Rush Limbaugh was detained yesterday at Palm Beach International Airport as he returned from a vacation in the Dominican Republic after customs officials found Viagra in his luggage, for which he did not have a valid prescription.
The prescription was in his doctor's name, for "privacy" purposes. There's a lot to be said about those ethics right there, but I want to skip over that and get to the more important question that CNN didn't ask.
O staunch defender of American morals, thrice divorced and presently single, would you care to explain why you take Viagra with you when you vacation alone?
arise, shine, for your light has come
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32 comments:
'Cause it's ok for dudes to have non-marital sex (straight, that is), even if they need a medical intervention to do it.
Family values: protecting the double standard since the dawn of mankind.
Now wait just one second Andy! Don't go accusing people of sex on the count of their possession of Viagra!
How do you know he wasn't just masturbating? It's at least possible that he needed Viagra to do so at his age, and as an aid to arousal Viagra is much more moral than pornography!
You got me, Little Cicero. I was unfair. If Rush Limbaugh would like to come forth and say, "I only needed the Viagra to assist with my masturbatory habits while on vacation," will absolutely take him at his word.
Viagra is much more moral than pornography!
KR, want to field that one?
No, not really :P. Actually, I agree with LC--at least he's not contributing money directly to the objectification of whoever/whatever he might be fantasizing about.
LC, did you really have to bring that up :P? I am dead sure noone here wanted to think about it. No, wait, let me go back further: Andy? Necessary??? Eeeeewwwwwww. Anyone who still seriously listens to that man isn't going to have their lack-of-reality affected by this slip.
Does he still moralize? I was under the impression he had mostly given up moralizing and was sticking to ethical concerns like lying and porkbarrel ... but then my impressions are pretty vague, since I try to avoid news about him entirely. Too bad about today :P.
No, not really :P. Actually, I agree with LC--at least he's not contributing money directly to the objectification of whoever/whatever he might be fantasizing about, if he's masturbating. Best case, Viagra is so potent he doesn't have to objectify people in his head.
LC, did you really have to bring that up :P? I am dead sure noone here wanted to think about it. No, wait, let me go back further: Andy? Necessary??? Eeeeewwwwwww. Anyone who still seriously listens to that man isn't going to have their lack-of-reality affected by this new drug-slip.
Does he actually still "moralize"? I was under the impression he had mostly given up moralizing and was sticking to ethical concerns like lying and porkbarrel ... but then my impressions are pretty vague, since I try to avoid news about him entirely. Too bad I missed today :P. Eew.
OK, not sure how that posted twice. sorry. The mysteries of blogger are beyond my ken some days.
Well, I honestly have no clue what he talks about on his show. I really never listen to it. The Salem Network is the talk radio for me!
Viagra is technically a medicine Andy- it doesn't enslave women as does the porn business. Of course he would still need a fantasizing aid, but like you said- he has three wives with whom he's slept, so there is plenty of material in his memory banks.
Poor Rush. I'm glad that you did a piece on it so I wouldn't have to waste the bandwidth on my blog.
People buy Viagra all the time overseas. When we pulled into Thailand young verile guys on my boat were buying and using half a pill for their, uh, public relations with the local women.
Of course, none of these guys have a syndicated radio show preaching the ills of immoral behavior.
All I can say on the issue is that at leaset he wasn't using some dog-ugly intern as a humidor.
Sex slavery is an industry in the Dominican republic.
Let's try that again. Here's another.
FG, that's a rather harsh accusation. I've been to the Dominican Republic, and it really does have some beautiful beaches. I doubt that he would get a prescription of Viagra through his doctor solely for a couple of nights with sex slaves in the DR.
Wait for the facts to come out. If your suspicion is valid, I assure you there will be universal condemnation in the cards for Rush.
Out of curiosity, what are the possible implications of this incident, given Rush's other recent legal troubles with prescription medications?
None, really. Under Florida law, it is legal for doctors to authorize prescriptions in a third party name, as long as all parties are aware and agree to it.
Viagra is not subject to the same set of drug laws as painkillers like OxyContin because it is not considered to be addictive.
TK, I am seriously not down with the degree of objectification of women you are displaying, in your Monica and your "public relations" comments. I am very tired of the dehumanizing implications of women being shore-leave entertainments. I am very tired of the frequent assumption by hetero males that their perception of a woman's physical attractiveness can or should be the major measure of the legitimacy of a relationship--especially someone else's relationship! What the hell!
I am sure that if "Monica" had been Hollywood/Playboy "attractive" the nation would have (1) been more accepting of the President's actions and (2) put more of the social blame on her for "seducing" him. Our calls for Clinton to "at least have some taste" were/are incredibly revolting commentary on ourselves. We are So Fucked Up.
I know visual stimuli matter to men, but come on. We moderns, who can drive around the world in our nuclear submarines (TK) and jet airplanes (the rest of us), should be able to use something above our alligator brains in judging a relationship we are not personally involved in--or better yet, not judging it.
kr, I am sorry to bring the harsh reality of overseas lifestyles those women chose to support themselves and thier families. they don't seem to mind the dehumanizing when they are soaking some kid for half his paycheck.
It isn't my fault Monica Lewinski looks like she got beat in the face with a bag of nickels. I'm a bad person for stating the obvious? Alligator brains? Come now, I am to be faulted for approaching an attractive woman and keeping my distance from (uh let's see, something not so offensive) a mildy unattractive one?
And where did I say that I try legitimize other people's relationships?
Yes, ugly is only skin deep and I know a lot of unattractive people who have great personalities whom I would no want to have sex with. And if you are going to throw the "there is more to a realtionship than sex" argument in my face please save it for the Leo Buscaglia retreats.
While you may be tired of the percieve unfairness of how straight males 'legitimize' their relationships I am tired of women who fault me becuase I like pretty females. What's next, faulting my love for chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream?
Ironically, in the Navy it is the fat sedentary people who always complain about the unfairness of the physical readiness program.
While I understand that outward appearance is the first noticable thing people have to go on when meeting someone for the first time, I also realize that for every attrctive woman I see there is a guy that is tired of her shit.
TK: I recognize your irritation as well, but "some dog-ugly intern" makes your judgment of their relationship (and you've certainly implied judgement) about her relative attractiveness instead of Clinton's lack of judgement in mingling personal + professional lives. Objecting to an "intern," sure--but adding "dog-ugly"? Wasn't this comment supposed to compare Limbaugh to Clinton?
Surely, shore leave is what it is. But someday I wish there would be a little more humanity to it--from both sides. As much as you are irritated by women asking for less dehumanizing language, the language we use communicates to ourselves and others perceptions of reality ... and consciously changing the language is one way to try to bring around healthier discourse, and to prevent teaching new generations old destructive patterns. (Women should also stop speaking among themselves as if, among other things, 'their' men were pets, to be coddled and disciplined and generally not considered fully human. It's not like hetero men are the sole sinners here.)
That being said, I used slightly juicer language than I usually use for discourse here because you seem to prefer head-on commentary. It was not meant to be more condemnatory of you than the entirely less colorful language I normally use here.
[Of course, someday I hope there won't be need for shore leave and all its attendant issues, as all militaries would in this little dream world become unnecessary ... now that's an unrealistic picture of social relations!]
In any case, if anyone is making all sorts of unbased extrapolations, please note that I am not here moralizing that Everyone Must Follow Catholic Teachings On Sexuality. (Look closely; I didn't say that, or even imply it.) I am advocating a very secular morality: try to maximize the humanity of everyone all the time in your thinking and speech. I certainly don't live up to this ... but I can't see where it's not a good idea to aim for.
Well, I'm not sure shore leave is such a bad thing. Do we really want a bunch of sailors painting the town blue every night in our port cities? Granted it would be good for the prostitution business. (:
Take no offense- these are just the steriotypes about sailors I've been force-fed by the media! (:
KR PDX said, "...try to maximize the humanity of everyone all the time in your thinking and speech..."
BRAVO!!!! What a beautiful precept.
I've been thinking about you alot since your gorgeous exposition of the spiritual experiences that inform your opinion of contraception. In the best of all worlds...
About Monica/Bill...Bill was a selfish lust-driven idiot who knew better and should have told the courtroom plainly that his sexual indiscretion with Monica was a grievous error and noone's business but the offended parties (Monica, his family, and hers). Monica was a selfish lust-driven idiot who put her own sexual interests ahead of our nation's. She's a smart young lady who knew exactly what she was doing. Easily she's a 140+ IQ with professional and sexual ambitions to match her GPA and collegiate credentials. She conflatec approval of powerful superiors with psychosexual gratification and then sought to realize that plainly perverted fantasy in a sex act with the president of the most powerful nation on earth. And yet she's just one of any number of women in this fallen world whose most deeply felt and cultivated biological drive is to blow the big man on campus. What a waste of women's suffrage! And last in this tragic-cast: our nation's media pandered to a lust-driven national audience. We are mired in heinous unholy war today because a blowjob captured the national imagination. Now Halliburton will probably rebuild Babylon.
I am serious when I say that excluding Revelation, our only hope is fierce satiric comedy. And many many adhoc cultural interventions by our nation's finest drag queens. We have many years of healing ahead of us!!!
Getting back to the post, I suspect that Rush is a Clinton knockoff who also knows better.
Chiron: Monica Lewinsky was certainly fully complicit ... but she had not asked the country to elect her to what most ot the country still wants to believe is an office which should represent the nation with (superhuman?) dignity. TK was dragging ML's looks in to knock on Clinton, as if they were a part of Clinton's moral mistake(s). I did and do object. No pun intended.
And, yes, what a waste of the battle for equality. The whole episode was so awkward, pitting Democrats against their own traditional feminist interests (denigrating ML, asking Hillary to stay married to a man who had cheated on her and lied to her), in the immediate (understandable) struggle to try to save the Administration.
(On the other hand, Clinton was a much better President once he gave up trying to win a permanent popularity contest (the polls), I thought.)
Just for clarity's sake, please: was your contraception comment a turnaround in your opinion of me or deeply satiric? Without voice I cannot tell from the words. Either way is OK (obviously, freedom of thought etc.). Of course I am hoping for--and I think I read--the positive ... but I also know I am not infrequently over-optimistic about that messy place where my reality meets others'.
No satire about that. I was really impressed by that experience you described. But also no turnaround. I'm still thinking about that. More soon if you'd like.
I think Monica Lewinsky is pretty, in a full-figured way. I think she has lovely eyes and beautiful black hair.
Both she and Bill exercised astonishingly bad judgment. I echo Chiron's lament, that Clinton should have just flat out said, "Yes, I did it, it was a mistake, but this issue concerns only me, my family, and Miss Lewinsky."
Chiron/Andy: Clinton: yep. Truth first = better. (Pity politicians in general seem to be trained exactly the opposite :P.)
Chiron: Thank you. Wherever you are at is fine; you don't need to tell me more unless you think it is pertinent (here or later); I am relieved you weren't being satiric (which would have been especially harsh at the end of the sentence preceding). Since my first comment in that horrendous string was consciously inclusive (I deliberately avoided issues that had a divisive history here), but was taken so differently, and I hadn't heard back from you after your comment in that string, I wasn't sure whether my response had made you angrier or less angry ... or whether you had seen it. I am glad that I decided to include that bit, then ... I don't often bring that stuff up, since, in my life experience, there is no faster way to get written off as a complete flake than sharing some of my less "scientific" experiences. But then I hadn't a lot to lose in that conversation, I suppose. Sigh.
One favor, though? In your deliberations, if you are one of the people who has seen LC and I as a unit (I doubt Time is the only one), please try not to: the one thing LC and I agree on with any regularity is that we don't agree with each other ... about how to think or, in almost all cases, what to think. Two or three points of agreement get exaggerated here because of the nature of the forum, and even on those we seem to have drawn different "life lessons" from our currently held "conclusions."
And Andy brings up the most excellent point. Physical attractiveness is a subjective concept, whose qualities vary between cultures, time periods, and even individuals.
One of the things that I have personally discovered is that "attractive" is not defined strictly -- or even primarily -- by physical attributes. Subtle things such as how the person carries themselves (particularly how "comfortable in their own skin" they are) play a major factor in whether or not I find a particular person attractive.
Yes, it's somewhat disappointing that kr and I cannot be a unit- as a debate team we would be able to tear anyone in our path to pieces, (:
But no, we disagree in the very element of our ways of thinking as well as on specific issues.
David Duke is a malignant narcissist.
He invents and then projects a false, fictitious, self for the world to fear, or to admire. He maintains a tenuous grasp on reality to start with and the trappings of power further exacerbate this. Real life authority and David Duke’s predilection to surround him with obsequious sycophants support David Duke’s grandiose self-delusions and fantasies of omnipotence and omniscience.
David Duke's personality is so precariously balanced that he cannot tolerate even a hint of criticism and disagreement. Most narcissists are paranoid and suffer from ideas of reference (the delusion that they are being mocked or discussed when they are not). Thus, narcissists often regard themselves as "victims of persecution".
Duke fosters and encourages a personality cult with all the hallmarks of an institutional religion: priesthood, rites, rituals, temples, worship, catechism, and mythology. The leader is this religion's ascetic saint. He monastically denies himself earthly pleasures (or so he claims) in order to be able to dedicate himself fully to his calling.
Duke is a monstrously inverted Jesus, sacrificing his life and denying himself so that his people - or humanity at large - should benefit. By surpassing and suppressing his humanity, Duke became a distorted version of Nietzsche's "superman". But being a-human or super-human also means being a-sexual and a-moral.
In this restricted sense, narcissistic leaders are post-modernist and moral relativists. They project to the masses an androgynous figure and enhance it by engendering the adoration of nudity and all things "natural" - or by strongly repressing these feelings. But what they refer to, as "nature" is not natural at all.
Duke invariably proffers an aesthetic of decadence and evil carefully orchestrated and artificial - though it is not perceived this way by him or by his followers. Narcissistic leadership is about reproduced copies, not about originals. It is about the manipulation of symbols - not about veritable atavism or true conservatism.
In short: narcissistic leadership is about theatre, not about life. To enjoy the spectacle (and be subsumed by it), the leader demands the suspension of judgment, depersonalization, and de-realization. Catharsis is tantamount, in this narcissistic dramaturgy, to self-annulment.
Narcissism is nihilistic not only operationally, or ideologically. Its very language and narratives are nihilistic. Narcissism is conspicuous nihilism - and the cult's leader serves as a role model, annihilating the Man, only to re-appear as a pre-ordained and irresistible force of nature.
Narcissistic leadership often poses as a rebellion against the "old ways" - against the hegemonic culture, the upper classes, the established religions, the superpowers, the corrupt order. Narcissistic movements are puerile, a reaction to narcissistic injuries inflicted upon David Duke like (and rather psychopathic) toddler nation-state, or group, or upon the leader.
Minorities or "others" - often arbitrarily selected - constitute a perfect, easily identifiable, embodiment of all that is "wrong". They are accused of being old, they are eerily disembodied, they are cosmopolitan, they are part of the establishment, they are "decadent", they are hated on religious and socio-economic grounds, or because of their race, sexual orientation, origin ... They are different, they are narcissistic (feel and act as morally superior), they are everywhere, they are defenseless, they are credulous, they are adaptable (and thus can be co-opted to collaborate in their own destruction). They are the perfect hate figure. Narcissists thrive on hatred and pathological envy.
This is precisely the source of the fascination with Hitler, diagnosed by Erich Fromm - together with Stalin - as a malignant narcissist. He was an inverted human. His unconscious was his conscious. He acted out our most repressed drives, fantasies, and wishes. He provides us with a glimpse of the horrors that lie beneath the veneer, the barbarians at our personal gates, and what it was like before we invented civilization. Hitler forced us all through a time warp and many did not emerge. He was not the devil. He was one of us. He was what Arendt aptly called the banality of evil. Just an ordinary, mentally disturbed, failure, a member of a mentally disturbed and failing nation, who lived through disturbed and failing times. He was the perfect mirror, a channel, a voice, and the very depth of our souls.
Duke prefers the sparkle and glamour of well-orchestrated illusions to the tedium and method of real accomplishments. His reign is all smoke and mirrors, devoid of substances, consisting of mere appearances and mass delusions. In the aftermath of his regime - Duke having died, been deposed, or voted out of office - it all unravels. The tireless and constant prestidigitation ceases and the entire edifice crumbles. What looked like an economic miracle turns out to have been a fraud-laced bubble. Loosely held empires disintegrate. Laboriously assembled business conglomerates go to pieces. "Earth shattering" and "revolutionary" scientific discoveries and theories are discredited. Social experiments end in mayhem.
It is important to understand that the use of violence must be ego-syntonic. It must accord with the self-image of David Duke. It must abet and sustain his grandiose fantasies and feed his sense of entitlement. It must conform David Duke like narrative. Thus, David Duke who regards himself as the benefactor of the poor, a member of the common folk, the representative of the disenfranchised, the champion of the dispossessed against the corrupt elite - is highly unlikely to use violence at first. The pacific mask crumbles when David Duke has become convinced that the very people he purported to speak for, his constituency, his grassroots fans, and the prime sources of his narcissistic supply - have turned against him. At first, in a desperate effort to maintain the fiction underlying his chaotic personality, David Duke strives to explain away the sudden reversal of sentiment. "The people are being duped by (the media, big industry, the military, the elite, etc.)", "they don't really know what they are doing", "following a rude awakening, they will revert to form", etc. When these flimsy attempts to patch a tattered personal mythology fail, David Duke becomes injured. Narcissistic injury inevitably leads to narcissistic rage and to a terrifying display of unbridled aggression. The pent-up frustration and hurt translate into devaluation. That which was previously idealized - is now discarded with contempt and hatred. This primitive defense mechanism is called "splitting". To David Duke, things and people are either entirely bad (evil) or entirely good. He projects onto others his own shortcomings and negative emotions, thus becoming a totally good object. Duke is likely to justify the butchering of his own people by claiming that they intended to kill him, undo the revolution, devastate the economy, or the country, etc. The "small people", the "rank and file", and the "loyal soldiers" of David Duke - his flock, his nation, and his employees - they pay the price. The disillusionment and disenchantment are agonizing. The process of reconstruction, of rising from the ashes, of overcoming the trauma of having been deceived, exploited and manipulated - is drawn-out. It is difficult to trust again, to have faith, to love, to be led, to collaborate. Feelings of shame and guilt engulf the erstwhile followers of David Duke. This is his sole legacy: a massive post-traumatic stress disorder.
I guess anonymous is either trying to say that Monica Lewinski also had an affair with David Duke, or that Rush Limbaugh had an affair with David Duke. Or he may be saying that there was a three way. If there was a three way in progress, I could certainly understand why Rush would need Viagra, but that is an unfounded and reprehensible accusation!
Uhh...wow, that has to be the most articulate, interesting and lengthy non-sequitur ever! Fabulous, thanks.
Andy, I must say that you are the epitome of politically correct:
I think Monica Lewinsky is pretty, in a full-figured way.
TK translation: She has a great personality too.
the most articulate, interesting and lengthy non-sequitur ever!
Tk translation: What the fuck did that have to do with anything in this post?
KR, no offense taken with your comments. You and I have been coming to Andy's blog for some time now and I know a personal attack from a gentle social reminder.
I do use more colorful language than most and I am trying to curb that in both the written and vernacular. I get a little passionate and forget that I am not on the boat.
TK: OK, cool, I'm glad.
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