Rush Limbaugh has previously slammed "crazy environmentalist wackos," but he seemed to embrace the practice of recycling on his radio show today. Rush attacked President Obama throughout the show, deriding last night's State of the Union address, and if Limbaugh's smears seemed familiar to regular listeners, they were -- he got plenty of extra mileage out of smears he's already used plenty of times before.

Limbaugh started his show by comparing Obama's “pathetic” State of the Union address to “a speech by Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro.” Only two weeks ago, Limbaugh told his listeners, “I think Obama has the same speechwriter as Hugo Chavez.” Rush equated the president with Chavez last November, too. When Obama gave a speech on national security in May 2009, Limbaugh asserted that “we got Castro'd.” Then in September, while pushing the tired “death panel” falsehood about health care reform, Limbaugh again compared Obama to Castro.

Limbaugh again invoked Chavez and Castro a little later in today's show while attacking Obama as a “delirious” and “petty, little man” and likening the president to a “little kid” who “becomes king due to a premature death.” (Don't worry -- Rush assured his listeners that he doesn't like to say these things about the president of the United States.) A week ago, Limbaugh described the president as a “spoiled-rotten little man-child” and suggested he is “delusional.” Limbaugh made a habit of referring to Obama as a “boy” and a “man-child” throughout 2009, in addition to calling him a “a small and petty, spoiled little man.”

In the second hour of today's show, Limbaugh stated that Obama's promise to uphold laws requiring equal pay for women was actually an effort to pit “groups of Americans against each other” and to expand Obama's “enemies list,” which Limbaugh said is “longer than any enemies list I have ever seen.” That echo listeners heard was from August, when Rush joined a slew of other media conservatives in asserting that “the White House is gathering an enemies list.” Limbaugh and other conservative media figures had similarly accused the White House of compiling an “enemies list” after a March 2009 report that "[t]op Democrats" were “depicting Rush Limbaugh as the new face of the Republican Party.”

One thing that stands out to me is that the circumstances under which Limbaugh was discussing Obama were very different in many of these cases: national security, health care reform, women's rights. But Rush came back to the same attacks time after time. It makes me wonder if Limbaugh would make the same attacks regardless of what Obama says or does.