Rush Limbaugh Quotes

No nation has ever taxed itself into prosperity.

Liberals measure compassion by how many people are given welfare. Conservatives measure compassion by how many people no longer need it.

I’m waiting for the day when Rush Limbaugh’s pharmacist writes a book.

Read things you're sure will disagree with your current thinking. If you're a die-hard anti-animal person, read Meat. If you're a die-hard global warming advocate, read Glenn Beck. If you're a Rush Limbaugh fan, read James W. Loewen's Lies My Teachers Told Me. It'll do your mind good and get your heart rate up.

He's one fry short of a Happy Meal.

Most of the reasons people think they can't do something are reasons they've created. Everything you do is up to you. Part of life is realizing that you have much more potential and ability than you'd ever know. However, it is up to you to reach inside, face the fears, and unleash that which really drives you.

The way liberals are interpreting the First Amendment today is that it prevents anyone who is religious from being in government.

You know why there's a Second Amendment? In case the government fails to follow the first one.

When people call up Rush Limbaugh and say, ‘It’s an honor to speak to you,’ I want to shoot myself.

If God were good, why would he create Rush Limbaugh?

It's 5:22pm you're in the grocery checkout line. Your three-year-old is writhing on the floor, screaming, because you have refused to buy her a Teletubby pinwheel. Your six-year-old is whining, repeatedly, in a voice that could saw through cement, "But mommy, puleeze, puleeze" because you have not bought him the latest "Lunchables," which features, as the four food groups, Cheetos, a Snickers, Cheez Whiz, and Twizzlers. Your teenager, who has not spoken a single word in the past foor days, except, "You've ruined my life," followed by "Everyone else has one," is out in the car, sulking, with the new rap-metal band Piss on the Parentals blasting through the headphones of a Discman. To distract yourself, and to avoid the glares of other shoppers who have already deemed you the worst mother in America, you leaf through People magazine. Inside, Uma thurman gushes "Motherhood is Sexy." Moving on to Good Housekeeping, Vanna White says of her child, "When I hear his cry at six-thirty in the morning, I have a smile on my face, and I'm not an early riser." Another unexpected source of earth-mother wisdom, the newly maternal Pamela Lee, also confides to People, "I just love getting up with him in the middle of the night to feed him or soothe him." Brought back to reality by stereophonic whining, you indeed feel as sexy as Rush Limbaugh in a thong.

Enraging liberals is simply one of the more enjoyable side effects of my wisdom.

None of what Barack Obama is doing or wants to do to this country is anything the rest of the world hasn't seen before and already failed at.

Draft-dodging is what chicken-hawks do best. Dick Cheney, Glenn Beck, Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh (this capon claimed he had a cyst on his fat ass), Newt Gingrich, former Attorney General John Ashcroft—he received seven deferments to teach business education at Southwest Missouri State—pompous Bill O’Reilly, Jeb Bush, hey, throw in John Wayne—they were all draft-dodgers. Not a single one of these mouth-breathing, cowardly, and meretricious buffoons fought for his country. All plumped for deferments. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani? Did not serve. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney? Did not serve in the military. (He served the Mormon Church on a thirty-month mission to France.) Former Senator Fred Thompson? Did not serve. Former President Ronald Reagan? Due to poor eyesight, he served in a noncombat role making movies for the Army in southern California during WWII. He later seems to have confused his role as an actor playing a tail gunner with the real thing. Did Rahm Emanuel serve? Yes, he did during the Gulf War 1991—in the Israeli Army. John Boehner did not serve, not a fucking second. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-KY? Not a minute! Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-MS? Avoided the draft. Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl, R-AZ—did not serve. National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair John Cornyn, R-TX—did not serve. Former Senate Republican Policy Committee Chair John Ensign, R-NV? Did not serve. Jack Kemp? Dan Quayle? Never served a day. Not an hour. Not an afternoon. These are the jackasses that cherish memorial services and love to salute and adore hearing “Taps.

I must be honest. I can only read so many paragraphs of a New York Times story before I puke.

Ronald Reagan was the greatest president of the twentieth century.

The future is not Big Government. Self-serving politicians. Powerful bureaucrats. This has been tried, tested throughout history. The result has always been disaster. President Obama, your agenda is not new. It's not change, and it's not hope.

For many evangelicals, the masculine values men like John Wayne, William Wallace, Ronald Reagan, Rush Limbaugh, Jordan Peterson, and Donald Trump embody have come to define evangelicalism itself.

I'm not against the government building roads. That is a legitimate government function. But I am very much against the government claiming that their building the road is the reason somebody on the road is successful.

Militant feminists are pro‐choice because it’s their ultimate avenue of power over men. And believe me, to them it is a question of power. It is their attempt to impose their will on the rest of society, particularly on men.

Liberals habitually work themselves into a lather about the antics of Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck, but they are really just political gargoyles looking for ratings as they whip up the GOP faithful. The true danger lies in an ostensibly neutral journalism that most Americans count on to tell them what is going on in the world but which too often acts as a stenographer for powerful and self-serving factions in government operating under a cloak of anonymity.

Conservatism solves problems libralism blows em up.

The worst of all of this is the lie that condoms really protect against AIDS. The condom failure rate can be as high as 20 percent. Would you get on a plane — or put your children on a plane — if one of five passengers would be killed on the flight? Well, the statistic holds for condoms, folks.

Feminism was established to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream.

I'm pro-choice. But I hope that choice will be life.

It is freedom that allows ordinary people to do extraordinary things.

Now the poles have gotten so far apart that anyone who isn’t officiating a gay wedding at a Whole Foods is considered to be to the right of Rush Limbaugh.

In 1987, under President Ronald Reagan, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) abolished the Fairness Doctrine. In place since 1949, it had stipulated equal airtime for differing points of view. In this environment where media outlets felt less compelled to present balanced political debate, AM radio stations in particular started to switch to a lucrative form of programming best exemplified by Rush Limbaugh—right-wing talk radio. For hours on end, Limbaugh, and others who followed his lead, would present their view of the world without rebuttal, fact-checking, or any of the other standards in place at most journalistic outlets. Often their commentary included bashing any media coverage that conflicted with the talk-radio narrative.

I'm a huge supporter of women. What I'm not a supporter of liberalism. Feminism is what I oppose. Feminism has led women astray. I love the women's movement, especially walking behind it.

Three years earlier, when the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq became public, Rush Limbaugh—the most popular radio broadcaster in the United States, whose syndicated radio show has, at last count, 13 million listeners—described the prisoners who had been killed, raped, tortured, and humiliated by or at the behest of U.S. military personnel, as less than human. “They are the ones who are sick,” fumed Limbaugh.

New Rule: Now that liberals have taken back the word "liberal," they also have to take back the word "elite." By now you've heard the constant right-wing attacks on the "elite media," and the "liberal elite." Who may or may not be part of the "Washington elite." A subset of the "East Coast elite." Which is overly influenced by the "Hollywood elite." So basically, unless you're a shit-kicker from Kansas, you're with the terrorists. If you played a drinking game where you did a shot every time Rush Limbaugh attacked someone for being "elite," you'd be almost as wasted as Rush Limbaugh. I don't get it: In other fields--outside of government--elite is a good thing, like an elite fighting force. Tiger Woods is an elite golfer. If I need brain surgery, I'd like an elite doctor. But in politics, elite is bad--the elite aren't down-to-earth and accessible like you and me and President Shit-for-Brains. Which is fine, except that whenever there's a Bush administration scandal, it always traces back to some incompetent political hack appointment, and you think to yourself, "Where are they getting these screwups from?" Well, now we know: from Pat Robertson. I'm not kidding. Take Monica Goodling, who before she resigned last week because she's smack in the middle of the U.S. attorneys scandal, was the third-ranking official in the Justice Department of the United States. She's thirty-three, and though she never even worked as a prosecutor, was tasked with overseeing the job performance of all ninety-three U.S. attorneys. How do you get to the top that fast? Harvard? Princeton? No, Goodling did her undergraduate work at Messiah College--you know, home of the "Fighting Christies"--and then went on to attend Pat Robertson's law school. Yes, Pat Robertson, the man who said the presence of gay people at Disney World would cause "earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor," has a law school. And what kid wouldn't want to attend? It's three years, and you have to read only one book. U.S. News & World Report, which does the definitive ranking of colleges, lists Regent as a tier-four school, which is the lowest score it gives. It's not a hard school to get into. You have to renounce Satan and draw a pirate on a matchbook. This is for the people who couldn't get into the University of Phoenix. Now, would you care to guess how many graduates of this televangelist diploma mill work in the Bush administration? On hundred fifty. And you wonder why things are so messed up? We're talking about a top Justice Department official who went to a college founded by a TV host. Would you send your daughter to Maury Povich U? And if you did, would you expect her to get a job at the White House? In two hundred years, we've gone from "we the people" to "up with people." From the best and brightest to dumb and dumber. And where better to find people dumb enough to believe in George Bush than Pat Robertson's law school? The problem here in America isn't that the country is being run by elites. It's that it's being run by a bunch of hayseeds. And by the way, the lawyer Monica Goodling hired to keep her ass out of jail went to a real law school.

Consider the perverse logic of Rush Limbaugh’s suggestion that President Obama was deliberately trying to destroy the American economy as some form of “payback” for slavery and racism, or Glenn Beck’s charge that health care reform is really just Barack Obama’s way to obtain reparations for slavery. Both allegations seem the stuff of absurdist and paranoid fantasy, and yet, in an era of white racial anxiety and resentment, they couldn’t be more rational. They serve, almost perfectly, as triggers for our racial angers and insecurities. That black guy is trying to harm us, to take our money and give it to them, to make us hurt the way his people were hurt.

if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up.

Why didn't Obama make Hillary Clinton his vice president? (Answer: Because then he’d have to have someone taste his food for him, and start his car for him … )

Each of us can be fearless and strong like this rock when we know, without a doubt, where we belong and what we should do. God helps us to know these things.

The far-right American radio host Rush Limbaugh has, on his popular radio show, denounced “the four corners of deceit: government, academia, science and media. Those institutions are now corrupt and exist by virtue of deceit. That’s how they promulgate themselves; it is how they prosper.”10 Limbaugh, here, provides a perfect example of how fascist politics targets expertise, mocking and devaluing it.

Part of what interests me is the impulse to dismiss and how often it slides into the very incoherence or hysteria of which women are routinely accused. It would be nice if, say, Rush Limbaugh, who called Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute” for testifying to Democrats in Congress about the need to fund birth control and who apparently completely failed to comprehend how birth control works — Limbaugh the word-salad king, the factually challenged, the eternally riled — got called hysterical once in a while.

So I've always been interested in politics. And I thank my parents for that. As you can see, there's a strong element of moral indignation behind this interest, and indignation is well and good in doses, but I noticed fairly early in life that some people live to find stuff to be indignant about. And it's pretty unattractive. That's why I decided to become a wiseass.

The Messianic Wall and the Ultra-Loyal Base First published in 2019 There is much talk of Trump’s ultra-loyal political base, and rightly so. That base, or at least the most passionate element of it, consists of angry people who feel spurned by the political establishment. The base showed its psychological and political clout when Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, who claimed to speak for it, denounced Trump for “caving” to a unanimous Senate decision to keep the government running, which caused Trump to reverse himself and create a disastrous partial government shutdown. Yet that same base could play a large part in removing Trump from office. People who submit themselves to an omnipotent guru can be especially passionate in their support of all that he says and does. But this cultism can also be a source of vulnerability for both. Leaders and followers can become antagonists rather than mutual nurturers.

I really think that if we don’t start caring about whether people tell the truth or not, it’s going to be literally impossible to restore anything approaching a reasonable political discourse. Politicians have always shaded the truth. But if you can say something that is provably false, and no one cares, then you can’t have a real debate about anything. I firmly believe that you can draw a straight line from Rush Limbaugh through Fox News through present-day websites like Breitbart and the explosion in “fake news”* that played such a big role in the 2016 campaign. And that’s how someone like Trump can wind up in the Oval Office. I know I’m sort of farting into the wind on this. But I hope you’ll fart along with me. I’ve always believed that it’s possible to discern true statements from false statements, and that it’s critically important to do so, and that we put our entire democratic experiment in peril when we don’t. It’s a lesson I fear our nation is about to learn the hard way.

The seeming power of a unified minority in Washington with just enough votes to thwart Obama was also a source of strength and, arguably, arrogance and self-importance. Even after Brown's election, the Democrats held 59 percent of the U.S. Senate, 59 percent of the House of Representatives, and 100 percent of the White House. But the GOP's forty-one Senate votes—representing, it must be noted, no more than 37 percent of the American public (thanks to Republican popularity in smaller states)—seemed paramount, because it offered just enough votes to kill any piece of legislation through the delaying tactic known as the filibuster. These representatives of 37 percent of the country wielded unprecedented powers because of something the likes of which this nation had never seen before: their ability to stick together on every single issue with the sole purpose of obstructing Barack Obama and his Democratic allies. It was an 'I Hope He Fails' strategy hatched in the ratings-driven studios of talk radio, but now rigid legislative fealty to the on-air musings of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck had ground Washington to a total halt.

During the 2016 US presidential campaign, the hatred shown toward Hillary Clinton far outstripped even the most virulent criticisms that could legitimately be pinned on her. She was linked with “evil” and widely compared to a witch, which is to say that she was attacked as a woman, not as a political leader. After her defeat, some of those critics dug out the song “Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead,” sung in The Wizard of Oz to celebrate the Witch of the East’s death—a jingle already revived in the UK at the time of Margaret Thatcher’s death in 2013. This reference was brandished not only by Donald Trump’s electors, but also by supporters of Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s main rival in the primaries. On Sanders’ official site, a fundraising initiative was announced under the punning title “Bern the Witch”—an announcement that the Vermont senator’s campaign team took down as soon as it was brought to his attention. Continuing this series of limp quips, the conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh quipped, “She’s a witch with a capital B”—he can’t have known that, at the Salem witch trials in the seventeenth century, a key figure had already exploited this consonance by calling his servant, Sarah Churchill, who was one of his accusers, “bitch witch.” In reaction, female Democrat voters started sporting badges calling themselves “Witches for Hillary” or “Hags for Hillary.”48

Barry Soetoro’s declaration of martial law stunned the nation. His reason—the need to protect the nation from terrorism—met with widespread skepticism. After all, at least three of the Saturday jihadists had entered with Soetoro’s blessing, over the objections of many politicians and the outraged cries of all those little people out there in the heartland, all those potential victims no one really gave a damn about. His suspension of the writ of habeas corpus went over the heads of most of the millions of people in his audience, since they didn’t know what the writ was or signified. He didn’t stop there. He adjourned Congress until he called it back into session, and announced an indefinite stay on all cases before the courts in which the government was a defendant. His announcement of press and media censorship “until the crisis is past” met with outrage, especially among the talking heads on television, who went ballistic. Within thirty minutes, the listening audience found out what the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus meant: FBI agents arrested select television personalities, including some who were literally on camera, and took them away. Fox News went off the air. Most of the other networks contented themselves with running the tape of Soetoro behind the podium making his announcement, over and over, without comment. During the day FBI agents arrested dozens of prominent conservative commentators and administration critics across the nation, including Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Michelle Malkin, George Will, Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Ralph Peters, Judge Jeanine Pirro, Matt Drudge, Thomas Sowell, Howard Stern, and Charles Krauthammer, among others. They weren’t given a chance to remain silent in the future, but were arrested and taken away to be held in an unknown location until Soetoro decided to release them.

Many years later, the right wing continued to lambast Sagan well after the man was dead, while Seitz’s attack on nuclear winter was reprised by Rush Limbaugh in the 1990s and by novelist Michael Crichton in the 2000s.110 What was going on? The answer is that the right-wing turn against science had begun.

Rush Limbaugh nailed it on his broadcast: “Obamacare is not about improved healthcare or cheaper insurance or better treatment or insuring the uninsured, and it never has been about that. It’s about statism. It’s about expanding the government. It’s about control over the population. It is about everything but healthcare.” Obamacare is just one part of the unwanted, unnecessary, unaffordable fundamental transformation of America hoisted upon us; its premise is unquestionable government control over a free people. Limbaugh’s message echoes that of early nineteenth-century minister William John Henry Boetcker: “You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. . . . You cannot build character and courage by taking away man’s initiative and independence. . . . You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.” Good leaders understand that the ills of our economy and our society won’t be solved by a bigger, more intrusive government. The answer to restoring America is to restore her values of freedom, hard work, and individual initiative. SWEET FREEDOM IN Action Today, get more informed about how big government is antithetical to America’s foundational principles. Work to elect leaders who promise (and then deliver!) to rein in government, repeal Obamacare, and return power to the people, who can make better decisions for themselves, their families, and their businesses than bureaucrats ever will.   DAY 92

In November 2012, on the day after the first black president won reelection to a second term, Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio talk show host, went on the air and lamented to his listeners. “I went to bed last night thinking we’re outnumbered,” Limbaugh said. “I went to bed last night thinking we’ve lost the country. I don’t know how else you look at this.

Mild though Obama’s observations were, all the tropes of the angry black man out to get revenge were thrown at him, especially in talk shows on radio and TV, with Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck leading the charge. Among other things, Obama’s policies were accused of being covert attempts at getting ‘reparations’ for slavery, segregation, and discrimination.

This complacency with the social order, however, is not experienced as complacency, but as defiance. Our complacency—our conformism—feels as if it is radical activity: today, we think we are challenging authority at precisely the moment we are most wholly following its dictates. This is why political conservatives increasingly see themselves—and paint their conservatism—as rebellious. For them, conservatism represents a willingness to defy the ruling structure of contemporary society. FOX News represents its conservativism as an “alternative” to the dominant ideology. And even someone like Rush Limbaugh can imagine himself (like the Leftist of old) “telling truth to power.” Most of its practitioners today define conservatism as a radical program—thus the “Republican Revolution” of 1994—despite how this contradicts the very definition of the term “conservative.” Whereas within the society of prohibition it is relatively easy to distinguish between conformity and defiance, this becomes increasingly difficult within a society structured around the command to enjoy. This is because, in a society of enjoyment, we no longer experience the explicit prohibition from the social order, which lets us know that the symbolic order is structuring and determining our behavior. We don’t experience the symbolic law in its prohibitory form, and so we imagine that, when we act, we are acting without reference to the symbolic law, that it does not shape our actions. Our failure to experience the impinging of the symbolic law, however, doesn’t mean that it does not exist.

It's never time to panic, folks. It's never, ever gonna be time to give up on our country. It will never be time to give up on the United States. It will never be time to give up on yourselves.

the point. She doesn’t blow smoke.

and

Romney was not an ideologue. He prided himself on this fact. Though he was a Republican, he had no patience for Rush Limbaugh and never read the National Review. If he adhered to any kind of conservatism at all, it was of the small-c variety. He was a believer in fiscal prudence and sober thinking, in well-produced white papers and the Wall Street Journal, in spreadsheets and data and running the numbers one more time. He saw himself, proudly, as a partisan of pragmatism.

Richardson offered a theory as to why these chaos architects (Buchanan, Agnew, Gingrich, even Reagan) and those who benefitted from their systems were able to manipulate and experiment with the government: because “they expected that the guardrails would hold. I always think of them like toddlers: toddlers fight against their parents because they know their parents aren’t going to throw them in the trash, and they behave well for someone who they think might throw them in the trash. They could do all this because they knew they could get away with it, because American democracy was so strong. They were provocateurs deliberately, to put themselves in power. They were all about power.” Unfortunately, it paid off. The toddlers continued taking advantage of waves of populism and national anger, while their system of disruptive governance empowered or inspired antagonistic characters beyond the Capitol, like talk radio host Rush Limbaugh.

The reason Limbaugh gets so much airtime is pretty obvious: people like him. He is a principled conservative with a populist foundation, and he discusses issues that hit people where they live. For those who are of a different political persuasion, he offers an invaluable window on what Republicans are thinking. Personally, I find him witty, funny, and often wrong. If NOW finds him too wrong to ignore, then countering his ideas would be the principled and feminist thing to do. But, alas, NOW [National Organization for Women] has nothing of substance to say. Instead, its Flush Rush campaign just gives Limbaugh more proof that the "feminazis" are alive and well.

Theoretically, people might form intentional communities (the current term for communes) and/or polyamorous clans of one hundred to one hundred fifty in Ecotopia (the term for a theoretical independent Pacific Northwest), living off the land, all local and sustainable-like. But these utopian societies won't be able to count on being left alone to live peacefully. The millions of partisans who follow Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and right-wing televangelists happen to be the best-armed people around, and they despise just about everyone who doesn't think and pray like them. They will see collapse as affirmation of their beliefs that secular liberalism is destructive. They will also see it as an opportunity to create a new, ordered world atop the ashes. They will act to stop teenage sluts from getting abortions, teach niggers a lesson, and slaughter those spics, dots, and everyone else who doesn't fit into their vision of what and who is right. ¶ Anarchist may opt out of revolution, but counterrevolution will come to them.

cumulonimbus

Alaska.

And everybody knows a party means food!” Liberty yelled, causing a passing woman in a velvet dress to drop her fan to the ground.

Buh-buh-buh-bagel time

Cam’s Presidential Team.

Hey, buddy,” Liberty yelled, “back away from the saddlebag. My snacks are in there!” The man looked shocked, backed up, and fell over into a tub beside the road. Water splashed over a woman dressed in fine clothes, who yelled at the man. Wet in the tub, the man pointed at Liberty, who looked just like any horse on the street. The drenched woman

Compassion is no substitute for justice.

Why would we expect the French to fight to liberate the Iraqis when they wouldn't fight to liberate themselves?

Not many Americans know Myron Magnet or his work, but they know Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Alex Jones, Lou Dobbs, and an endless stream of professional nuts and cranks who roam the internet selling conspiracies, bitterness, grievance, and anger, in search of an argument.

In the words of President Obama to his fellow Americans, “If you’re someone who only reads the editorial page of the New York Times, try glancing at the page of the Wall Street Journal once in awhile. If you’re a fan of Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh, try reading a few columns on the Huffington Post website. It may make your blood boil; your mind may not often be changed. But the practice of listening to opposing

There will be increasingly widespread and organized efforts to shut down the Rush Limbaughs, Sarah Palins, Glenn Becks and other known conservatives and Christians across the land. Those

She squeezed the left side of his face.

The things she worried about on a daily basis included but were not limited to: Children starving in Africa. Chemicals in her daughter’s food and drinking water. Corruption in Washington, everywhere you looked. The poor, who no one even talked about anymore. Rape in the Congo, which didn’t seem to be going away, despite so much talk. Rape at elite American colleges, which wasn’t going away either. Plastic. Oil in the Gulf. Beer commercials, in which men were always portrayed as dolts who thought exclusively about football, and women as insufferable nags who only cared about shopping. The evils of the Internet. Sweatshops, and, in the same vein, where exactly everything in their life came from—their meat, their clothes, their shoes, their cell phones. The polar bears. The Kardashians. China. The poisonous effects of Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and the seemingly limitless pornography online. The gun-control laws that would likely never come, despite the five minutes everyone spent demanding them whenever a child or a politician got shot. The cancer various members of her family would eventually get, from smoking, microwaves, sunlight, deodorant, and all the other vices that made life that much more convenient and/or bearable. Throughout each day, the world’s ills ran through her head, sprinkled in with thoughts about what she should make for dinner, and when she was due for a cleaning at the dentist, and whether they should have another baby sometime soon. She wondered if everyone was like this, or if most people were able to tune it all out, the way her sister seemed to. Even Dan didn’t care all that much about the parts of the world that were invisible to him. But Kate couldn’t forget.

We are currently living through a version of 28 Days Later. In this analogy, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and the rest of their depraved ilk comprise the group that’s spent two decades exalting ignorance, demeaning truth and preaching bigotry, seeding and feeding the rage virus.

Well, we are certainly experiencing a heyday for irrational discourse and 'alternate facts.' Donald Trump, Alex Jones, Devin Nunes, Ann Coulter, Dinexh D'Souza, Kellyanne Conway, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Rush Limbaugh, and the entire Republican congressional caucus inhabit a world in which down is up, up is down, and science is fake news. It is hard for some people to have faith in American institutions when they are being told every day that climate change is a hoax, that Obama is a Kenyan, that the United States government brought down the Twin Towers, that the grieving parents of murdered Sandy Hook kindergartners are "crisis actors," and that Hillary Clinton is splitting time cooking up uranium deals with the Russians and running a child-sex ring out of a pizzeria. Not to mention every word that tumbles from Donald Trump's lying mouth.

If we feel and learn nothing from the tragedies of the past, then we'll never know how to truly help avoid those same tragedies in the future. Certainly, we can't avoid all pain and suffering, but we can and should learn from it.

Pete, to his credit, would respond to Rush at a Las Vegas town hall in a viral moment: The idea of the likes of Rush Limbaugh or Donald Trump lecturing anybody on family values. I mean, I’m sorry, but one thing about my marriage is it’s never involved me having to send hush money to a porn star after cheating on my spouse, with him or her. So, if they want to debate family values, let’s debate family values, I’m ready.