Rush got a lot of flak for his comments yesterday politicizing the Haitian earthquake, but when a woman phoned into his show today to confront him about it he had an explanation at the ready. It turns out that Rush wasn't using a tragic natural disaster with a death toll in the tens of thousands to attack President Obama, he was using a tragic natural disaster with a death toll in the tens of thousands to “tweak” the media.

From the January 14 edition of The Rush Limbaugh Show:

LIMBAUGH: I play the media like a violin, like a Stradivarius, and I love tweaking them, I love irritating them, and I love upsetting them. And all I do is take words uttered by liberals and apply them to current events. It was Harry Reid who looked at Obama and said he's a light-skinned guy that doesn't speak--

[...]

And then I proceeded to suggest that Obama's going to be giving aid to both light-skinned and dark-skinned negroes in Haiti, and I--and it's just designed to get the reaction I got. And it worked. The people that listen to this program laugh and chuckle every day at this stuff because we're just needling the--needling the media. And they talk about me all the time and I can create it any time I want.

Let's give Rush the benefit of the doubt and assume, in spite of ample evidence that he focused his narration regarding the earthquake on Obama, that his primary intent was to use his finely tuned sense of satire to bait the media and thereby provide a commentary on their supposed propensity to blow his statements out of proportion. Well, what an achievement, and what a time to make that point.

Rush had opined earlier in his broadcast that in their coverage of the earthquake the media are “making it about them.” An hour or two later, Rush reframed his remarks from yesterday to show us that he's making it about himself.