I happened to catch a few minutes of Limbaugh, in a couple of segments today, and I concluded that the man is genuinely, truly, literally, crazy.
I've never thought that way about Limbaugh before. When he was first on I liked him and found him entertaining, but I have concluded that he has quite literally gone nuts. Here are the things he said today that made me conclude that.
First, I caught him talking about President Obama as a "Chicago style thug", which is ok. Nothing nuts so far. He was talking about how Obama and his gang of thugs had done all sorts of mean nasty things, like leaking his senate opponent's divorce papers. I don't know if that, or some of the related allegations are in the least bit true. They could be, although I doubt that it's quite the way it was presented. So far, nothing nuts. Then, however, he went into wackoland.
Among the things that Obama and his cronies had done was engineered the collapse of the US economy in the fall of 2008 so that he could get elected. Rush was serious, or at least he sounded serious to me. The economic collapse was a Democratic Party conspiracy, aimed at getting Barack Obama into the White House.
I was amazed. It got me to thinking, too. Why would anyone bother with such a conspiracy? Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that such a conspiracy existed. It's aim was to bring their guy to the White House. However, the current occupant of the White House (George W. Bush) was powerless to get in their way. So, let's examine the premise. The conspirators desperately want the White House. They are willing to sink the US economy in order to get it. They have the ability to make that happen. However, the actual occupant of the White House doesn't have the power to stop it.
Why bother with a highly destructive conspiracy to gain power, when apparently, there isn't a whole lot of power involved, since there wasn't enough power to prevent the conspiracy from succeeding. It's classic conspiracy theory stuff, and every bit as nutty.
Even that I could brush off because, although nutty, you could just say that it's plain old knee jerk blame the other side for everything talk. It's not so much nutty as mindless. However, later in the show, a caller called in an asked, since GM was controlled by Obama (and the unions, which were all Obama people), would buying a car from GM be equivalent to a campaign contribution to Obama, and therefore would it be wise to avoid buying GM cars?
To my astonishment, Limbaugh said yes, and said that the same thing was true about Chrysler.
So, here's uber-patriot Rush Limbaugh encouraging his audience to buy foreign cars, sinking American industry. (Fords were apparently ok, since they hadn't taken the money.) That's crazy talk.
Lately, Mark Steyn has been guest hosting a lot. I've been liking Steyn a lot. He's witty, and not too crazy. He does a good job of bashing leftist excess, while not sounding like a wing nut. Frankly, he reminds me of the Rush from two decades ago. Sure, he's predictably conservative, and I disagree with him on many topics, but he isn't so loony about it. I think Rush should step away from the microphone, and go into a very long, and much needed, vacation. Thanks, Rush, for the memories, but it really is time to move on.
