Rush Limbaugh, the still-alive host of Creepy the Aging Clown's Masturbatorium of Hate and Homophobia, believes that Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg has made headway in the 2020 race because of him. See, about a year ago, Limbaugh said, "Keep a sharp eye out for Mayor Pete. Keep an eye on this guy. He is gonna make mincemeat of all the rest of these people." This past Wednesday, he crowed, "Had I not made the observation, a lot of people would not have given Mayor Pete Buttigieg the time of day." Yep, he believes that no one would have paid attention to Buttigieg without ol' Rush chiming in.
However, Limbaugh didn't think that Buttigieg had what it took because, well, the gay stuff. He offered that Democratic voters are "sitting there and they’re looking at Mayor Pete - a 37-year-old gay guy, mayor of South Bend, loves to kiss his husband on the debate stage - and they’re saying, 'Okay. How’s this gonna look, a 37-year-old gay guy kissing his husband on stage next to Mr. Man, Donald Trump? What’s gonna happen there?'"
Put aside for a moment that calling Donald Trump "Mr. Man" is like calling a pile of shit "a gourmet snack." Put aside that it might be nice to see a married couple of actually seem to love each other, unlike Donald and Melania. Put aside that Buttigieg joined the Naval Reserve and did a seven-month stint in Afghanistan, which is more time spent overseas in military service than Trump and all his terrible children combined, plus seven months. Put aside the rank gay-bashing and the weird obsession with Buttigieg and his husband locking lips. Put all that aside because that's leaving out the rest of what Limbaugh said:
"They gotta be looking at that, and they’ve gotta be saying that despite all the great progress and despite all the great wokeness and despite all the great ground that’s been covered, America’s still not ready to elect a gay guy kissing his husband on the debate stage president. They have to be saying this, don’t they? Now, there may be some Democrats who think that is the ticket."
Limbaugh was fairly relentless in his assertion that no way, no how will Mayor Pete ever seem more electable than the prissy president with his manicured nails, his shitty spray tan and makeup, his dyed hair plugs, and his obsession with celebrities that borders on Perez Hilton-esque. But Buttigieg kisses his husband, so that's less manly.
Limbaugh wasn't done. He continued, "There may be some Democrats who think, 'That’s exactly what we need to do, Rush. Get a gay guy kissing his husband on stage! You ram it down Trump’s throat and beat him in the general election.' (laughing) Really? Having fun envisioning that."
Well, thanks, Rush, I will have fun envisioning someone ramming something down Trump's throat and beating him.
It had been a while since I had bothered to even think about Rush Limbaugh, who is one of the original carriers of the plague of the modern right-wing media. But he's been in the news for two reasons: He announced that he's suffering from Stage IV lung cancer after half a lifetime of bragging about how much he smokes and saying that cigarettes didn't cause cancer, and he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Donald Trump, which is a little like Caligula giving Genghis Khan the Nobel Peace Prize.
I'm gonna save my total contempt for Limbaugh when he finally dies for his sins and the sins of the savage conservatism that he helped usher us into like the porcine gatekeeper at Hell's deepest shit pit. My initial reaction to his diagnosis was "What did cancer ever do to deserve Rush Limbaugh?" You can call me an asshole or talk about how we should love our enemies or how terrible lung cancer is or what you will. But Limbaugh is not suffering nearly enough. I hope he shits blood every day for the rest of his shortened life.
I'm not a Buttigieg voter in the primary. I find his positions too moderate to conservative for my taste. This ain't about him. It's about how Rush Limbaugh was given a pass for a couple of days because of his illness and his appearance as a weak old fuck at the State of the Union, "shocked" that he was being given the medal then. And he doesn't deserve anything but abject hatred for being one of the most destructive forces in the media not named "Ailes" or "Murdoch." And his attacks on Buttigieg are of a piece with his entire pathetic career of tearing the nation apart.
Limbaugh has been queasy and angry about the lesbian and gay community for decades (he's been actively hostile to the transgender community, but that is a whole post to itself). Back in the 1980s, he was so antagonistic about the AIDS crisis that he ran an AIDS Update for a month, mocking victims of the disease to theme songs like "Back in the Saddle Again" (before he actually had to back down and apologize). He was enraged at the federal funding going to sex education, especially as it related to HIV/AIDS. Limbaugh was whipping people into such an anti-gay frenzy that it likely caused actual harm to people who were dying. As recently as 2004, he was claiming that HIV doesn't spread to straight people unless they were promiscuous, like, he claimed, people in Africa are. He's also equated same-sex marriage to acceptance of pedophilia and bestiality.
In 2016, he was attacking, no, really, lesbian farmers because the Obama administration wanted to have a summit to talk about LGBT Americans who were living in rural states. "So here comes the Obama Regime with a bunch of federal money and they’re waving it around, and all you gotta do to get it is be a lesbian and want to be a farmer and they’ll set you up. I’m like you; I never before in my life knew that lesbians wanted to be farmers. I never knew that lesbians wanted to get behind the horse and the plow and start burrowing." And if you don't think that was intentionally a crude sex joke, you don't know Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Rush Limbaugh.
As you might imagine, there is so much more.
In 1994, on his radio show, he said, "When a gay person turns his back on you, it is anything but an insult; it’s an invitation." Well, now Rush Limbaugh is getting ass-fucked by cancer. It's been shoved down his throat and burrowed into him. He will not have some deathbed change of heart. He will not be humbled. He is what he has always been: an infected carbuncle on the right ass cheek of democracy.
