Palin, Hannity and Rush Sweeping The Bottom of the Barrel

Maybe Americans are finally waking up to the antics of these Three Stooges.

Palin’s supporters are not coughing up the bucks to her PAC. The queen of Mooseburger, Alaska, has lost her charm, seeming not a bad seed so much as an ignorant and inarticulate one.

Hannity has embarrassed himself by practically drooling over Palin, perhaps because he enjoyed the sound of gray matter bouncing around in her cranium, where there is so much room. But perhaps the most remarkable proof of the pretentious lightweight that he is was the way he went down before Robert Gibbs in their famous 2008 encounter, falling “like sheep” as the Native Americans said about Custer’s troops in the Great Sioux War.

But it is Limbaugh (whose name is always mispronounced as “Lim-bog” by competitor the Rev. Al Sharpton) who may be sinking most swiftly into a bog of disfavor after his bad-boy act helped Mitt Romney and the GOP lose the votes of Republican women to Obama. They were repulsed by his attacks on a 32-year-old woman studying at Georgetown named Sandra Flute, who got on a panel to talk about women’s health issues. Her appearance was not appropriate, said the man willing to imitate a bog filled with mud.

Far from boldly but with plenty of venom, Rush got rolling and called Fluke a slut and a prostitute who wanted to be paid for having sex, since she wanted insurance to cover her birth control. In what analysts call projection, Rush proclaimed that if taxpayers should pay for that then she in turn should put her erotic life on YouTube, to that he and pals could see what they were underwriting.

This cannot and should not be forgotten.

Americans too often appropriate New Testament forgiveness in order to avoid hard facts or repulsive or opportunistic performance personalities.

I always oppose Limbaugh and his ilk because they are ready and willing to say whatever will work to exploit fear and insecurity for profit. If we dismiss their belligerence as “fun,” we help them dismiss those who do not find them “funny” as too uptight.

Bigots always tend to present themselves as good boys just trying to get past the boring with some humor. They want to keep themselves interested, and they do things that are pretty desperate to escape being bored.

Stupidity is not the problem at all. The novelist Milan Kundera points out that it was once thought that stupidity could be easily cured with knowledge; that was wrong. The addiction to influential power based in untruths modernizes itself with everything else. Propaganda has become a popular melodrama, especially when driven by self-pity.

People love to feel victimized, threatened and on the verge of being destroyed.

Limbaugh, Palin and Hannity will slowly go down and away, though they will return in a smaller venue because the public always loves bad movies