Rush Limbaugh, conservative radio barker and alleged human being, has turned his cretinous gaze towards ‘public sector jobs,’ and in his never-ending campaign to undermine the United States government, threw police, fire-fighters and (the mortal enemies of the conservative mind) teachers under the bus. Their sin? They don’t “grow the economy,” one of the favorite recurring word jumbles that make up the wretched, context-free alphabet soup he regurgitates into the mouths of his listeners on a daily basis.
If I had to boil Rush Limbaugh down my kitchen would be filled with oxycontin-scented toxic fumes to a simple formula that described his rhetoric it would be this:
Rush Limbaugh is to ‘Obama is a Marxist,’ what Donald Trump is to ‘Obama is a foreigner.’
That’s really all you need to know about the Limbaugh model over the last three years. Just as Trump and the rest of the Birther squad find ‘clues’ that bolster their asinine narrative in everything they see, Rush can always find a way to twist innocuous realities into scathing indictments of socialist totalitarianism.
Limbaugh’s latest gaze into the red tea-leaves of the Obama administration came after watching (or having a flunky describe to him) a David Axelrod interview on CNN Sunday. Axelrod has been a Senior Advisor in the Obama Administration, as well as the Clinton Administration (you know the one that had the surplus), and was talking job creation, and how police, fire, and teaching jobs, are all good middle-class jobs.
You may not see anything inherently wrong with that idea, and that’s why you’re you, and not the firebrand darling of the mouth-breathing set.
Because if you were, you’d know how to look at that idea the (far) right way. From Rush’s point of view (and to get that point of view you to contort yourself in ways that would seem impossible for a man with Rush’s health problems and body type), those are private sector jobs. They don’t “grow the economy,” in fact, just the opposite:
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teaching jobs, firemen, policemen — they are all paid for with money out of the private sector. They are paid for with tax revenue from citizens. They cut into the amount of money left for private sector. They don’t grow the number of private sector jobs, they reduce them.
Those bastards! It’s like they’re stealing our money! He goes on to explain in fallacy-ridden detail how David Axelrod thinks ‘fire-fighters are good,’ to mean ‘Obama wants to turn America into the U.S.S.R. Which, I suppose if you’re one of his listeners is as logical as any number of other things they’ve heard, but didn’t understand. Like dogs, they respond more to inflection more than actual words; they know when Rush wants them to be angry, or roll over, or play (brain) dead.
Of course none of it makes any sense, but it’s the one-note narrative that we’ve all come to expect from Limbaugh. In fact, if I had to strip Rush Limbaugh down I’d gouge out my eyes with a shrimp fork to his essential rhetoric style; it’s that he takes a simple, though wholly illogical, premise designed to upset his listeners, and then support it with borderline-insane leaps of reason and mash-ups of phrases they don’t understand the true meaning of. It’s a rickety wagon filled with horseshit, but if you label it fertilizer, some folks will buy it and spread it around.
Anyone with any grasp of the obvious understands how these ‘public sector jobs’ are essential to our well-being, as well as the economy in a democracy. And it is a democracy, not the soviet gulag Rush would have you believe, nor the capitalist free-for-all he and his cronies would have it be. But for any Limbaugh fans that may have accidentally stumbled onto this site, here’s a ball for you to play with here’s how those jobs help business and ind industry thrive:
Police- Or “policemen,” as Rush referred to them from his comfy 1958 world view, protect your business from robbery! That’s right, profitability goes way down, when armed robbers come and take your money and goods away. Likewise, they discourage kidnappers (who can really cut into profit margins), extortionists who would make you buy back pictures of you indulging in whatever repressed sexual desire you’re hiding from loved ones; they even keep traffic clear so your trucks can get down to the docks, and retrieve whatever Chinese manufactured items you sell.
Fire-Fighters and EMT- Again Rush calls them ‘Firemen’, because that’s a job that only boys can have. But these highly-trained public servants are also very good for the economy. You can’t sell the items your trucks brought back from the docks if your building is on fire. People just don’t like shopping in burning buildings. And if you happen to be a massively unhealthy drug addict, it’s always handy to have someone who can come over and clear the ham sandwich out of your trachea.
Teachers- This by far the most perplexing enemy-of-the-right. I get that they want to privatize everything, but it’s also clear that the conservative powers-that-be have staked their personal futures, to tomorrow’s consumers being dumb. But even the Koch Brothers need someone who can accurately count the toilet-paper rolls. So, I don’t know Rush fans, your brainless explanation is as good as mine, on this one.
Barack Obama is not a socialist. How do I know? Goldman Sachs still exists, and they’re still gaming the system in ways that probably make a more elegant argument for collectivism than Lenin ever could have. But if you’d like to learn less about how the economy, democracy, socialism, and government work, here’s a lovely non-instructural video:
Rush Limbaugh, conservative radio barker and alleged human being, has turned his cretinous gaze towards ‘public sector jobs,’ and in his never-ending campaign to undermine the United States government, threw police, fire-fighters and (the mortal enemies of the conservative mind) teachers under the bus. Their sin? They don’t “grow the economy,” one of the favorite recurring word jumbles that make up the wretched, context-free alphabet soup he regurgitates into the mouths of his listeners on a daily basis.
