I Challenge Rush Limbaugh to a Battle, Man to Man

I’m not done with Klavan.

He called me and people like me “lowdown, yellow-bellied, lily-livered intellectual coward(s)” because we don’t make a habit of tuning into a bald fat loudmouth who makes millions appealing to hatred and ignorance. Real tough guy.

Personally, I don’t waste my time listening to fat loudmouthed drug-addicts.  I write books and articles and do a lot of thinking for the very people who are apparently too mesmerized with bullshit to think for themselves.

Unfortunately, I write the books that Palin’s and Limbaugh’s fans actually need to read, but they don’t because the wingers have convinced  “real Americans” that the left is full of elitist snobs.

There’s an element of truth to that, a potentially fatal shortcoming of the left that wingers will certainly exploit, perhaps all the way to a Palin- occupied White House. Scary shit, which is why the left needs to get its act together now before it’s too late.

Too late for what? In the post –W. era, Republicans will inch ever closer to the party of American fascism, and that frightening prospect is all the more probable with Palin’s pretty face as an appealing front.

Obama’s a smart guy, but that’s part of the problem.  Working-class folks in this country don’t trust smart guys and gals, particularly ones from Ivy League colleges, no matter their race or color. 

It’s a class thing. Somehow, Republicans have figured out how to convince working-class people that their Ivy Leaguers don’t stink as much as Democratic Ivy Leaguers. Republican smart guys have perfected those down-home southern drawls, and they’ve got the holier-than-thou religious thing down cold.

Palin’s not an Ivy Leaguer -- far from it. She can’t speak in complete sentences, or utter a clear thought. So, she doesn’t have to dumb herself down.  She’s the real  deal – a little bit country, pretty as a picture, and not too smart.  A gen-u-ine be-speckled clothes-horse rogue.

The dangerously weird thing is in this worm hole of American politics, the more confused Sarah is, the more her fans love her for being the anti-elitist babe that she is, blaming all her missteps on the mean old media when journalists simply quote her verbatim.

For the left, it’s time to take the gloves off. It’s time to quit fretting about which Ivy League college the kids should apply to for Early Decision, and take the country’s future to the streets. Remember how that works?

I’ll do my part. I could keep writing and thinking, but it’s increasingly clear that clarity of thought and well reasoned arguments are a f------ waste of time in postmodern America where idiocracy is the new badge of honor.

Instead, I'll put my own slant on Klavan’s challenge. I’ll challenge Limbaugh to a battle, man against man.  No guns, no weapons of mass destruction, no robotic drones, none of the crap the wimpy egg-headed, blow-hard right wingers hide behind when puffing out their fat beer-gutted bellies and oinking their slobbering piggish drivel.

If he’s afraid to battle me, then we can simply play a game. I understand the dude likes to golf. I’m also a golfer. A very serious golfer.  I challenge him and his Cuban cigar to an 18-hole match-play event.   I walk when I play golf. Walking is part of the game. Golfers who ride those Disneyland rides called golf carts are lazy cheaters. Let’s see, does anybody really think Rush Limbaugh is fit enough to walk his golf courses? No freaking way. 

Our game will be straight up, no strokes, man to man.  That is, no handicaps allowed.  As a conservative who hates welfare, food stamps, a public health-care plan, and other social programs for the poor, aged, sick and weak,  I have no doubt Rush would agree with me that taking or giving strokes is golf’s version of a government hand-out, a communist plot.

Bring your A-game, dude. I’m quite sure you swing a golf club like you swing your political mouth: Way over the top, producing thinly hit shots that spin way right.

Golf not your deal? Then let’s play some football. You must love watching football, right? It’s the All American spectacle for countless uncoordinated guys trying to prove their manhood.

Sorry, Rush. We’re not going to watch. Unlike Chauncey Gardner, I don’t like to watch. We'll throw the football and we'll see who can throw it like a real man. (By the way, I’m a former high school quarterback.)

I have no doubt that you throw like a girl.

The Holy Rush

Several months ago a guy named Andrew Klavan wrote an article in the Los Angeles Times  challenging liberals to listen to Rush Limbaugh.

Because this Klavan dude concluded that I -- and people like me -- refused to listen to Limbaugh, then I was “a lowdown, yellow-bellied, lily-livered intellectual coward.”

Klavan went on, “You're terrified of finding out he makes more sense than you do.”

Bullshit. I’m not afraid of Limbaugh in any way, shape, or form. 

But I’m terrified, all right.

Terrified of stupid people who haven’t the guts or the intellectual capability of thinking for themselves.

Terrified of what happens to innocent people when stupid people don’t have the guts to think for themselves.

Why should I be terrified? Why, even, should Rush's own flock be terrified?

Well, Klavan, I listened to Limbaugh's most recent rant about the global warming “hoax," and this is what Rush said, word for word:

“Now, the bottom line is, the whole man-made global warming movement is a fraud. It is a hoax. It's (sic) made-up lies. I have known this since the beginning of the movement. I'm the one who said that militant environmentalism is the home of displaced communists after the Berlin Wall came down. Now, scientists cannot rely on common sense. So the anti-global warmers have to go out there and get their own science to counter the science that the pro-global warming crowd is using, and they're making it up. I instinctively know this for two reasons. One -- and I've explained in great detail before so I'm not going to do it again because of time constraints -- is I believe in God.”

If any ViciousLiberal readers can make sense of this illogical, grammatically-challenged rant, I would like to know.

This is what I hear: Your 20-year-old daughter studying environmental science in college is a communist. Global warming is a lie because scientists don’t have any common sense. And Limbaugh knows, and has always known, that global warming is a physical and metaphysical impossibility because, well, he believes in God.

When all else fails, when your arguments and facts add up to a big fat bald-headed zilch, when you need to go back to sixth grade to get a lesson in proper grammar so that your listeners can decipher your babble and discern the truth from the lies, then the perhaps the best possible argument for the intellectually lazy and stupid is to invoke the God card.

Because God created humans it’s impossible that humans would ever “destroy the planet,” says the bald, fat man.

Yeah, right.

I’ll buy that -- and so will the six million Jews whom the Nazis rounded up on cattle cars, shipped to concentration camps, robbed of their watches, rings and money, then murdered in Nazi gas chambers.

If I were to borrow from Limbaugh’s pathetically immoral playbook, I might say that it’s impossible that the Nazis did those things. How do I know? Because I, Rush Jr., believe in God.

God’s a good guy. I’m a real All-American good guy. Real Americans like me don’t do bad things. Unreal, lefty dudes do bad things because they're godless. Rush says so. How do I know? I believe in God, and I believe in Rush. It's like the Holy Trinity. The right-wing version. Call this one the "Holy Rush."

All together now, genuflect: the Holy Rush.

Repeat ten times, take your Soma, and go to sleep. 

Welcome to the Brave New World.

Allow America to be America Once Again

Reaganism's second piece of handiwork was to foster the illusion that the most resourceful, richest nation on the planet couldn’t afford to enact policies that helped real people.

Reagan and his henchmen accomplished this by slashing taxes for the wealthy, starving government domestic programs of revenue, and raising military spending to unprecedented levels -- and then blaming everyone but themselves for the red ink.

These anti-government, anti-democratic tactics worked beautifully.

Americans grew to mistrust in the public’s ability and responsibility to provide a practical public response to public problems.

Americans were brainwashed into believing that the United States was on the brink of financial calamity unless the “tax and spenders” in Congress were booted from office.

The great irony is that we suffered a financial calamity, but it wasn't caused by the "tax and spenders." Like virtually all America's financial calamities in the past, the most recent one was caused by the irrational exuberance of capitalists run amok and the failure of financial markets to self-correct.

Despite the financial meltdown and the abject failure of unregulated capitalism, Reagan's anti-government ideology lives on.

Reminiscent of good old Harry and Louise back in the early 1990's, we have the idiotic statements of Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, who says with a straight face that health care reform isn’t really about health care but about Barack Obama's "wish for a government takeover of our nation’s health care."

Even as our healthcare system is on the brink of crumbling, the same forces for private gain at the expense of the public good have convinced many Americans that a public option for health insurance would destroy the country and turn us into some sort of socialistic freak show.

DeMint’s diatribe of fear has apparently found a receptive audience in his largely poor and rural state of South Carolina, where according to the New York Times the unemployment is 12 percent and 16 percent of the people don’t have health insurance.

“If (Obama’s) agenda is not stopped at health care, Mr. DeMint warned at a town-hall-style meeting in Greenville, “he’ll continue to spend and borrow this country into oblivion.”

Statements like this and the poor people who believe them are why we must place a high value on education and on the ability of citizens to think critically, knowing how to detect demogoguery from facts and evidence.

Stupid people apparently are unaware that tens of millions of Americans already have the option of choosing a public health plan, in the form of Medicare and other government heath programs.

These health insurance programs for the poor and elderly were born from the Great Society era when progressive ideals and the belief in the power of government to do good for people weren’t considered pornographic ideas.

If, as DeMint would have it, reforming a broken health care system is simply another government conspiracy to tax and spend the country into oblivion, then we can only imagine the holocaust that would ensue from a recent Senate bill to provide a bit of financial support to family caregivers of disabled vets returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Senate leaders had hoped for unanimous passage of the legislation.  What they didn't realize, however, was the anti-government hard-on of one Oklahoma Republican named Tom Coburn, who put a hold on the legislation.  "I sent a letter to every senator at the beginning of this Congress that if you put a bill on the floor and you're going to authorize new spending, you better be putting something with it that's going to decrease the spending to pay for that," Coburn said.  "And so therefore thats the reason for the hold."

Like DeMint's whining about the possibility of a government health plan to compete with private insurers, Coburn's pig-headedness comes right from the Reagan playbook.  Funny thing about Coburn. This guy's a physician, who has forgotten about his medical school training to do no harm to another human being.  Another funny thing about Coburn. He had no problem authorizing trillions of dollars for the American military to invade and occupy Iraq.

Such is the beauty of the right-wing demogogue. Conservative principles about thriftiness are well and good but only when they're politically convenient.

The most important question now before our political system is this:

Will President Obama be a dangerous man for the status quo? Or will he be timid, allowing the fear-mongers, the DeMints,  the Coburns, the Palins, and the Limbaughs to keep us living in fear?

I’ll give Reagan this: He was a good communicator.

Remember that great speech of his when exhorted Michael Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall?

Let's exhort President Obama to tear down the gates of fear, and allow America to be America once again.

The Real Legacy of Ronald Reagan

Programs like TRIO, which I wrote about last time, came out of an era in American society that was far more hopeful and egalitarian than the pessimistic and cynical values we have been saddled with nowadays.

They came in an era when we believed that enlightened government was our last best hope for progressive change.

These programs were born from the idea that government could provide disadvantaged young people the tools, resources and information to help themselves.

It wasn’t about government throwing money at the problem of underachievement, tossing the dice, crossing our fingers, and hoping for the best.

It was about building a bridge of opportunity, providing sufficient amounts of cultural capital to the children who were born unlucky, so they might walk across that bridge of opportunity on their own two feet.

But then something happened to this great idea, this notion of progressive government providing bridges of opportunity to people who were born unlucky.

In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan whacked this great notion, declaring that government was the cause of all America’s social and economic ills.

Reaganism worshipped at the alter of unfettered free markets, and created new bridges of opportunity.

Mind you, these new opportunities were not for the disadvantaged; Reagan built them for the rich.

Since the 1980s the United States has suffered through a Dark Age for progressive policies that would actually help the lives of ordinary people.

While programs such as TRIO have struggled to stay afloat, we got the unchecked greed of American capitalism getting a free ride and a free lunch off the American taxpayer.

You know what happened. Here’s just a partial list of what we got:

• A new Gilded Age, in which the spectacularly wealthy became even more spectacularly wealthy, while the standards of living for ordinary people stagnated.
• A level of wealth and income inequality between rich and not rich that Americans haven't seen since before the Great Depression.
•  Enron, the quintessential case of corporate greed running amok while regulators couldn’t be bothered to do their jobs.
• Regulators who were religiously opposed to government intervention, including the Federal Reserve Board, run by a bunch of zealous economists who fervently believed in the power of free markets to self-correct and self-regulate.
• A spectacular failure of the banking system not seen since the Great Depression, requiring at least a trillion dollars of taxpayer money to bail out insolvent financial institutions, so greedy for short-term profits that they couldn’t be bothered to make prudent loans.
• An American education system  content to serve the interests the elite to the exclusion of ordinary people, because, after all, that’s the mentality which pervaded nearly all facets of public life.
  

What is the real legacy of Ronald Reagan?

His real gift to the American people -- or, perhaps his curse to the American people -- has been a cynical apathy that is continuing to tear this democracy a part.

Beyond the sunny rhetoric and jovial personality, Reagan’s world view shattered the very notion of Government of the People, the fundamental democratic idea, from the European Enlightenment to the founding of the United States of America, that government and the people are one in the same entity.

For the private interests who would profit off the anti-democratic epoch, the Reagan enterprise was the cleverest of counter-revolutions.

This counter-revolution came from within the halls of the very government we elected to serve the people, staffed by functionaries who hated the very idea of government.

Their first mission was ideological: to characterize government as a malevolent force, like an alien agent that has infiltrated the nation, working like mad to bring harm to the people.

Reagan, the former anti-communist crusader, crusaded against his own American government, thus paving the way for corporate profiteers and their ideologists on the political right, operating under the phony guise of populism, to assume their place in the new Gilded Age.

Next time: Allow America to be America once again.

Born to the Wrong Parents

It’s part of our national character to believe that any one of us can, as the saying goes, “grow up to be president someday.”

The historic election of Barack Obama as our first African American president seems to reinforce that notion.

But not all America children can grow up to be president. The deck is stacked and the cards have been dealt.

Not to be coy, but some babies made the mistake of choosing the wrong parents, born on the wrong side of the class divide.

Is one’s class at birth one’s destiny? Let’s hope not.

But hardheaded analysis of reality tells us that the inequalities in opportunity are far too great for any individual to overcome them on his or her own.

That’s why a collection of federally sponsored education programs known as TRIO exist, and why they must continue to exist. But a lot politicians, even many liberals, don’t get it.

Just ask Dr. Arnold Mitchem, President of the Council for Opportunity in Education, which administers the TRIO programs. Created during Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society, TRIO is a collection of three programs -- Upward Bound, Talent Search, and Student Support Services.

The basic idea behind TRIO is simple: kids born to the wrong parents need some extra support to getting on a path to college and staying on that path until they earn a bachelor's degree.

Writing in Inside Higher Education this past summer, Mitchem, the legendary advocate for low-income and disadvantaged students, warned that Obama's higher education budget foolishly places too much stock in Pell Grants while shortchanging the sorts of TRIO services that low-income students need to actually make the Pell Grants an effective expenditure of taxpayer dollars.

"Simply put," Mitchem says, "the Obama administration’s definition of student aid is far too narrow. What is desperately needed instead is a more comprehensive view of student aid that reflects the recognition that low-income and first-generation students face multiple barriers — class, cultural, informational, academic, and social — to postsecondary education, and not just a lack of funds. Merely providing financial resources through mechanisms like the Pell Grant alone will not solve the problem of getting first-generation and low-income students through college."

The counselors, teachers and other professionals who work the trenches of helping kids born to the wrong parents know these things. They see how disadvantage amounts to far more than not having enough money.

Disadvantage is also intangible. Some children, of course, are born to the right parents. These are the parents with the college degrees who teach their kids how to open their eyes to the world beyond home, school, and neighborhood.

It’s about information – who’s got it and who doesn’t. It’s about knowing the lingua franca of the well-educated citizen. It's knowing where and what Harvard is (yes, some students, however bright, don't know). It’s knowing that a community college degree comes before, not after, a Bachelor's degree. (And yes, some students don’t know this basic fact.)

These are not facts one learns in school. Schools don’t teach this stuff. Parents do, and middle-class parents and their politicians assume that all children are exposed to these facts because they were exposed to these facts.

Children born to the wrong parents don’t get this information at home. In our education system, they’re out of luck.

The Glass Bead Game

The president of the University of Chicago, Robert J. Zimmer, spoke at Columbia University on October 21st on the topic, "What Is Academic Freedom For?"

With all due respect, I can only say I’m glad I wasn’t in the audience. I would have expected more from a University of Chicago president on the subject of academic freedom. I would have expected him to actually say something, to embody the very academic freedom that he claims to hold so dearly instead of reciting the tired and abstract argument that academic freedom is a good thing that must be preserved. Why must university presidents wish to preserve a freedom that they’re afraid to exercise?

Apparently, academic freedom is what presidents of great universities put in a box and keep it on a shelf in the college’s dimly lit wood-paneled library with all the other ancient manuscripts gathering dust.

Apart from Chicago’s fifth president, the outspoken Robert Maynard Hutchins, whom Zimmer describes as “a powerful defender of academic freedom,” Zimmer suggests that, as a modern university president, he must refrain from speaking out on controversial subjects. Exercising academic freedom, he argues in all earnestness, would actually harm the cause of academic freedom.

We should be clear about what academic freedom really means at great modern universities. Academic freedom has been transformed from an idea about individual freedom to speak one’s mind into a business strategy of endowment-maximizing universities. And presidents of great universities exercise this sort of “academic freedom” with abandon.

Universities hide behind academic freedom as a constitutionally protected entitlement -- to which the U.S. Supreme Court has invariably deferred -- which has allowed universities to pick and chose the kinds of students whom the university claims best represents the cultural values of the institution.

Thus we get constitutionally protected admissions systems at elite universities that are namely all about merit, but have virtually nothing to do with genuine merit. Rather, our great modern universities use admission criteria that sort for certain kinds of individuals, typically affluent students from nice neighborhoods and well-educated families who’ve been endowed with the right tribal lineage.

That’s what academic freedom really means at the modern university, and university presidents, who depend on alumni parents to help build their endowments, will fight to the death to keep it.

But that’s not the kind of academic freedom that presidents of great universities like talk about. For his part, Zimmer describes the University of Chicago as a model of academic freedom for all great universities, an institution “where education and research are embedded in this culture of inquiry, where intellectual freedom is viewed as essential to open inquiry, and where we are open to all people and all perspectives that can stand the scrutiny of argument.”

These highfalutin words made me feel like I was re-reading Hermann Hesse’s Magister Ludi and its grandiose descriptions of the timeless and perfect Glass Bead Game. All young scholars of a certain class aspired to become the Master of the Game, ascending to Castalian society’s pinnacle of knowledge, power and prestige.

As Zimmer’s own grandiose descriptions of academic freedom go on and on, I must say, “Congratulations, Dr. Zimmer. You’ve arrived. You are Master of the Game!”

But we know the path that Hesse’s Joseph Knecht, ultimately chose. For Knecht, being the Magister Ludi wasn’t what all that it was cracked up to be. So he quit his prestigious position, despite his lifelong pursuit, and decided to go out into the messy and imperfect world where he genuinely confronted the notion of freedom -- a freedom that was not merely academic.