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I don’t like e-mail asking me to sign a petition any more than I like a telemarketer calling at dinnertime. A digital petition doesn’t signify much of anything because big numbers are so easy to come by; furthermore, it advances the most sinister work of the Internet—which is slicing and dicing the American population into niches that don’t know, don’t want to know, and despise each other.
Looking further, I found this video of Limbaugh’s two-and-a-half-minute peroration Monday on Ohio State, and on his own website a transcript of everything he’d had to say on the subject of feminism and what he called the reprogramming of men. Limbaugh said nothing we hadn’t heard before, and back in the 1950s much of it would have passed for conventional wisdom. “I don’t know how men can be held to that Ohio State agreement, policy, anyway,” said Limbaugh, “because everybody knows in sex men don’t think with their brains. Not the one in their heads, anyway. It’s just so silly.”
They’re not even that disgusting—they’re weary and banal. There’s a big difference between wishing somebody would just shut up and trying to make them. Try to make them and you’ve stupidly ceded them the moral high ground, which makes no sense at all if you’re a political party.
