Rush Limbaugh And A Glimpse Into The Conservative Mindset

This blog points out often the manner in which facts, science and objective reality simply no longer matter to the far right an much of the Republican Party base.  Those who some might call the "true believers" - people who simply "know what's true" based on ideology.  I often wonder how such people function in the objective world and/or come to conclusions about issues and concerns since thinking seems to play little or no role in the process.  A piece in The Atlantic focuses on Rush Limbaugh and how he just knows what ids true and what is not.  Perhaps this kind of blind certainty gives a glimpse into the mind of a member of the far right and today's GOP base.  Here are excerpts:

He knew that [Supreme Court Justice Clarence] Thomas was a conservative, and that his political adversaries were leftists. And that's all it took to "know" that Thomas was innocent. Evidently, no true conservative would ever sexually harass anyone, and no leftists would tell the truth about being sexually harassed by a conservative.

Limbaugh offered all this to make a point about Christie and the dearth of people defending him:

Christie may well be worth defending, is my point. I don't know. He may well be worth a Clarence Thomas-type defense, but notice that nobody is coming forth with one. They've all got that caveat. "He's home free IF he's not lying." This is not a comment about Governor Christie, so please don't misunderstand or be confused. I'm trying to illustrate (What's the word?) the emptiness of the Republican ... I'm trying to make the point that over there in the RINO Club, the Republican establishment, the wildebeests, whatever, there's not an ideology. There's not a belief system. There's not a foundation on which to base a defense, as I had with Clarence Thomas—and, by the way, he's not alone.

Got that? Were Christie and his supporters all true conservatives, they would be assured that Christie is in the right. Whereas as non-conservatives, the only way to ascertain the truth is a dispassionate analysis, qualified with hedges such as, If he's lying about everything, then he isn't blameless after all. Christie may well be innocent, Limbaugh argues, but no one can know for sure because he isn't a conservative.

Then he introduces another wrinkle:

It's just every Republican who has entered the fray defending Christie has to put a caveat out there "if he's telling the truth." Now, if there were a fervent ideological foundation, if there was a substantive reason of believing in Governor Christie, then whether he lied wouldn't matter. They'd be out there defending him left and right just to make sure the Democrats don't get away with this. And I'll admit that was part of the reason that I jumped into Clarence Thomas. There was no way they were gonna get away with this if I had the ability to have a little bit of something to do with it. There's no way. I wasn't gonna sit there and put up with this. I'd done enough to find out he was a fine man and know this was a witch hunt. They were out to seek and destroy.

But if Christie lied, then his accusers wouldn't be "getting away with" anything, would they? Their attacks would be accurate. Unless, Limbaugh seems to be saying, Christie was a true conservative, in which case the attacks on him would be illegitimate, because attacks on true conservatives are by definition illegitimate, at least when they're coming from leftists.
True conservatives cannot fail, they can only be failed. They cannot sexually harass leftists. They can only be falsely accused. That is Rush Limbaugh's ideology. I'm not sure what to call it. But it isn't deserving of the name conservatism.

There was once a time when Republicans valued logic, reason and actually analyzed facts.  Those days are long gone.  Now all that remains is unfounded certainty and ideology.  And the GOP race for abject ignorance seems to be accelerating.