Congressman Joe Sestak (D-7) and radio host Rush Limbaugh had a little tussle over the weekend, after Limbaugh called Sestak a “dangerous, left-wing, radical ideologue” for supporting the Obama administration’s decision to try Guantanamo detainees in the United States.

Airing comments Sestak made in a television interview, Limbaugh said the decision to try the detainees in the U.S. was being done “precisely to appease the left” (audio above).

Sestak’s Senate campaign shot back in a statement Saturday.

“Rush Limbaugh’s attacks on a Veteran for supporting our American values shows a lack of understanding and respect for the very people who serve our country to defend those values,” the campaign said. “Instead of helping to bring about justice for the families who lost loved ones on 9/11, too many in Washington seem interested in politicizing the issue of prosecuting terror suspects.”

As expected, both he and his listeners are following what has become the well-trod path of conservative victimization and denial. First, Rush never said any of those racist things he’s accused of saying. Where’s your proof? What are the dates? Let’s hear the tapes.

Ah, but Mr. Limbaugh and his listeners have been engaged in this race-baiting diatribe far too long for others not to have taken notice. So, when the proof is offered up in the way of audio and video recordings along with Limbaugh’s own writings, then the excuse becomes, “It was taken out of context. It’s just his brand of humor. You don’t get it.” Apparently, these folks are unaware of just how low one must go in the human character department to actually think any of this is funny.

Then, of course, we move on to, “Well, the other side does it, too.”

Is it just me, or do these people unceasingly sound like bratty children?

“I didn’t do it.” “She did it first.” “Well, they started it!”

Honestly.

I really don’t know if these folks are truly incapable of grasping the reality that the rest of us live in, or if they just enjoy throwing fits and martyring themselves, and I really don’t care. I’m tired of having my country held hostage by this crowd of tantrum-throwing children.

Rush insists that what has been done to him is nothing more than “Obama’s America on full display.” Well, he’s right.

In Obama’s America, the one that was democratically chosen by a majority of voters in the 2008 presidential election, decent people have decided that this brand of bigoted, racist, self-serving, incendiary bile is no longer tolerable and no longer acceptable. And neither are those who spew it.

OK, but doesn’t civility go both ways? Do lefty blogs regularly referring to social-issues conservatives as “wingnuts” add much to dialogue? Or the suggestion that Republicans are “immoderate and irrelevant” (The Inquirer’s Dick Polman), or “somewhere between a doomsday cult and Scientology” (Frank Rich in the The Times)?

There was a country once where the left liked to poke fun at the right for its narrowness and absurdity. The theory was to subject it to ridicule and, perhaps, provoke more extreme responses that would discredit the right even further. The country was Weimar Germany. The strategy worked.

As I wrote, I don’t think Murphy is a big enough fish for Limbaugh to fry like he’s been doing to people like RNC Chairman Michael Steele.

That being said, are you listening Rush?

UPDATE: It looks like sayitaintsoalready.com is keeping an eye on this.

“Rush Limbaugh is a racist, he’s a cancer to the Republican Party and he should be excised,” Murphy said recently.

Those aren’t unusual sentiments. But what is unusual is hearing them from a Republican candidate for office. Republicans far and wide have been prostrating themselves before Limbaugh in recent months, who has been effective at leveraging his massive conservative audience into allegiance from elected officials in the party. But Murphy, an underdog Republican candidate for Senate, says Limbaugh can’t be the voice of the party.

“My opponents are afraid to say that,” Murphy, told pa2010.com recently.

He’s got a point. Incumbent Senator Arlen Specter, working hard to court the party’s conservative base ahead of a grueling primary next year, recently said of Limbaugh: “I like him.”

Murphy, by far the least known of the four Republican Senate candidates, has such a low profile that it’s unlikely he’ll get caught up in the apologize-to-Rush game that has snagged his more prominent colleagues in recent months. But he’s also clearly hoping his stance against Limbaugh will bolster his credentials as a more independent Republican.

“People like Rush and [radio host] Laura Ingraham, they’re really destroying our party, and we need to wake up and see that,” Murphy said, adding that his would be a “different kind of Republican candidacy.”

“It’s not going to mean-hearted, it’s not going to be sound bites,” he said.

Former Congressman Pat Toomey and conservative activist Peg Luksik are also running against Specter in next year’s primary.

Republican Senate candidate Larry Murphy