Once upon a time in the greatest country in the world lived a clown with the most common of desires—to change the world and rule the masses. While in most polite nations this sort of behavior would be described as overreaching, a veritable Icarus tale, in the greatest country on earth the clown was able to enact this bold strategy. Once upon a time there was a terribly unamusing clown named Rimbaugh.
This story is quite amusing in the way that Ronald McDonald making the world a better place after cheeseburgers have clotted your arteries is amusing. This story is an amusing one precisely because the greatest country in the world came to allow Rimbaugh to control their government, and he was never an elected official.
When Rimbaugh was hired to tie balloons in knots, spray water from fake flowers, or pull an unnaturally long string of handkerchiefs out of his pocket, he never came in makeup, never pushed a pie into his face, nor did he make funny faces at the crowd. No, Rimbaugh the clown was an interlocutor.
Once upon a time in a land that was not the greatest country on earth, an interlocutor was the master of ceremonies at a minstrel show, and Rimbaugh, the poor clown, was simply a confused idiot. He believed himself to be a prophet of the people, and a go-between for these people and their elected officials. In the greatest country on earth no one saw fit to correct this behavior, or douse his dreams of self-deluded grandeur.
Not in the greatest country on earth. He started talking and people started listening. At first they were outraged that they hired Rimbaugh to entertain them, and they ended up in a heated argument about whether it was acceptable to stick your ding-dong in a young girl's mouth. Whenever someone stood to challenge Rimbaugh on his false statements, as he made many, the manifolds of jowls under his jaw would swing back and forth and the very sight of this would often silence the questioner. When that didn't work Rimbaugh the not-so-entertaining would question the questioner. He would often ask people critical of his bumble headed ideas "If you don't like it here, why don't you leave?" or more often, "Why don't you love the greatest country on earth as much as I do?"
Soon enough Rimbaugh was given the world's largest platform available in the greatest country on earth. In this great country there were many a people who would drive around and listen to a thing called the radio, for a great many people in the greatest country on earth make their living driving around all day, and music often pales to the rantings of an uneducated mind.
Sadly, all the fame and the power he garnered went to his head, his legs, his stomach, but it was the effect on his heart that all the world's love and admiration brought him that was the most affected—he could no longer feel.
The man who championed his love for the people and the quality of the officials they elected to misrepresent them no longer felt anything but a continuous fit of rage, and he felt a massive hole inside him where his heart once was. It was in this place that Rimbaugh became addicted to drugs. In a strange twist of irony his addled ideas saw fit to justify long prison sentences for drug users, but when he was caught trading his dignity and money for pills behind a convenience store on the largest peninsula of the greatest country on earth, his pleas for mercy were heeded. He pretended to sober up, and continued to justify long prison sentences for drug offenders, and was always enraged when someone asked him why his goose and gander had different tastes.
Rimbaugh became one of the most powerful people on earth. What he believed affected the beliefs of millions of people in the greatest country on earth, and his rhetorical blind spots were overlooked by these people. Rimbaugh was not a great debater nor was he formally educated in the ways of reason, and neither was his primary audience, but together they were a mighty force in the government of the greatest country on earth.
Rimbaugh the clown got fatter and his jowls continued to make small children cry and elected officials to sweat in fear. Many of the government officials in the greatest country on earth relied upon those who listened to the great clown to get elected every year. Even though the clown had no degree in law, experience working in government, nor any education in any particular field related to civil service he was given the largest badge of all. In another strange twist of irony, the clown came from a family filled with such people. Perhaps this is how he got confused at the definition of interlocutor.
It was this badge that he waggled at any elected official to get them to do his bidding. If an elected official misspoke and called him an entertainer or an irritating nuisance, as most people in the greatest country on earth agreed, Rimbaugh would use his radio platform to eviscerate, emasculate his critics. Often times the elected official would apologize and acknowledge the great clown as the great voice of their governmental party. It was this sort of behavior that made the majority of educated people in the greatest country on earth to worry for the future of their country.
Over time, another twist of irony came when he let it be known that his self-medication had cost him almost all of his hearing. After years working in a space where he could listen to the sound of his voice raise blood pressures but not consciousness, he came to not be able to hear himself talk. It was through a miracle of science that people gave him his hearing back in the greatest country on earth.
These were the Dark Ages of the rule of Rimbaugh. His prominence got one man really close to being elected, and then people of his stripe in the highest court in the greatest country on earth told him to be president, even though he lost the election. The next eight years Rimbaugh saw fit to work closely with this president to enact the most fear-inducing policies the greatest country on earth had ever seen. During those eight years Rimbaugh and the people he helped install into that government started a war and lied about the reasons why. To all thinking and educated people in the greatest country on earth there was no need to go to war, and every reason offered by Rimbaugh and his ilk was either made up or just a dodge.
Eventually Rimbaugh's choices for government ruined the country and they were thrown out of office with the greatest of contempt. The people elected someone they thought they could trust, because Rimbaugh didn't like him. The great clown publicly wished the new government to fail, and repeated this wish a million times as others working in the government began to parrot this wish as well.
Despite a lack of ideas or experience in government the great clown Rimbaugh continued to control the minds of the people in the greatest country on earth. Only in the greatest country on earth could such a story be true, because in any other country, someone would have pointed him out early on in his blathering--"Look, it's a village idiot!"
I hope you have enjoyed my fictional tale of the great interlocutor clown known as Rimbaugh. Any resemblance to anyone real, whether living or dead, (or just dead inside), was perhaps accidental.