El Rushbo and race

Conor Friedersdorf does an excellent job covering an article on Rush Limbaugh in Commentary, and highlighting Jonathan Chait's response.  Conor's wrap up is great:

In partisan politics, the knee-jerk reaction is to defend whoever on your side is being attacked in the media, whether they're right or wrong. What's happened lately is that Rush Limbaugh makes a remark that is intentionally racially provocative, knowing he'll be attacked in the media for it – the offensive mockery of Chinese dialect is the latest example – and true to form, many on the right defend him, no matter how outrageous his remarks.
Apparently they're oblivious to the problem: the knee-jerk instinct to rally around your ieological ally is problematic in this case because it entails rallying around a racial provacateer who consistently exploits America's fraught relationship with race in order to play on the anxieties and prejudices of his audience.
For all Rush Limbaugh's supposed brilliance and quick-wittedness, he would be terrified to debate a critic in a neutral written form – he knows that stripped of his broadcasting mastery, call screeners, and a medium where flawed arguments drift into the ether without rebuttal, his ideas would be shown for the weak, contemptible, indefensible nonsense that they are. A bully in the recording studio, he is too cowardly to test himself in direct debate on the Web.

It is good to see somebody who leans conservative take on the shameful race-baiting and worthless pontification of Rush.  But one of the quotes from Chait's post stands out to me:

Limbaugh is obsessed with race. In his telling, racism against whites does not just happen here or there, it has overwhelmed -- indeed, completely replaced -- traditional white-on-black racism. "Racism in this country is the exclusive province of the left," he says. In Limbaugh's world, minorities deploy racism endlessly and with impunity against whites, who are hamstrung by out-of-control political correctness. He presents Obama's agenda as the blacks' revenge against White America for slavery and Jim Crow. ("He's angry, he's gonna cut this country down to size, he's gonna make it pay for all the multicultural mistakes that it has made, its mistreatment of minorities.") Even such disparate events as a random school bus fight between a couple kids who happen to be black and a kid who happens to be white reveal, in Limbaugh's fevered mind, a widespread pattern of racial victimization against whites triggered by Obama:

You put your kids on a school bus, you expect safety but in Obama's America the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, "Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on," and, of course, everybody says the white kid deserved it, he was born a racist, he's white.

This attitude is so prevalent amongst people I have conversations with, it is almost unbelievable.  To listen to them tell it, white men in the United States suffer under reverse apartheid.  They are the most repressed ethnic group in this country.  Likewise, when they start talking about Islam in the United States, you would think that Christians are a distinct minority with no religious freedom.  According to them, there are too many mosques in this country already, and we shouldn't allow any more to be built.  Sharia law is going to be put into effect in the US.  Living in an area with nearly no blacks and nearly no Muslims, I don't understand where this idea would come from, if it weren't being blared into these folks' houses on television and radio.  Actually, I realize such ridiculous fears have been around ever since the civil rights era, but I am still puzzled by their persistence.