....LMB: "Big Crazy Rush"....

April 19, 2004

A lotta lefty bloggers are pointing out this latest Rush Limbaugh absurdity:

Hillary [Clinton] wants to be on the VP ticket so that she dispels the notion that the Clintons are sabotaging the campaign and so that she can also go out there and really be the star. She'd be the star because she'll be the one bringing excitement to it. And, by the way, she'll get all kinds of criticism and the Republicans will launch all they've got at her, and she'll endure that. They know that they're pretty confident Kerry is going to lose and if Kerry wins there's always Fort Marcy Park.

I didn't catch the reference, but apparently Fort Marcy Park is where the body of Vince Foster was found. And according to right-wing nutjob mythology, Hillary Clinton had Vince Foster killed to cover up, I dunno, something or another.

So... Rush Limbaugh is arguing that Hillary Clinton wants to run as John Kerry's running mate... to sabotage his campaign... or, if he wins... to assassinate him and seize control of the US government.

Not the craziest theory I've ever heard, but still doesn't place into what we call "The Sanity Rainbow."

At this point, a lot of liberal folks get outraged at a conservative making such slanderous charges and joking so easily about violence and death. This in turn makes conservatives laugh and say "liberals just don't get it." And in a way, the conservatives are right on this one.

I don't entirely understand it, but there is a sense of humor among conservatives in which calling for deadly mayhem to befall a person who disagrees with your political opinion (or thousands of such people), is just a harmless joke. These statements are hyperbole with which they express how much they despise their opponents; conservatives don't actually intend these statements as threats (except when they do).

So non-conservatives, lighten up.

But since we're talking Rush Limbaugh and crazy, I'll have to share some of my favorite Rush nuttiness; for a year and a half, I had to study the works of this jackasss as a research assistant in graduate school.

1. Rush was ranting about activists protesting against Gulf War I back in 1991. He was really piling the insulting adjectives on thick, something like "those lazy, traitorous, long-haired, tree-hugging, dope-smoking..." (yes, I know the irony of the "dope-smoking" epithet) when out came the eye-popping one:

"maggot-infested."

"Maggot-infested"? Did these protesters have gangrene? Where they the walking dead? Did they just have an unhealthy fixation on fly larvae? I heard this quote and just laughed my ass off.

2. The summer of 1999. Rush is Clinton-hating in a major way. Then he starts guaranteeing his audience that no matter who wins the 2000 election, that Bill Clinton will refuse to vacate the White House. He will call out the national guard and fleets of tanks to protect his throne, staging a violent coup in Washington DC. Even at the time, this prediction seemed a bit... unlikely. Of course, time has proven Rush wrong on this one, but in the strange world of Right-Wing folklore, the Clintons are the most power-hungry individuals in the history of the world. If we can make it through our lifetimes without the Clintons enslaving mankind, then we're all damn lucky.

3. While researching Rush, we couldn't always get audio recordings or transcripts of his shows, and sometimes had to rely on a Rush fan who would listen to the show every day, and condense the three hours of hot gas into about 15 pages of typed summary.

One such summary described Rush's introduction of a bit of science news, followed by his response to it. Some public interest group had done a study on the unhealthiness of many popular snack foods, and issued a press release about their findings. It claimed that movie theater popcorn was some of the most dangerous stuff around, due to (I think) the high levels of saturated fat in the butter used to pop the popcorn.

This caused Rush to blow several gaskets, lose some marbles, and make cuckoo clock noises.

Rush first began to sing the praises of movie theater butter, and popcorn made with it. He said that the kitchen at his radio studio used such butter because it made the tastiest popcorn. Air-popped popcorn just tasted inferior.

Then he began blasting this "pointy-headed liberals" trying to legislate everything and take the popcorn away, and he kept at it for quite a while. Note: the guys who came up with this study were not the Democrats, and they did not propose to take movie theater butter away from anybody, they just told everyone that the butter was bad for your health.

They cut to commercial or station ID or something, and when the come back, Rush apologizes for his earlier rant. And then he starts yelling about the popcorn butter again.

All told, Rush's popcorn rant took up three pages of the fifteen page summary!

That's some crazy shit.