…just might kill you! Film at 11.
I just listened to about a half-hour of Rush Limbaugh stammering through his addled haze about how the recovery bill is actually a “porkulus” bill. After a lot of fake hemming and hawing about whether he should proceed, he decided to list some of the spending items in the bill. Nothing alarming or ridiculous — lots of spending on renovations to federal buildings, some green transportation provisions, and so on. All of the items he listed create jobs and save the government money in the long run.
But he and Hannity and other far-right crazy people have taken to listing these items with an outraged tone of voice that’s entirely incongruous with the content of what they’re reading. Put another way, Limbaugh could recite the names of childhood leukemia victims and, in that tone of voice, the list would sound like a roster of criminally insane rapists.
A staple of modern media satire involves taking mundane, unremarkable video footage, desaturating the colors and adding scary music to make the subject of the footage look evil or sinister — like a news magazine show or prison documentary. Only, Limbaugh isn’t doing this for satirical purposes. He’s doing it in order to deliberately deceive his dittoheaded listeners.
The far-right will never grasp or accept the fact that government spending stimulates growth — double the growth that’s created by tax cuts. I mean, the government could allocate funds to tear down the Washington Monument and, in its place, rebuild four replica monuments made out of ham, and such spending would create jobs and stimulate the economy. Likewise, modernizing the Bureau of Indian Affairs building with green technology succeeds in creating jobs, and it reduces government spending over time.
How is that so awful? Oh yeah, because Limbaugh read it aloud in a scary voice.
