The Big Answer

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Rush Limbaugh is a guy that most people cannot help but be ambivalent about. On the one hand, he’s a good entertainer and often the only thing on the radio that one can bear, what with the ads and bad music everywhere on the dial. His program’s subject content often holds one’s attention. And he’s a great antidote for the social engineering liberals in our government, both local and national. He calls for personal responsibility and ridicules attempts to equalize wealth—these end up penalizing achievement. He criticizes entitlement mentality and the narcissism of the “me” generation.

Limbaugh rightly criticizes entitlement mentality and the narcissism of the 'me' generation

But on the other hand, he practices demagoguery, ridicules legitimate concerns about the environment and global warming and pollution, population control, feminism, pro-choice advocacy, and many other areas. He even supports smoking tobacco. One gets an ugly feeling when listening to his show that such an intelligent person should be able to think more clearly about some of the critical issues and come up with better conclusions. But no—he simply tows the conservative, orthodox line of dogma all the way up and down the line, as if he were one of their employees. One keeps waiting for him to wise up. Some of what he says is right on. The rest of it is balderdash. Go figure . . .

A fibbing Obama shown as Pinocchio exemplifies the kind of things Rush is right about

He rightly says that liberals see mankind as too dumb to solve their own problems, so these liberals conclude that we need the great progressive wisdom of Utopian social engineers and the compassionate generosity of big government programs. But to show how ludicrous such a conclusion is, he looks at the facts of how badly so many of these programs have worked, how they’ve wrecked responsibility ethics, and how many government welfare programs get only 28% of their funds to the people—the rest go to the bureaucrats. So you can see why these bureaucrats want more government programs. Benevolence indeed!

A bureaucrat

But not only liberal welfare state jobs are at stake if we drop the entitlement mentality. The social order which is supported by the “social safety net” is also at stake, or so liberals think. Rush says that liberals tend to believe that there’s an elite “we” of actual individualists who need no government help, and the rest of the common people are not bright or talented or high-born so they need government help—they need to be dependent on government programs to survive.

Rush believes in progress and improvement but not through entitlements but through self-initiative and empowerment. He likes the idea of helping people help themselves and has no problem with a Utopian life as long as it comes from the empowerment method rather than bleeding-heart liberal interference, however well-meaning.

But he has trouble describing how true empowerment can take place if liberal programs aren’t involved to do it. We’d all like to think that it will come because “they”—the Have-nots—choose it and become not just responsible but entrepreneurial. But, in reality, they’re the least likely segment of our national population to do this. So expecting this type of action from Have-nots is unrealistic.

Where Rush apparently thinks the underclass belongs if they won't suddenly act responsibly

In truth, Limbaugh can be excused for this empowerment dilemma; it’s not his fault and he didn’t cause it. There is no easy answer—in fact there’s no apparent answer at all to this problem. That is: there’s no answer until one factors in the potential of the MC movement. There is an answer to this dilemma in the MC movement. People of strong character who are highly motivated, eager to learn, and highly responsible have always done well in America. This is—by definition—the type of person MCs produce, and this is exactly the opposite of the type of person the underclass usually produces. Rush has no answers—just some good insights about what will not work. But suddenly expecting the underclass to choose to be more responsible because it is the morally right thing to do is silly—they won't do it and he knows it. It's like Rush is saying: well if they won't then the hell with them. This is not an answer. It's a failure of imagination—he needed to think outside the box. For a REAL ANSWER, see Why Register for an MC?.

Registering for MC search and match

Rush suffers from a failure of imagination—he needs to think outside the box