I suppose I should just get it out of the way and apologize to Rush Limbaugh right off the bat, but who knows how long the line to do that is at this point?
Has there ever been anyone who has taken umbrage-taking to such hyperventilating heights? And has there ever been a group of people - Republican National Chairman Michael Steele being only the latest - who can't beat a path fast enough or prostrate themselves low enough to beg forgiveness for incurring such easily incurred wrath?
I know I should avert my eyes, but I can't help watching this horrifying spectacle, this emotional hostage-taking, that's going on between the GOP and the popular, powerful talk show king. It's the ultimate bad relationship, all neediness and desperation, what with the party beholden to the conservative talker and his ever-present threat that if Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.
The latest unhappiness to befall the House of Rush is, of course, Steele's heart-clutching, get-the-smelling-salts notion that Limbaugh is an "entertainer" who says "incendiary" things on a show that can get "ugly." Once he was revived and helped up from the fainting couch, Limbaugh took up the challenge and defended his, what? His honor? His dignity? His inalienable right never to be treated with anything less than utter, unquestioning fealty?
In what amounted to a public humiliation, Limbaugh basically told Steele that he wasn't the boss of him, or the party either, and that he needed to work behind the scenes and get off-stage because he wasn't much good out there anyway.
It was a slightly sickening spectacle: A powerful white man publicly taking a black man down a peg in such an outsized way for so minor a slight. There was the dripping disdain by which Limbaugh informed Steele that he was not the head of the Republican Party - never mind that the party leadership elected him to that post - followed by the entirely contradictory suggestion that he quit now in shame for the party's failure.
That makes a lot of sense: He's not in charge, but he's to blame.
But that's just Rush being Rush. Anyone who still manages to get outraged by what he says hasn't figured out that that's his schtick, that's what he gets paid hundreds of millions of dollars to do on 600 radio stations. But what possibly explains Steele responding by crawling over that well-worn path of humbled Republicans to apologize to Mighty Mouth?
