Worst Human Being in the World: Rush Limbaugh

By Michael J.W. Stickings

He could be our Craziest Conservative of the Day, but I think he's actually much worse than that. (Our newest contributor, Nicholas Wilbur, will have more on Rush this afternoon.)

On his radio show yesterday, Dear Leader Rush actually said -- I kid you not -- that Arizona shooter Jared Lee Loughner has the full support of the Democratic Party:

What Mr. Loughner knows is that he has the full support of a major political party in this country. He's sitting there in jail. He knows what's going on, he knows that... the Democrat party is attempting to find anybody but him to blame. He knows if he plays his cards right, he's just a victim. He's the latest in a never-ending parade of victims brought about by the unfairness of America... this guy clearly understands he's getting all the attention and he understands he's got a political party doing everything it can, plus a local sheriff doing everything that they can to make sure he's not convicted of murder -- but something lesser.

This, of course, is completely made up, and, in typical blowhard manner, all he's trying to do -- as usual, he is utterly transparent -- is deflect the justifiable blame (not specifically for the shooting directly but for feeding the right-wing culture of violence, hate, and paranoia) that has been directed at conservatives the past few days.

It may very well be that he can't quite grasp this intellectually, but Democrats aren't actually trying to blame anybody else for the shooting but to supplement the blame that must obviously directed at Loughner with a deeper sense of the socio-political context of right-wing extremism that underpinned the shooting. (He may grasp this, of course, but, even if he does, he certainly doesn't care. For him, this isn't about the truth, about coming to terms with what happened and why, but about defending his right-wing ideology at all cost, and about trying to score partisan political points by lashing out and hoping his idiocy sticks. Which of course it does, with the idiots who follow him.)

As Andrew Sullivan notes, responding to Rush's comments:

Very very very few people have contributed more poison and hatred and extremism to the culture than Rush Limbaugh...

Again, the statement is so offensive and absurd one has to pinch oneself to believe someone actually said that about a mass murderer. No one has said something that crudely partisan about Loughner and the GOP. So this is actually a classic example of what some of us have long been worried about in "conservative" discourse. Limbaugh is not mainstream, you say? National Review just approvingly reprints excerpts from Limbaugh's show. He is untouchable; and his tone will not change.

And neither will the increasing right-wing extremism of conservative politics.