The Evil Twins
A few days ago, Steve Alber asked in an e-mail why we hadn’t posted our revulsion over Pat Robertson’s and Rush Limbaugh’s characteristically creepy opposition to helping Haitians after their earthquake. We asked if he would take on that task himself, and lo and behold, he’s done just that – as follows:
*
In a world populated by the likes of James Inhofe, Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes, Carl Rove and their simian ilk, it’s not surprising to find a lot of ideas that make you shake your head and regret that abortion isn’t retroactive. But every now and then, one of more of their number does something that’s so offensive and so egregious I figure I have to comment or I can’t live with myself.
And thus it is with les freres ideologique Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson
Their tandem performances after last week’s Haitian earthquake left me positively slack-jawed in the wake of their stupidity, cynicism and sheer unvarnished hatred. Limbaugh started the ball rolling by telling his cadre of prognathic-jawed baboons that, “We’ve already donated to Haiti … it’s called the Federal Income Tax …” and that “… any donations sent to the Red Cross through the White House will end up in Democratic campaign coffers.” Then I heard Robertson explain the earthquake thus: “It’s what Haitians get for making a pact with the devil. True story.”
After I picked myself up from the floor, lamenting that these two – what are they? people? – were actually possessed of human DNA, I decided to go through a little analytical exercise to determine who was worse. (It’s what you do on a cold winter night when you can’t help other people who are being crushed to death by slabs of collapsing concrete.) And it occurred to me in a flash that, Robertson was far and away the most offensive, and here’s why.
Rush Limbaugh is a professional hate machine.
He’s a drug-addled gas bag with sinister motives, a low IQ, greed beyond avarice, and a questionable education who’s found a way to parlay hatred into $33 million a year. His success is more a comment on our society that it is on him, so the venomous rubbish that drips from his lips is pretty much beyond his control. (This doesn’t excuse his cretinous mouthings, it just explains them.) Blaming him for being an asshole is sort of like blaming someone with a cold for sneezing.
But Pat Robertson? Ah! … he’s another story.
Pat is smart, really smart. After all, the man graduated Magna Cum Laude from Washington & Lee, then got a law degree from Yale. In fact, he’s so smart that he couldn’t possibly believe a word he says because he knows it’s bullshit; and thus, he’s turned hypocrisy into an art form – and a well-paid art form at that. Which makes his pronouncement about the “pact with the devil” so cynical and such an obvious act of pimping to the people who send him money, that in a truly civil society, he’d be drawn and quartered. Except he says things like that because he knows that the only thing that will happen is that his coffers will swell. So he can spend the rest of his life propagating more of the out-and-out claptrap that’s already made him a multi-millionaire at the expense of the stupid, the lonely and the desperate. To quote Jim Murray, the late Los Angeles Times sportswriter, “You can’t keep a bad man down.”
To sum up, Limbaugh’s hatred is drug-induced reflex; Robertson’s is calculated. Advantage: Robertson … and isn’t it a fucking shame?
Lost in all this, of course, is the real-world suffering of millions of people who would simply like to have gotten on with their lives, and who did nothing to provoke nature’s scourge. And this, in the final analysis, is Limbaugh’s and Robertson’s greatest legacy of hate: forcing the media – and you and me – to focus on the irrelevant instead of the victims.
- Steve Alber
1 Comment »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
Bravo! I’ll nominate this commentary for a Pulitzer and possibly a Nobel in herpetology.
Comment by Al — January 19, 2010 @ 10:24 pm