Even More Assholery

AWESOME!

Some prominent members of the Republican noise factory are getting pissy and bitching about Willard's prospects in November. Limbaugh, the stain in America's underwear, is going out on limb, predicting that a Grand OLD Party defeat in November will open the door for the creation of a new, ultra-right-wing third party, presumably made up of voters who crave the tea party domestic agenda and the George W. Bush foreign policy.

Limbaugh is full of shit, granted, but this idea really appeals to me. I want to finish out my life in a state of bliss, and nothing would help me find peace of mind like a massive schism in the GOP. Let the regular conservatives and the lunatic fringe divide their share of the pie, maybe 25 percent each, or 30-20, something along those lines, but neither faction near a majority. How cool would THAT be?

20,000,000 ? Maybe not.

For years, I've been assuming that Rush Limbaugh's radio audience is twenty million listeners. This is the number that El Rushbo himself claims when he's bragging about his power and influence. But it's possible that the actual daily audience is far smaller. Wouldn't it be a kick in the head if Limbaugh's audience wasn't really much larger than Rachel Maddow's ? And Republican officials had been groveling at Limbaugh's feet all these years for no good reason ?

Sounds from the slop

Sometimes the fat fucking pig should just oink and leave it at that... but don't count on it. Limbaugh needs to pray that I'm never in charge of the country, because if I was, his personal income tax rate would be as confiscatory as I could make it, maybe 99.999 percent. And I'm still wondering if I'll live long enough to see the day when any Republican in elected office will have enough courage to admit that worthless motherfucker is a disgrace.

Added 6:20 pm: The fat slob has apparently posted an apology to Fluke on his website. The so-called apology sounds like a "bare minimum" act of contrition required to give his radio sponsors a little cover and keep them from dumping his show.  

Fat Boy and Women

I fell into one of my dark moods while driving this morning and switched the AM radio station to Lardass Limbaugh's program, just in time to hear fat boy's attempted wisecrack about the women with harassment complaints against Sugar Cain wanting to "synchronize their menstrual periods."

It's obvious that Limbaugh hates women. It doesn't require a degree in psychology to figure out the reasons why. I've lost track of his marriages and divorces, but his failure rate proves that even women who marry for money will only tolerate so much before they're ready to move out.

Ratings

Finally some good news ? According to this article, ratings indicate that audience interest in hardcore right-wing talk shows may be declining. Of all the things I can live without, AM talk radio is near the top of the list. Before retirement, I spent a lot of time in my car, commuting between home and office, between offices, and to out-of-town training and meetings. I usually passed the time listening to right-wing radio programs, particularly Limbaugh's. The exposure was mildly educational in terms of clarifying what modern conservatism was really all about, and I continued to tune in from time to time after I retired.

During the latter years of the G.W. Bush administration I decided that too much talk radio would eventually rot my mind, so I stopped listening other than short (usually under a minute) snips while I was driving to the store. After hearing hundreds of hours over most of a decade, I finally realized the same five or six messages were being constantly repeated. Same tired old diatribes, day after day, with only the names (Clinton, Obama, Daschle, Reid, Pelosi, etc) changing. Frankly, who needs this shit ?

Radio Days, Zogby, and Rasmussen

In the 1990s, during the last decade of my career in the public welfare business, I supervised several counties and my duties required me to spend a lot of time on the highway, driving from office to office. That was when I started listening to AM talk radio, since those were the signals I could pick up clearly no matter where I was on my route. I'd listen to the sports talk station during football season, and the so-called "news talk" station the rest of the time. In those days, the afternoon news talk lineup was Rush Limbaugh, followed by Dr. Laura Schlessinger. Sean Hannity hadn't yet surfaced as a national AM radio hotshot.

Limbaugh, America's anal cyst, devoted nearly every minute (that I was listening) to tirades about the latest Clinton administration scandal or screwup. During those years, I first heard about the Zogby Poll. Rush liked to hype the latest Zogby poll results because they almost invariably differed from the better-known national polls, e.g., Gallup, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, New York Times, or Washington Post.

In the Zogby poll, Clinton's job approval rating was usually lower than in concurrent national polls, and other measurements (at least those discussed on Limbaugh's show) always seemed to support broad public approval of the agenda Limbaugh and the conservatives were pushing at the moment. In simple terms, a Zogby poll was almost always bad news for Clinton and the Democrats, good news for Rush and the GOP.

Back then I didn't have a computer at home, and the one in my office wasn't connected to the internet. Even if it had been, I wouldn't have had time to use it. I almost never watched news programs on TV, so whatever I knew about national affairs came from the local newspaper, a magazine like Time or Newsweek, and Limbaugh's AM radio program. In the 90s, I didn't consider every minute spent listening to Rush as a minute of precious life wasted since I was out in the car anyway and it was either him or C&W music.

After retirement, I continued listening to AM radio some afternoons, mostly from force of habit and not as regularly as during the driving days. In 2001, I bought my first Mac and gradually began to follow current events on the web. Bush replaced Clinton, and the Zogby Poll results began to be less favorable to the GOP for some reason. Limbaugh started trying to discredit Zogby after years of claiming his results were the only ones that were reliable and accurate.

It looks like the right-wingers have found a new poll refuge. The Rasmussen Report has replaced Zogby as the survey that's near-and-dear to the hearts of every hardcore conservative in America. If things look bad for Obama in Gallup, count on them looking worse for him in Rasmussen. Any time a conservative is dancing joyfully, the glee probably originated with that day's daily tracking poll numbers. I don't know if Zogby had an agenda in the nineties or if Rasmussen has one now, but polling organizations can't buy the kind of good publicity that accompanies reports of a Democratic presidency going down the crapper.