Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [43]
At the front of the persecution parade, twirling his big black-bigotry baton like an enraged, overweight drum major, marched Rush Limbaugh, fulminating about the hellish state of “Obama’s America.”
Greetings, my friends. It’s Obama’s America, is it not? Obama’s America—white kids getting beat up on school buses now. I mean, you put your kids on a school bus, you expect safety, but in Obama’s America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, “Yeah, right on, right on, right on!”3
The black-on-white school bus assault must have seemed like a god-send to Limbaugh, timed as it was with a Newsweek article titled “See Baby Discriminate” about a scientific study that suggested a biological predisposition for racism—which Limbaugh interpreted as a liberal broadside against white people. He continued:
And of course, everybody says, “Oh, the white kid deserved it, he was born a racist, he’s white.” Newsweek magazine told us this. We know that white students are destroying civility on buses, white students destroying civility in classrooms all over America, white congressmen destroying civility in the House of Representatives.
By that point, Limbaugh had become so excited by his own oratory that he surrendered any remaining shred of coherence and attempted to connect Obama’s “socialist” economic polities to segregated buses:
We can redistribute students while we redistribute their parents’ wealth. I mean, we can just redistribute everything, just return the white students to their rightful place—their own bus, with bars on the windows and armed guards. They’re racists, they get what they deserve.
Make that segregated prison buses for white schoolchildren.
The hyperbole is vintage Limbaugh. His rhetorical strategy is to raise his pitch a couple of notes higher than what he really means to convey—singing a piercing F-sharp to communicate a shrill E. The exaggeration entertains his audience and infuriates liberals, which suits Limbaugh just fine. And when those high notes cross the line of acceptable public discourse, Limbaugh just shrugs and passes the offense off as “satire.” Indeed, it’s not always easy to distinguish Limbaugh’s hyperbole from parodies on The Daily Show. For instance, here is Jon Stewart’s take on the school bus assault: “Because Barack Obama is president it is now open season on white children . . . and black people are now allowed to hit them.”4
But there are two important differences between Limbaugh’s hyperbole and Stewart’s parody. One, Stewart is funny. Two, Stewart exaggerates to highlight absurdity, whereas Limbaugh exaggerates for rhetorical emphasis, like calling someone the worst person in the world when you really mean that he’s just a big fat liar.
So what did Limbaugh really mean when he suggested that Obama wanted to pack white children into “their own bus with bars on the windows?” He meant that the Obama administration discriminates against whites the way racist state governments used to discriminate against blacks. When he said, “We can redistribute their parents’ wealth,” he meant that Obama wants to take money from middle-class white people and give it to poor black people. Finally, when Limbaugh said, “They’re racists, they get what they deserve,” he meant that Obama hates whites. The message, in short: He will call you names, he will take your money, and he will persecute your children because he hates you and everything you stand for. “Boom, boom, boom!” went the persecution drums as Limbaugh hurled his baton into the air, and the crowd went wild.
Unfortunately for Limbaugh, reality sometimes interferes with exploiting someone’s personal misfortune to make a political point. Though the police captain who investigated the school bus assault initially described the attack as racially motivated, he later