This hour of the Limbaugh Wire brought to you by revisionist economic history
By Simon Maloy
We've reached the final hour, and Rush is feeling demoralized, but promised to soldier on regardless. For once, we sympathize with the man... Anyway, he kicked it off by attacking Brown University for dropping Columbus Day and renaming it Fall Weekend because students urged the change “after controversy arose over the nature of Christopher Columbus' conquests and treatment of Native Americans.” Rush laid into these Brown students, comparing their intellectual aptitude to the vast wastelands of the Sahara desert.
Then it was time for Rush's daily Tea Party plug, revisiting yesterday's conspiracy theory that ACORN will dispatch its elite infiltration units to cause violence at the Tea Parties in order to discredit them. Rush noted that Politico is reporting that ACORN is going to stage its own protests outside post offices to bring fairness to the tax code. Rush didn't really make a whole lot of noise about this, but we think he's missing the bigger picture. Just like how the White House is trying to distract the media by talking about the Saudi King, ACORN is trying to distract the media away from covering its Tea Party infiltration by staging these post office protests. And it is probably paying for all this with the $4 billion it got from the government! It all makes perfect sense...
Anyway, after attacking The New York Times and the Boston Globe over their ongoing dispute over the Globe's viability, Rush aired some audio from Obama's remarks this morning on housing, encouraging Americans to refinance their mortgages and to visit MakingHomeAffordable.gov to find out if they're eligible. Rush told his listeners not to fall for this, but said he might go to the website and plug in his $15 million mortgage to see if it will even accept it. Then he aired audio of Obama warning Americans against “scammers” offering to lower their mortgage rates. This was funny to Rush: "[H]e realizes he's got competition. He's in competition with the loan sharks, ladies and gentlemen."
After the break, Rush purported to offer the audience some examples of news stories that are not news, the most prominent being the New York Times' report that “President Obama plans to begin addressing the country's immigration system this year” despite political difficulties caused by the recession. Rush said this was not news because he predicted it last January, airing a clip of himself saying that immigration reform (“amnesty,” as he dubbed it) will be taken up again by Republicans or Democrats at some point in the future. Eat your heart out, Nostradamus.
As a counterweight to his slandering of the Brown University students at the top of the hour, Rush took a call from a college student claiming that his liberal economics professor was constantly running down supply-side economics, saying it doesn't work and that it exacerbates income inequality. Rush said supply-side does work. It works every time. It's brilliant. Just look at Ronald Reagan, said Rush. When he came into office, the top marginal tax rate was 70 percent, he cut it to 28 percent, and suddenly, the economy was hunky-dory. And it was all thanks to supply-side economics, which, according to Rush, is “simply capitalism,” and leaves money in the hands of the people, not government. We found it an interesting theory, but there was one niggling little detail that eluded us -- specifically how Reagan's multiple tax increases squared with this brilliant example of supply-side economics in motion. Anyway, Rush peppered the conversation with some digs at the student's “walking liberal cliché” professor who just wants to make “everyone miserable,” and found it sad that his parents paid so much money for tuition when all this young man had to do was call in to Rush's show for free to learn the “truth.”
Rush closed out the show by taking one more call, a devoted fan who nonetheless disagreed with Rush's attacks on the unions. Rush said he didn't have time to get into this because there were only a few seconds left in the program and promised to call the guy back tomorrow. But in that time, he did have Rush deny he'd been “critical of unions, per se”; rather, he'd been critical of the union leadership. Mere seconds later, Rush reiterated his devout reverence for “individuality” and said that when you join a union, “you're giving away your individuality.” We look forward to the conversation resuming tomorrow.
Speaking of tomorrow, that's when we'll be back, as we're all out of Limbaugh for today. We do hope you'll join us again, and to better understand our jokes so we don't have to explain them, please take a moment to peruse Media Matters' complete and unabridged Limbaugh coverage.
Highlights from Hour 3
Outrageous comments
LIMBAUGH: Making you money? What is it? MakingHomeAffordable.gov. Go in there and plug in your pathetic figures, listen to the administration's website tell you whether you qualify, but don't go out there -- don't go out there. And if anybody that demands money up front -- that's right. The government demands money all the time, at the end, from the front, from the rear, from the down, from the up. What do we got? We got scammers out there?
Obama is admitting that there are scam artists in America now that he's president? They're going to take advantage of the people? Don't be fooled. So, he realizes he's got competition. He's in competition with the loan sharks, ladies and gentlemen.
Clips from this hour: