The Democrats’ Dan Quayle Moment
The current adminstration’s determination to make Rush Limbaugh the “face of the Republican party” reminds me of a time some years ago when another administration tried to do something similar with a pop culture icon. In June 1992 Dan Quayle attempted to lay some of the blame for the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles at the feet of TV’s Murphy Brown character played by Candice Bergen. Quayle’s argument, that was completely ignored by the media, was that popular culture was undermining family values and that the decline of these values contributed to the riots. It was his attempt to put a face to the perils of social liberalism and played well with the conservative audience he spoke to.
The media latched on to his comment and chided him for criticizing a fictional character at a time when the economy was struggling. In the end it made him and his boss look stupid, and was derided as Quayle’s “Murphy Brown Moment”. The term even entered the American lexicon and was used most recently against John McCain last year.
Today we have another administration and another economic crisis, but that hasn’t stopped Team Obama from zeroing in and zealously attacking America’s true enemy - “some fat guy in Florida” as Don Surber called Limbaugh.
Forget Bin Laden, Kim Jong Il, and Hugo Chavez*. There’s RUSH. So what if you’re unemployed, underwater on your mortgage, but watching your taxes go up: A fat man is talking smack about the President on AM radio!
Time Magazine – part of Obama’s Allelujia Chorus – even wonders if the adminstration has gone too far. Writer David Von Drehle cautioned:
But the words of Theodore Roosevelt, issued in the midst of a world war, may still be apt in our present troubles. “To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
- By the way, Hugo Chavez has just announced his campaign to nationalize the Venezuelan media. How far off are his actions from Obama’s today? Or tomorrow?
Chad:
What comes first? Nationalized media or a command economy?
4 March 2009, 5:22 pmSince we have a “sympathetic” (sycophantic?) media do we skip right to the workers councils?