Who Weeps For Rush?

Okay, I have to hand it to them, conservative pundits really seem to be outdoing themselves today.

Even before he actually was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, everyone right of center was taking the opportunity to rake Al Gore over the coals over it.  From attacking the Nobel organization, to attacking Gore, to cranking up the volume on the anti-climate change argument, to semantics over what a Peace Prize entails, to making the connection that Al Gore now is in the same company of Yassir Arafat, there has been no shortage of smear on the former Vice President’s achievement.

But the big winner in who could be the most ludicrous in going after Gore’s Nobel Peace Price has got to be Rush Limbaugh.

Now, it’s been years and years since I’ve actually sat down to listen to an entire Rush program.  My father was a huge fan of his back when he was still centered out of Sacramento, but even then I remember how ill disposed to public service Rush was.  We already know that he deferred his butt off to stay out of Vietnam.  But even the much more cushy job of President of the United States was something Rush was just a little too busy for.

Back in those simpler times I remember Rush complaining about the pay cut he would have to take to fill the Oval Office, so you can tell what’s important to good ol’ Rush.  Public Service is out, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say that he’s not much of a philanthropist.

So, I think it’s safe to say that his single greatest contribution to the world is his three hour a day radio show and other appearances in mass media, preaching his message such as when he engendered good race relations by promoting a video that dubbed Barack Obama a “Magic Negro,” and implied that Donovan McNabb was overhyped because of some secret NFL affirmative action.  Or how about how he encouraged patriotic dissent when he called military service members “phony”, or his work with children, such as the “brain washed” Graeme Frost?

No, while it is his largest contribution to the world, the stuff that comes out of Rush Limbaugh’s mouth is all too often only capable of producing bile.  So, I must, at the very least, express amusement at the idea that Rush Limbaugh was also nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

But wait, there’s more:

While it may have been common knowledge in the Dittohead universe that Rush Limbaugh was nominated for the Nobel Prize this year, the story went largely unreported out here in the real world.

Even though Limbaugh had no chance, now that Al Gore is the official winner, Limbaugh is in a snit of jealousy:

LIMBAUGH: My lawyers at the Landmark Legal Foundation are looking into the possibility of filing an objection with the Nobel committee over the unethical tampering for this award that Al Gore is engaging in. This is clearly above and beyond the pale. I mean, this might happen in high school class president elections and so forth, but this is shameless.

Rush’s nomination sounds on the surface like a stunt dreamed up by Sascha Baron Cohen. A deeper dig reinforces the perception that it was a stunt.

For starters, it appears that Limbaugh de facto nominated himself. The nomination went out under the letterhead of “his lawyers” at the Landmark foundation, a rightwing nonprofit for which Limbaugh is an unpaid adviser. (Landmark’s donors include relatives of Richard Melon Scaife, the Pittsburgh heir and newspaper publisher who funded the Arkansas Project, a smear campaign against the Clintons that served as the prototype for what we now know as Swiftboating.)

Landmark’s president, Mark Levin, is a snarling, unappealing ideologue who made his name in the 1990s as a Clinton-basher on cable news. Levin is a Rush acolyte and wannabe who, despite having a voice that would curdle milk, has his own talk show.

Levin and Landmark are Limbaugh’s lapdogs. Even if the idea for the stunt didn’t come from Limbaugh himself, it was done with his approval and, more than likely, guidance.

I think what Rush might really be mad over is that not only did so many conservative blow hards beat him to the punch on raging against Al Gore’s Nobel, but also that his friends around the right-o-sphere (particularly Fox) weren’t at the very least saying that Rush should have been awarded instead.

Ah, poor Rush.  For him, watching the presidency ripped right out of Al Gore’s hands wasn’t nearly enough.  He has to try and lawyer up some sort of phony scandal about the Nobel as well.