Limbaugh, lord of louts

If you like Rush Limbaugh, I don’t like you. If you thought he was clever back when he was making jokes about young Chelsea Clinton, calling her the “White House dog” at a time when she was entering puberty, then you’re not someone I want to know. Grown men (or women) who think it’s funny to laugh at adolescent girls as they make the painful transition to adulthood are beneath contempt.

You’re a lousy human being if you thought Rush Limbaugh was making a cogent political point when he mimicked Michael J. Fox twitching with the effects of Parkinson’s disease, using that grotesque charade of a debilitating affliction in order to accuse Mr. Fox of exaggerating the symptoms of his disease to win sympathy. If you think it’s fair game to mock a man’s disease to score a cheap political point, I don’t want to know you.

If you consider yourself to be one of Limbaugh’s “Ditto Heads,” then I think you’re a mindless automaton. If you think it was just brilliant of Rush Limbaugh to come up with the term “femi-Nazi” for women who sought equal pay for equal work, then I think you are, like the man you revere, a sexist swine.

No day goes by that Rush Limbaugh doesn’t say something incendiary, offensive or repulsive. He’s been poisoning public discourse for a long time now, spewing hatred, fear and lies to listeners who revel in the nastiness. But he exceeded even his own levels of despicable behavior last week when he referred to women who wanted government assistance to pay for contraceptive devices as “sluts,” singling out a young Georgetown coed for particular abuse, a woman who had committed the offense against men like Limbaugh when she testified before Congress on the need for contraception.

In the creepiest way imaginable, Limbaugh said that women who wanted their contraceptives paid for should be required to have their sex acts posted online because, in his tortured and perverted logic, taxpayers will have helped to pay for that sex and deserved, therefore, to be voyeuristic observers when it takes place. What kind of mind can come up with something like that?

If Rush Limbaugh’s consistent pattern of sexism and racism doesn’t offend you, then you have the decency and the discernment of a guttersnipe, the sensibilities of a thug, and the sexual imagination of a pervert. A man like Limbaugh is a stain on this country and an ongoing insult to the women who are so persistently targeted for his attacks.