Rush's Bizarre Flight of Self-Contradictory Fantasy

Rush Limbaugh had an interesting (and by interesting I mean "disturbing") flight of fancy on his show recently.  The transcript of this is posted on his site under the title "All Great Statists Target the Elderly."

This off handed riff starts with one of Rush's favorite hobby horses, that tax cuts are the best way to stimulate the economy and reduce unemployment.  This may well be the case, but it's hard to make it an interesting discussion, as much as Rush tries.  Supply side economics just doesn't bring in the audience the way that a good old fashioned tirade does.

Perhaps this is why Rush slides weirdly over to his assertion that the Left is trying to kill off old people, because old people are the ones who are the keepers of the "cultural and social goodness," the ones who remember the way the world was before those cursed Democrats got into power.  This extended riff is insulting to everyone involved, including Rush's own audience.  Let me count the ways:

1.    Using historical examples of genocide, mass slaughter, and the massacre that was the Chinese Cultural Revolution only undermines your own point.  Unless you are talking about situations of genocide and mass slaughter, which are actually happening in the world today.  

2.    Rush's entire riff is based on the assumption that the Left is attempting to take away health care from old people.  This is utterly baffling.  How does he get from "public health care system" to "shutting down nursing homes"?  Where is this coming from?  Rush doesn't say, and I have no idea.  Maybe it's my fault for spending so much time following the "state controlled media" like the New York Times, CNN, and Washington Post.

3.    If there is one person squealing about the excesses of the Medicare system and how it needs to be strangled, it is Rush Limbaugh.  This is his very favorite thing!  He talks about it all the time!  Particularly now, because he likes to say "look how fraudulent and pork barrel Medicare has become!  And these people think they can extend Medicare to the entire country?"  

Rush Limbaugh has called Medicare a "socialist" measure more times than I can count.  But now in this latest article, he is somehow Medicare's greatest defender, and the Left wants to pull the plug on it.  What?

4.    Rush draws the comparison between the Left wanting to kill all the old people, and when Mao Tse-Tung "took out the educated people."  That's rich, coming from someone who constantly uses the words "elite," particularly "cultural elite," as well as "college educated," "intellectual," and "Ivy league" as slurs.

Rush is our country's greatest anti-intellectual.  If you listen to Rush, you learn that the more education someone has, the less they are to be trusted.  (Why else would someone prefer George W. Bush over Barack Obama?)  Rush plays right to the lowest common denominator, and he harps on that audience's fear and distrust of "intellectuals."

Rush finishes off by pointing out that Pol Pot wiped out the middle class in Cambodia because "these dictator types" have to slaughter their opponents in order to take the reins of the country.  Melodramatic much?  Does Rush really, honestly believe that Obama is going to set up death camps and killing fields in order to accomplish his aims?  Hard to say, but it sure does get his audience's blood up.