Journal Daniel Dvorkin's Journal: Rush Limp-baugh 7

So apparently, Rush Limbaugh was caught carrying an improperly labeled bottle of Viagra back from the Dominican Republic. Meanwhile, this column, in one of Salon's periodic attempts at nice-guy political moderation, argues that it's really not a big deal; Tim Grieve tells us, "Yeah, Limbaugh is divorced, and if we looked around long enough, we could probably find some snippet of sound in which he rails against sex outside the bonds of holy matrimony. And yeah, we could all speculate about why Limbaugh might arm himself with a bottle of Viagra for a two-day trip to the Dominican Republic. But unless there's something more at stake here -- we're not ruling it out, but we haven't heard it yet - this is one Limbaugh story that leaves us a little limp."

My letter in response appears below:

Okay, here's one for you:

"And yeah, we could all speculate about why Limbaugh might arm himself with a bottle of Viagra for a two-day trip to the Dominican Republic."

Yes, we could indeed: almost certainly, it was to make it possible for him to get his limp, flabby dick up enough to stick it in a prostitute.* When a tough-guy champion of traditional morality does something like this, it is both our right and obligation to, at the very least, point and laugh. Limbaugh may be less important than he used to be, but he is still a major voice of both the armchair hawks and the God Squad. Here we have an incident that goes to the heart of both his machismo and his moralizing. As with almost all modern American right-wingers, his is weakness that desperately masquerades as strength; we should take every opportunity to point out that the emperor has (ahem) no clothes.

*Quite possibly, an underage prostitute, in which case it isn't funny at all.

When, oh when, is the Left in this country going to realize there's a war on? And no, I'm not talking about Iraq or the War on Terra. I'm talking about the war (the only war, I might add) in which Limbaugh and his ilk are major combatants. Rush never had the guts to put his life on the line for America, but he's more than willing to actively support his beloved George III's war on his fellow citizens. And holding back from going after him for stupidities like this one is akin to the gentlemanly behavior occasionally seen in the early stages of the Civil War, in which soldiers would choose not to fire on an enemy judged to be brave enough to deserve such consideration ... until roughly the time of Shiloh, when both sides abruptly realized exactly what sort of struggle they were in. Which is why there were no gentlemen at Antietam, or Gettysburg, or Cold Harbor.

If you don't know you're in a war, and your enemy does, you're in trouble. Limbaugh may not a be a Lee or a Grant, but surely he counts as a Meade or a Jackson. And any obligation to fair play is as dead as all of them.