Rush Limbaugh and the Two Minute Hate

I am ashamed that Republicans are so simple. Like Lucy in Peanuts, Obama has once again offered the Republican Party a football to kick, and, like gullible old Charlie Brown, Republicans tried to kick it and ended up flat on their faces.

Obama's purpose should have been obvious. For the past eight years, the Democrats have made intense and persistent use of the Two Minute Hate technique that George Orwell described in Nineteen Eighty-Four:

The Hate had started. As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen...The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there were none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure...Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party--an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling... Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room ...In its second minute, the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen ...The Hate rose to its climax. The voice of Goldstein had become an actual sheep's bleat, and for an instant the face changed into that of a sheep...