Rush to Judgement (politics here)

Newsweek on Rush Limbaugh and Addiction.

Since the Rush Limbaugh-addiction story broke, I've been somewhat torn on how to feel about it. In all honesty, I must admit to a certain amount of schadenfreude in the whole thing. I'd be lying if I said otherwise. I've never been particularly tolerant of those whose professed morality is as limited as Limbaugh's, and it's rarely surprising when their own frailties are exposed. I saw this kind of nonsense during the 1990s, when conservatives of all stripes would rail against Bill Clinton's infidelities when their own personal lives were hardly the picture of faith-and-chastity; I saw with Bill Bennett, who is perhaps the one person in America who has made more of a cottage industry from moralizing than Rush Limbaugh. The pattern is pretty familiar now, right down to the headache-inducing parsings following the outing: "My affairs were youthful indiscretions (committed when I was 40)." "You'll notice that I never talked about gambling, and at least I didn't bet the house we live in." "He got hooked accidentally, not like those people who look to get high."

Do I feel much sympathy for Mr. Limbaugh? I do not, I'm sorry to say. I've tried, because I view addiction as much more of a medical problem than a moral one, and I think that if our society takes the reverse tack, society's wrong. But this is a guy who has been very vocal in his years on the radio in favor of "Just say no" and "Addiction's a choice, not an illness" and "Send them up the river". So if he broke laws I disagree with in order to get his fix, well...I still believe the laws are unjust, but it somehow seems fitting that a guy who has spent so much time advocating those laws now faces them. It's awfully hard to take the moralists seriously when their lofty pronunciations of "This is how everyone should live" so often turn out to be "Everyone else should live this way, except me".

Some liberals are hoping for some kind of conversion here, a kind of "atheist on the deathbed" moment in which Mr. Limbaugh will realize that he's been wrong about drugs and addiction and that maybe treatment should be the way to go instead of punishing them all, but I rather doubt it. Sure, when he gets back to the radio maybe he'll pay some lip service to it all, but I expect him to simply bring the topic up a lot less. But Gary Bauer, one of the most visible conservatives out there, said this in the Newsweek story:

From a moral standpoint, there’s a difference between people who go out and seek a high and get addicted and the millions of Americans dealing with pain who inadvertently get addicted.

No change here that I can see: "It's not Rush's fault that he got addicted. His addiction's not a matter of choice. His addiction is just bad fortune." The subtext, of course, is that Rush is a rich white guy who happened to get addicted, as opposed to all the poor folks who choose to do so. Well, I'm sorry, I really am. But Rush is still a rich white guy, and he'll easily be able to get himself cleaned up and move on. If it turns out that he really did break laws to keep his habit going, I'll bet any time he ends up doing is in a minimum-security facility. Again, I'm torn: Do I hope that Rush Limbaugh is treated in the way that I think the vast majority of addicts should be treated, or do I hope that Rush Limbaugh is treated in the way that Rush Limbaugh has long maintained that the vast majority of addicts should be treated? Tough question, that. And to return to Mr. Bauer's statement, I don't know if there's really a moral difference between a rich person's painkiller habit and a poor person's crack habit, and in a way, I don't really care. As Stephen King once wrote, in reference to his own addictions, "We all look pretty much the same when we're puking in the gutter."