The telling thing isn’t that AOL is suspending its advertising on the Rush Limbaugh show. \u00a0The telling thing is that AOL was an advertiser.<\/p>\n
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. \u00a0He is the exemplar of what the GOP stands for in the modern era: talk-radio bluster, safely insulated from little things like consequences. \u00a0Until 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.<\/p>\n
(Quick step back: Griswold v Connecticut<\/em> 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. \u00a0The reason the GOP is fighting to re-litigate Griswold<\/em> is because the vast majority of modern law around privacy derives from findings in Griswold<\/em>, and if you somehow kick the tentpole out from under Griswold<\/em> you suddenly disrupt Roe<\/em> in every way that matters. \u00a0Griswold<\/em> 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”.)<\/p>\n In any event, Rush said some terribly uncouth things, because, well, that’s what he does. \u00a0And the hue and cry was palpable, more than it’s been in a long long time, and advertisers started jumping ship. \u00a0And so, at the very end of the Friday show, a mealy-mouthed sorta-apology was shat out, and\u2026advertisers kept jumping ship. Right up to this morning when AOL announced it was suspending advertising on the show.<\/p>\n Nobody uses AOL. \u00a0This is a patently false statement, reeking of techno-elitism and Silicon Valley insider thought, but I’m going to repeat myself: nobody uses AOL. <\/em> 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. \u00a0And in 2012, that overwhelmingly means\u2026the Old Ones.<\/a><\/p>\n