samples of the swill from the Noise Machine-

This is nuts. (What word would you choose?) A law student testifies about contraception and within days conservative commentators are sprinting towards their microphones and keyboards in order to find ways to call her a slutty, semen demon?

That's what a nervous breakdown looks like and that's what has been broadcast across AM talk radio, Fox News and the Internet since last Wednesday.

-snip-

Devastating critique by Boehlert of the Republican Party's "Faustian bargain with the right-wing Noise Machine," which the GOP is powerless to shut off, even when it's having a nervous breakdown that's a disaster for the GOP politically.

[highplainsdem]

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