The telling thing isn’t that AOL is suspending its advertising on the Rush Limbaugh show. The telling thing is that AOL was an advertiser.
El Rushbo has managed a pretty sweet gig these last twenty years or so – he gets to be the id of the Republican party, without ever having to face a ballot box. He is the exemplar of what the GOP stands for in the modern era: talk-radio bluster, safely insulated from little things like consequences. Until he, like his Presidential candidates, inexplicably decided that 2012 was the year to nail the colors to the mast on the issue of birth control.
(Quick step back: Griswold v Connecticut is the dispositive Supreme Court decision here – in 1965, the Supreme Court threw out the Nutmeg State’s anti-contraception law by a 7-2 vote, finding that the right to privacy trumped any state interest in regulating contraception. The reason the GOP is fighting to re-litigate Griswold is because the vast majority of modern law around privacy derives from findings in Griswold, and if you somehow kick the tentpole out from under Griswold you suddenly disrupt Roe in every way that matters. Griswold is perhaps the only finding not concerned with black civil rights that occupies pride of place in the right wing’s hierarchy of “judicial activism”.)
In any event, Rush said some terribly uncouth things, because, well, that’s what he does. And the hue and cry was palpable, more than it’s been in a long long time, and advertisers started jumping ship. And so, at the very end of the Friday show, a mealy-mouthed sorta-apology was shat out, and…advertisers kept jumping ship. Right up to this morning when AOL announced it was suspending advertising on the show.
Nobody uses AOL. This is a patently false statement, reeking of techno-elitism and Silicon Valley insider thought, but I’m going to repeat myself: nobody uses AOL. The only folks using AOL are people who haven’t needed to make any meaningful change in their online presence in, say, 10 years or so. And in 2012, that overwhelmingly means…the Old Ones.
Jon Chait nailed this a couple weeks back: this really is last call. The GOP base is getting whiter, older – and shrinking. This may be their last chance to capture the triple-play: Supreme Court, Congress and the White House, and even if it means holding their nose and voting for Romney, they will turn out in force. Because even Romney will serve as an agreeable rubber-stamp for the motive force of the Congressional GOP, which is what George W. Bush was intended to be until Osama bin Laden stopped the 21st Century dead in its tracks. But if the Democrats hold on and Obama holds on, the odds are slim that the GOP will ever get a chance to pull the wheel hard to the right again. The last chance to forestall gay marriage, to derail the health-care plan, to build the fence around the United States, to let Israel have sway over Middle East policy and cut taxes and preserve the vision of Nixonland – if the GOP doesn’t get its shot in now, the numbers are against them going forward, and the 50-year project of Kevin Phillips and the Emerging Republican Majority is cooked. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon.
So the Old Ones are calling the tune, and the GOP is dancing ever faster – and then, the country looks up, and all of a sudden we’re arguing about birth control pills. And the Old Ones are against it, because they’re against sex in general and certainly against anything that grants agency to women beyond a future as a housewife, and the parts of the country not looking to live in 1952 say “wait, WHAT?” And then George Will nails it to the wall on Sunday: “these guys want to bomb Iran but they won’t stand up to Rush Limbaugh?”
But that’s what happens when the intellectual engine of your movement is a drug-addled lard-ass bigot with a megaphone: eventually you lose the ability to cope with anything more difficult than a sport-talk zinger. And then the rest of the world decides to move on. AOL knows where its customers are…and they’re punting. Because not even a fellow relic of the 1990s wants to get Rush all over it.
And speaking of the 1990s…but more on that later.