Rush Limbaugh accuses President Obama of something close to treason

I missed this over the weekend, but today’s Maureen Dowd column — yes, I read it, damnit — dredges up this little nugget from Rush Limbaugh’s weekend interview on Fox News:

In an interview on “Fox News Sunday With Chris Wallace,” Limbaugh accused the president of trying to destroy the economy — yes, the same economy that W. came within a whisker of ruining.

“I have to think that it may be on purpose,” Limbaugh said, “because this is just outrageous, what is happening — a denial of liberty, an attack on freedom.”

What the hell? One of the right’s leading political commentators is accusing the president on national television of deliberately bringing harm to his country in order to accrue power. That’s the kind of accusation that should only be made with a bushel of evidence in hand; airing it as a casual and unsupported political attack is vile hackery.

This is the point where lots of folks on the right, eager to have Rush in the corner but not always eager to have to defend his claims, pull the “Rush is just an entertainer” routine. Maybe. I certainly believe that much of what he says is an effort to maximize his audience. But the audience is largely made up of people who believe Rush’s crap. That is, verrrrry roughly, 20 million people a week. And while I don’t want to be alarmist, I do wonder how those millions of people will respond, over time, to being told not merely that the Democratic president is a bad presdient, but that he’s trying to ruin the country in order to take away their freedoms. I fear that can’t come to a good end.

Republicans promise revolt and revolution — but they’re just kidding

Over at Infinite Monkeys, my conservative collaborator Ben Boychuk dismisses my concern over the “alarming rhetoric” on display at the tea parties this week. Ben says:

Outrageous signs are one of those things we like to focus our attention on — just peruse Zombie Time’s Hall of Shame — to show how crazy some of our political opponents are. But from what I could tell, there was remarkably little seditious libel or overt displays of imagining the king’s death to be found yesterday. Texans — not unlike San Franciscans — talk about seceding every few years. Big deal. This is political street theater, after all, not the Oxford Union.

Ben makes it sound as though the crazy stuff was being said — or shouted — by fringe characters wearing wacky hats, the kind of stuff you find at every protest. But consider how conservatives would react if:

• A Democratic governor talked about his state seceding from the union?

• A Democratic congresswoman talking about armed revolt over taxes?

• A Democratic congressman telling his audience, with regard to taxes: “Thomas Jefferson once said that the tree of liberty will be fed with the blood of tyrants and patriots. You are the patriots.”

• Or a liberal pundit saying, as Ben does in our Scripps Howard column this week: “The original tea party protestors objected to ‘taxation without representation.’ The new tea party movement is disgusted with the way their representatives are squandering the taxpayers’ money. Revolutions have started over much less.”

I think we all know the answer.

To Ben, this is all “political theater.” We’re not supposed to take elected Republican officials and mainstream conservatives seriously when they speak of tearing the United States asunder or overthrowing the government. This dismissiveness, incidentally, comes in the context of a post in which Ben accuses me of not taking the tea partiers seriously enough.

Okay. But next time some goofball Hollywood star talks about leaving the country because a Republican has been elected president, I really don’t want to hear conservatives howl in protest about how it proves that liberals are un-American crybabies who take their toys and go home when they don’t win. Threatening armed revolution is a lot more rhetorically extreme than talking about leaving the country. Conservatives shouldn’t be allowed to have it both ways.