Jul 8, 2003

RUSH NEWSPEAK detailed and defined.

Kevin at Lean Left points out this terriffic PDF document made available by Orcincus with the help of many notable bloggers.
A very small taste:
In Limbaughland, there are still “evil” people in government but since Bushies took over they’re all liberals. Indeed, the demonization of all things liberal has always been a component of Limbaugh’s routine. But now it has become his focus. And it is in that shift, taking place in a context of rising extremism, that he has become openly divisive, and truly dangerous. Limbaugh has in recent months been one of the national leaders in the right-wing campaign to characterize opposition to President Bush’s questionable policies as “anti-American,” a campaign that is closely associated with broader conservative attacks on the underlying ideals of multiculturalism. But Limbaugh has taken the rhetoric another step by associating liberals with Nazis and other fascist regimes.

Consider, for instance, this essay, which appeared on Limbaugh’s Web site on April 17, 2003:
Little Dick Promises Fascism If Elected (There is a brief description of the Gephart Healthcare proposal here)
That’s fascism — a term thrown around by people who don’t have the intellectual chops to defend their ideas, but Gephardt’s plan has features of that discredited ideology. Merriam-Webster: “Fas • cism: A political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.”
This is a classic case of Newspeak — diminishing the range of thought (it’s telling that Limbaugh originally filed this under “Making the Complex Understandable”) by nullifying the meaning of words. Democracy, according to Limbaugh, is fascism. In fact, even as he ironically sneers at “people who don’t have the intellectual chops to defend their ideas,” he resorts to the notoriously inadequate dictionary definition of fascism in order to stand the meaning of the word on its head.
I suggest that anyone interested in debunking Limbaugh to download the PDF and keep it handy. There was a huge amount of work that went into this notable document. Thank you Orcinus.

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