This is a very serious Rush Limbaugh post. This is not a post where I'm going to mention his incredible girth, or the odd circumstances in which he was caught coming home from one of the world's most infamous sex tourism destinations with an illegal viagra prescription. I'm not going to talk about his being fired from ESPN for being an idiot, or that time he asked "what's [Obama] got in his pants?" No, I'm not going to mention any of those things.
I'm just going to point out that Limbaugh, far from losing his mind as I initially believed, seems to be deliberately trying to get the media's attention by describing Barack Obama as "an Arab," deliberately misquoting a newspaper article to do so.
This is a typical Limbaugh strategy -- he says something outrageous in order to get the media's attention, spreading whatever ugly smear he's concocted. Then, once the media bites, he merely says he was doing it to "tweak the drive-bys" and was just "illustrating absurdity by being absurd" or that it's "satire." He then informs his audience that by paying attention to Limbaugh's ugliness, the media have proved that they are in fact what he was pretending to be. His listeners seem unaware that (false) irony is not the same thing as satire, or that saying what you really mean and then calling it a joke is actually one of the more transparent forms of rhetorical cowardice, or that the above game gets old for most people before they hit puberty.
Will the media bite? Probably, they seem intent on injecting race into the race when it isn't there and ignoring it when it is. But don't be surprised when Limbaugh claims he was just trying to teach us all a lesson.
--A. Serwer
