So, big surprise—the President’s giving a speech tonight, and the liberal media has already passed judgement without Him having even said a word. They don’t know what Bush is going to say tonight! They don’t even care what Bush is going to say, because they want us to fail in Iraq just to make the President look bad. They are so full of hate that every day they just wake up thinking "what can we do today to smear the President." Well, I’ll tell you one thing. We should all really get behind the President no matter what and see this thing through! Otherwise all those people on 9/11 died for nothing!
...
Most (and hopefully all) of you know that I’m kidding. We already know so much about what he’s going to say and why he’s going to say it, that Bush might as well come out and say "Hey everybody. You know all that stuff you’ve been hearing? Well, we’re gonna do that. So...I’m gonna go back to reading "Superfudge." Let me know how it all turns out. Heh-heh-heh [shoulder bounce]." And, as with everything else he’s done as President (and apparently in life as well), this plan is going to fail. He’s like the King Midas of excrement—everything he touches turns to shit.
But you knew I was kidding because what I was saying was a) clearly ridiculous, and b) clearly counter to anything I’ve ever said before. Some would call it satire or sarcasm. Rush Limbaugh would call it "illustrating absurdity by being absurd," and it’s the key to the success of things like The Colbert Report and The Daily Show. It’s a complex and precise tool, and, like a caveman with an iPod, it’s something the right just doesn’t understand.
Which brings us to the topic of today’s blog. Yesterday I wrote about Rush’s upcoming appearance on the conservative version of The Daily Show (the unfortunately named Half Hour NewsHour). The HI-larious skit Rush described involved snippets from press conferences with fictional President Limbaugh and Vice President Coulter. (Here I take a cue from the old Goldschlager ad campaign – Wince, Shudder, Curse, Repeat.) But my first thought was what chance does a show like this have? I mean, how will the dittohead nation take satire? Will they get it? Literally 5 minutes after I posted that blog I got my answer from Rush.
I get in my car, turn on the radio, and hear the following. Let’s go to the transcript from yesterday’s show:
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Tom in Nevis, Minnesota, you're next on the Rush Limbaugh program. Hi.
CALLER: Good morning, sir. How are you doing?
RUSH: Just fine, sir, thank you.
CALLER: That's good. My question about the stem fluid research is, exactly where do you stand? And the reason I ask this is because a couple months ago you were quoted as saying that it is your constitutional right to get your hearing back and you didn't care about the abortion.
Okay, okay...stop the tape. [Sigh] Folks, let me give you a little backstory for this one. Most of you probably know that God has done everything in His power to convince Rush to leave radio. He really has! There’s the joke my uncle told me about a guy trapped on the roof of his house in a flood. One of his neighbors comes buy in a boat and says "need help?" and the guy answers "nope. Don’t worry. God will take care of me!" So then the waters get higher and some rescue workers come by in another boat saying "sir, you really need to come with us! These waters are going to get a lot higher" and the guy says "don’t worry about it, God will take care of me." Finally a helicopter comes by as the waters are about to overtake the house, and the guy waves it off shouting "Don’t worry! God will take care of me!" The helicopter leaves, and the guy drowns. He’s in heaven, and he asks God "What happened? I thought you were going to take care of me?" and God says "I did! I sent 2 boats and a helicopter! So, you know...what’s it gonna take!"
He’s wrecked his personal life through divorce (three times), threw drug addiction at him to ruin his reputation, and He’s even gone so far as to smite him deaf with a rare form of hearing loss called autoimmune inner ear disease (basically it’s where your immune system attacks those little hairs in your inner ear that help make hearing and balance possible). At this point God’s got to be wondering "what’s it going to take!"
The caller is referring to an incident before the mid-term elections when Rush was dealing with the heat from the Michael J. Fox incident (which I assume I don’t need to explain). Now, I’m assuming that most of you are NOT fans of Rush’s show. If I were to present you a quote from Rush where he said "It’s my constitutional right to get my hearing back, and screw the babies you have to kill to make it happen, and I want YOU the American taxpayer to pay for it," you’d probably think he was kidding...right? Okay, you might think you were in Bizarro World. That’s also an acceptable answer, but for the most part you’d know he was putting us on.
Maybe Tom was actually a liberal, and he thought he’d caught Rush in a flip-flop. Back to the transcript:
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: So...
RUSH: Yeah, I said that.
CALLER: I'm not against you putting down the Democrats. I don't really care for them. I don't like them at all.
Good news Nevis, Minnesota! Your idiot is safe and sound inside your village, and his name is Tom! Not only did he take Rush literally, but he filed it away in his mental Rolodex to bring up almost 4 months later! You can almost see Rush rolling his eyes thinking "surely my audience isn’t this dumb...is it?" (And I say that with all due respect since I used to be a card-carrying dittohead).
Okay, so now Rush has to explain satire to his audience. Wait until you hear this...
RUSH: Let me tell you why I did that, Tom. The reason for it was, I was trying a new tack.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: To illustrate absurdity by being absurd.
CALLER: Yes?
Actually, this isn’t a new tack. Rush first tried this approach during the 1992 election. He got so frustrated with the dittohead nation’s support of Ross Perot that he went on the air and said "you know, I’m on board with this Clinton guy! I think he’d be a great President! Thanks to the liberal media I can finally see the light!" And he had about as much success with his audience then as he has now. Back then he must’ve taken 3 or 4 days worth of angry calls from listeners practically crying, asking "Why, Rush, WHY!?!?"
I wonder if Tom was a listener back in ’92. Anyway, back to the transcript:
RUSH: See, it was my theory that the Michael J. Foxes and the John Edwardses and all these other people out there running these ads, creating false hope, were engaging in selfishness, and they were promoting liberalism at the same time. They were promoting a liberal, big-government agenda.
CALLER: Right.
True story—Rush was telling his audience before the election that Ben Cardin opposed stem cell research and Michael Steele supported it, but that the liberal media reported it the other way around. The basis for this claim was tortured to say the least, since Representative Cardin voted for the bi-partisan stem cell bill that passed in the Republican-controlled House. Rush bases his claim on the fact that Cardin voted against the non-embryonic stem cell bill that failed to pass in the Republican-controlled House. So, clearly he’s against stem cell research...even though he voted for it.
Don’t think about it too much. Let’s just get back to the transcript.
RUSH: But the ads were done in such a way as to evoke sympathy. They were very evocative. They evoked a lot of sympathy. "Ohhhh, why, that's horrible! We've got to fix Parkinson's," and as Tom Harkin said, "Why, we can't strip these people of their hope! We've got to have hope." So I gave it my best shot, treating this in a rational, responsive, and reactive way to what I saw.
CALLER: Right.
For those who need a refresher on Rush’s rational, responsive, reactive response click here. Testify, Brother Rush!
RUSH: It didn't seem to make much of an impression. So I thought I would become Michael J. Fox and John Edwards and anybody else doing commercials like this.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: I said to the audience, including you: Ladies and gentlemen, I've changed my mind. You know, I've lost my hearing, through no fault of my own.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: I can't hear. Without my cochlear implant, I can't hear. I can't hear music the way I would like to hear it. It's tough for me to go out in public where there are lots of voices because I can't communicate and I feel like an invalid, and I need hope that I can get my hearing back, and my doctors have told me that there might be a chance with embryonic stem cell research to restore my hearing, and so from this day forward, to hell with the babies of America! I want my hearing back, and I want embryonic stem cell research -- and I was hoping that people would say, "Wow, that sounds cruel. Wow, that sounds selfish."
Wow, that sounds cruel! Wow, that sounds selfish!
RUSH: To try to illustrate what I think advocates of embryonic stem cell research themselves sound like: selfish, mean, and self-focused. So I carried this on for two days. As is always the case, I'm so good at it, and I have so much credibility, that my audience -- some of them, like you -- believed it, rather than got my point.
Wow, that sounds cruel! Wow, that sounds selfish!
RUSH: We take the absurdity we see and turn it around and use it for our own causes to show people how ridiculous it is. I was just trying to portray myself as needy, unfortunate, a victim: [snip] That was my attempt to illustrate how the libs in this whole embryonic stem cell argument are actually approaching it.
Wow! That sounds cruel! Wow! That sounds selfish! Oh...we’re done. Sorry, I got kind of caught up there. So here we have further proof that the Right just doesn’t possess the level of...let’s say ‘comic sophistication’ to appreciate a conservative version of The Daily Show. I knew I could find it if I looked hard enough. I just didn’t expect it to fall in my lap like that.
Yesterday someone mentioned that the Half Hour NewsHour is prime MST3K territory. This is almost certainly something I plan on doing. Mike Nelson still does MSTies via his website, RiffTrax. Basically Mike is selling MP3s of him doing commentary that you sync up with movies that you rent (or in my case, movies I own) ala The Wizard of Oz and Pink Floyd. If this is even remotely feasible technology-wise, look for me to start doing this as soon as that thing’s on the air!
Let the most unintentionally hilarious half hour of misinformation begin!