Rush Limbaugh: The Boil Lanced

Sometimes, in medicine, you have to dissect open a wound and follow it from the surface downward into a deep cavity, to really appreciate the extent of the pathology. One of the most common instances of this is a a peri rectal abscess, which can, once excavated, wrap around all sorts of anatomy and be far more extensive than anyone appreciated when they first began cutting.

So let's explore, layer by layer, the peri rectal abscess which is Rush Limbaugh. I have thought, until now, of Limbaugh as the central nervous system of the Republican party, but now I realize, he is the the peri rectal abscess. But then, rectum, brain, when talking Republicans, I repeat myself.

Limbaugh attacked Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown University law student who had the temerity to say she thought the Jesuit institution, which provides health insurance to its non Catholic workers and students ought to include in that health insurance contraceptive coverage, which she considers part of health care for women.

To his credit, and typical of the Jesuits, the president of Georgetown, who disagrees with Fluke, quoted Saint Augustine, "Let us , on both sides, lay aside all arrogance. Let us not, on either side, claim we have already discovered the truth."

You got to love the Jesuits. Mad Dog was on the faculty of that Jesuit institution for nearly 30 years, and if there is an order in The Church, which can disarm you with its open mindedness, it has to be the Jesuits. But I digress.

Rush Limbaugh.

Rush Limbaugh says Ms. Fluke went "before a Congressional committee and says that she must be paid to have sex. What does that make her? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She's having so much sex she can't afford the contraception. she wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? We're the pimps. The johns." And then he adds, the coup de grace, saying if we are all be asked to pay for her having sex, we ought to demand something for our money, "We want you to post the videos [of you having sex] on line so we can all watch."

Whew!

Where do you begin? There's a lot going on in there.

First, there is the idea that a woman who asks for coverage for an IUD or an oral contraception is asking to be paid for sex. If she had a health insurance account, from which she could withdraw money for any health care cost, would she still be asking to be paid for having sex?

When most people think of a woman asking to be paid for sex, they are thinking about a woman who structures a deal with a client: I will have sex with you if you will pay me money. Here we have a woman who says, I would like treatment which will protect me if I behave in a way you do not want me to behave, but I want to avoid some very unhappy outcomes.

Before we go on: The insurance payments for Georgetown students do not come out of the taxpayer's pocket. The payments come from the pockets of the parents of the Georgetown students, for the most part.

And then there is the notion that insuring someone engaged in a risky behavior is something the insured is being paid "to do?" Consider the auto wreck. Have we paid the woman who was knocked unconscious and fractured to be knocked unconscious and fractured?

If we paid for the installation of a seat belt in her car, would we be paying her to have a wreck?

We want to prevent breast cancer, so we pay for mammograms. If a woman is found to have breast cancer, we do not say we are paying her to have breast cancer.

Then there is the usual Limbaugh escalation to moral outrage: If you make me pay for your coverage, then you are making me complicit in your crime of having a need for contraception, and that makes me both a pimp and a john, a participant in illegal and immoral sex.

Well, up to this point, there is a certain logic: You are demanding other people become involved in the implications of behavior they may not approve of and so they have a right to feel possibly complicit. It's all hyperbolic and over the top and exploded into outer space, but there is a shred of a line of reasoning.

Until we get to the sex videos.

And this is not exactly new with Rush Limbaugh.

I well remember, during the Clinton years, a twenty minute rumination by Rush Limbaugh about the Clintons having sex at the White House. First he elaborated about how fat Bill Clinton had become. Then he expounded on how fat Hiliary was. Then he put them in a bed in the Lincoln bedroom. Then he cackled about the creaking and moaning of the wooden timbers of the Lincoln bed, straining under the weight of the Clintons having sex and on ad nauseam.

What was really peculiar and striking was the detail with which he described the sex and duration of his description. He simply would not let go of it.

He was getting rather breathless describing it.

It was Clinton porn, right there on the radio, courtesy of Rush Limbaugh.

Limbaugh had his paid guffawers in the studio, laughing like drunken hyenas at a fraternity party, of course, but he was stoking his own flame.

I am not a psychiatrist. I am not even much of a fan of pop psychology.

But I would say, this man has a problem with sex.

I mean, just look at the man.

I don't want to even imagine or explore why he might have a problem with sex, with women, especially with women who, while they might want to have sex with some male, would not under any circumstances want to consider having sex with Rush Limbaugh.

Even thinking about Rush Limbaugh having sex has got to be a pretty disturbing proposition for most people on the planet, no matter what their gender.

None of this would be particularly germane to a political website, were it not for the particular psychopath we are considering.

After all, Don Imus is just as rancid, but Imus, as right wing as he is, does not inform, does not formulate thought for the Republican Party. Rush Limbaugh does. He is the central nervous system for the Tea Party Republicans, for Joe Six pack Republicans.

Rush Limbaugh is the pacemaker for the heart of the Republican Party, Fox News.

And this is what they are made of.

Yikes!