everybody calm down

Time to chill out -- no serious lawmakers are pursuing a Fairness Doctrine of any kind. It's not going to happen.

Rush Limbaugh's op-ed letter to President Obama in today's Wall Street Journal is a fantasy.

The hysteria over the specter of the Fairness Doctrine can only be coming from two possible places:

1) Confusion and learned behavior: The Far Right is doubling down in anticipation of being completely ostracized and shut out of the public discourse. This is not an unreasonable assumption, considering they were successful in treating left-wing media voices this way when their party was in power, especially from late 2001 through 2003. They have been so conditioned by the political culture they have helped distort and destroy for the last decade that they can't even fathom that Obama is not Bush: Left Wing Edition.

2) Strategy and arm-flailing: As they are plunged more deeply into irrelevance, and as their populist messaging runs up against the hard realities of a severe economic downturn, right-wing demagoguery simply requires new sensational topics to keep the hordes frothing. One can only fill so much airtime professing hope that Obama fails and warning that ARRA makes us a socialist state. The rest of the 24 hours news cycle must be filled with something -- so whatever gaps are left after a few hours of gay-bashing can be filled with dire warnings about liberal conspiracies to muzzle conservative media.


As usual, reality is probably some combination of the two.