Among all the many and varied forms of nuttiness that comes pouring out of Rush Limbaugh's mouth when he starts talking about health care reform is his latest jab, when he called it a "civil rights bill."  The mind boggling thing is that he meant that as a bad thing.

He also called it "reparations."  So the racist implications here are clear: bleeding heart liberals want to provide black people with health care, out of a constant need to deprecate themselves to black people.  For shame!

And people have the nerve to say Rush isn't a racist.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 granted voting rights to all Americans regardless of the color of their skin, and ended the racial segregation of schools, workplaces, and all public facilities.  Martin Luther King Jr. marched in favor of the Civil Rights Act.  The Ku Klux Klan marched against it.  Crosses were burned; people were killed.  After a long and difficult struggle, institutional racism was finally brought to an end when the Civil Rights Act came into place.

And Rush Limbaugh is using the term as a slur.

I want you to stop and digest that for a moment.  Set aside your opinions about the health care issue.  In fact, set aside everything you know about Rush Limbaugh, and just think about what sort of person would use "civil rights bill" as an insult.

Now let's move on to the other insult he hurled, "reparations."  The term "reparations" is actually used any time one person gives money to an aggrieved party.  If you lose a lawsuit, the money that you pay to your opponent is legally known as "reparations."

However, we can assume from context that Rush meant "reparations" as in "reparations for slavery."  This is the idea that the descendents of slaves should receive some kind of compensation for the horrors inflicted upon their ancestors.  

Taken together, as they were delivered, "civil rights bill" and "reparations" are clearly thinly veiled code for "black people."  What Rush Limbaugh is saying, in his eternally, transparently disingenuous fashion, is that health care reform is meant to provide benefits to black people.  And furthermore, that this is a bad thing.

Okay, so first of all, I don't think anyone would dispute that black people will benefit from health care reform.  So will white people.  So will people of every other race who are suffering from poor or nonexistent health care benefits, like the 50 million uninsured Americans.

But what Rush is implying is that health care reform is for black people EXCLUSIVELY.  And that this is a bad thing.  

It was buried deep within his ongoing hours-long rant about health care reform in general, so I'm not surprised that a lot of people missed it.  Those clever people over at Media Matters caught it, though, and I owe them my thanks.

I wonder what would happen if Rush held a press conference to say what he just said?  "Health care reform is designed to benefit black people exclusively, and this is a bad thing."  But of course, we all know that he doesn't have the guts to be that bold.  For all his buffoonery, Rush is a noted coward.