Irritating Radio

Rush Limbaugh makes me so mad. Which is too bad because I used to enjoy listening to him. I've sort of talked about this before, lately he's just awful.

Today I happened to hear him talking on the radio while I was driving into work and got so steamed I had to turn it off. Click! Take that! Tell the sleep number bed people I will not be listening to their ad today.

Today's rant was about how "liberals" didn't want people of faith to serve as federal judges. How some people have faith and that gives them a compass to know right from wrong and that the Democrats were afraid of people that knew right from wrong and so they were blocking people of faith from serving.

He can't just be missing the point. He has to just be knowingly lying. Like Democrats or liberals have anything against people of faith. Right. Not.

The problem isn't faith, and its not people who know right from wrong. The problem is people who can't put those issues into perspective, can't weigh them against other factors. There's nothing wrong on the face about people who understand moral choices. The discontinuity is in the idea that judges make moral choices. There isn't a fear of people of faith, but I think there is a fear of people who don't see a difference between moral, ethical, and legal.

Often the moral choice isn't the ethical choice or the legal choice or vise versa. Judges make rulings of legality, is something either within or against the law. Sometimes those choices are messy. Sometimes those choices have undesirable consequences. Doesn't make the choice any less legal. Someone sitting on the bench that believes their faith gives them a better rubric to measure outcomes, that's scary.

I'll add two more unfortunate indices: popular and patriotic.

Lately we've been hearing a lot about how judges are making decisions that the people don't agree with. We see polling to show that there's been an unpopular decision (actually lately we heard that rant while seeing polling that the people did side with the judges - another problem with wonk radio). Then the people encouraging various histrionics will say that taking an unpopular position is also unpatriotic. It doesn't matter if a decision is popular. If left up to the people many things would never be upheld ADA, civil rights, taxes. People will find a reason to sue over anything they don't like. Just because they don't like it doesn't make it illegal. Doesn't make it subversive either. Some of our greatest triumphs have been in the face of popular opposition.

We need judges that will make their decisions based on the law. Is it ok if they are people of faith? Of course it is, and Rush knows it. But that's not good radio.