In the wake of slut-gate, David Axelrod has has to put off an appearance on Bill Maher’s HBO show and “comedian Louis CK recently pulled out as entertainer at the Radio-TV Correspondents Dinner.” In short, the standard some of the left set up to destroy Rush has backfired.
Some might say that Rush himself laid the trap, but Ann Althouse disagrees:
Rush Limbaugh is a media genius, but I don’t think he’s enough of a genius to have laid this trap. It has worked as a trap. By going too far, on one well-chosen occasion — picking on a young woman about sex — he got an immense reaction from Rush haters, who smelled blood and imagined that they could use this incident to drive Rush off the air. In making their strong argument, Rush’s opponents articulated a rule demonizing those who use offensive language to describe a woman.
Pretty much sums it up. Read the whole thing.
Those who sought to drive Rush off the air were not yet accustomed to the power of a fully armed and operational right-wing blogosphere, able to track down and publicize. left-wing name-calling with just a few keystrokes and compare it to Rush’s language (for which the talker has since apologized) that had caused fainting fits in news rooms and Democratic offices.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from martial arts, it’s that you can exploit a situation without having planned it. Good fighters wait for the fight to come to them, then they jump in and improvise. It only looks like they’re geniuses who somehow planned it.
Dan,
It’s not Palpitine, its Karma.
It certainly helped that the left stood inside their glass houses and began chucking rocks every which-a-way.
This is precisely why libs can’t be trusted to fight for anything, let alone “social justice” *cough*.
They keep shooting their own people.
Tis mid-March, one has to wonder how long Limbaugh will bite his tongue. November is not as close as it seems.
If V’s ‘republican establishment’ encourages Newt to drop out, what would they consider if someone like Rush pushes the envelope?
It took me a few minutes, but the familiarity of the blog post title finally hit me. Good chuckle to start my day. Thanks, Dan!
Some time ago, Rush inaugurated what he calls “the media tweak of the day.” This is always a tempting morsel that he expects the media to scoop up and harangue about without either knowing or trying to understand the context. In that sense, it is a “trap.”
In the Fluke=slut/prostitute case, Rush went too far and had to pull back. His apology (which the hard left will not accept) was for using the liberal’s crappy low road rather than sticking to much higher standards. That apology was, in my opinion, a sort of trap.
Rush knows that you can not win playing defense, so he apologized by playing offense.
Sure enough, the hard left made a big deal of the apology and, predictably, came kicking and screaming at Rush because they thought they had him on the ropes and they wanted to batter his corpse. Rush knew they would do that. They always do. That is not just the M.O. of the left, it is deep in their moral relativism and their DNA.
So, as ILC so aptly pointed out about holding the offense in martial arts, Rush inadvertently was handed a pickle and he used it to smack the left a good one.
That is his genius. If you find yourself under siege, play on their weakness and lure them onto your chosen battlefield. The pitchfork and torches crowd is too busy ranting and frothing to know where they are headed or to even understand what hit them when they are sitting stunned after the blow that takes them off their feet.
Louis C.K. actually took the liberal left to task recently for overblowing the Tracy Morgan affair and not using it to start a dialogue, rather just grind an axe.
My Dad always used to say, ‘Give a man enough rope and he’ll hang himself.’
So, what can be learned from this swinging corps?
Instead of all this pissing and moaning, and this ’woe is me’ attitude over the fact that the MSM and liberal left don’t treat conservatives fairly; we need to use that fact against them. This isn’t fighting fire with fire, it’s recognizing our opponents weaknesses and exploiting them.
The hypocrisy by the left angers me. When the President spoke at the memorial for those who died at the attempt on Congresswoman Gabby Giffords in Tucson and said, ¨the rhetoric needs to be toned down.¨ Somehow or another the left doesn´t think that it applies to them. Even the The President´s class warfare has been insulting and inflammatory.
What the Left will never understand is that we’ve been with Rush through wonderful and terrible times, so we have a bond with him that people like Chris Matthews or Rachel Maddog can never match. Remember that these Dems are the ones who think “people are stupid.”