As you probably already know, Rush Limbaugh plumbed some new depths of loathsomeness a couple of days ago when he claimed that Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown student who’s testified in favor of mandated contraceptive coverage in healthcare plans, was a slut:
What does it say….that she essentially says that she must be paid to have sex? What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex, she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? The pimps.
Tod Kelly mulls over the larger meaning of this:
In the late 90s through the early and mid 00s, the GOP found that it could increase both number of voters and voter passion by aligning itself with a media machine that was initially created to build ratings from shock value….The GOP found, much to its delight, that by using the segment of the media that it controlled, it could continually rally its base and win elections without dealing with the traditional difficulties of having to sell superior policy proposals….In a world as hard and difficult as politics, the GOP found a way to make everything easy.
But, as Terry Pratchett has oft said, the problem with the easy way is that eventually it makes everything so damn hard.
The media business model the Right chose to embrace was based on the shock-radio model. An inherent flaw with this type of model is that while it leads to quick ratings and advertising profits, it it can be difficult to sustain. If you spend one week calling the President a liar and an idiot, it’s not going to be long before calling him a lying idiot isn’t really all that shocking. You have to continually push just a little bit more as you go, or risk being irrelevant in the shock-media world.
….Somewhere along the line, however, this model has to break down — partly because you eventually reach a ceiling where the base that believes the ever-increasingly shocking claims is small enough to make the party you’re backing politically irrelevant, and partly because to those that aren’t part of the machine or the base you begin to look increasingly out of touch. Birtherism is a fairly good example of this ceiling being reached, as are the Death Panels and Obama/Hitler youth programs. Unfortunately for the Right, however, once you tie yourself and your success so inexorably to the machine it becomes almost impossible to untangle yourself from it.
Question #1 of the day: Is this true? Is the right being hurt by its media machine these days? Question #2: Are liberals in danger of going down the same road?
