Several months ago a guy named Andrew Klavan wrote an article in the Los Angeles Times challenging liberals to listen to Rush Limbaugh.
Because this Klavan dude concluded that I -- and people like me -- refused to listen to Limbaugh, then I was "a lowdown, yellow-bellied, lily-livered intellectual coward."
Klavan went on, "You're terrified of finding out he makes more sense than you do."
Bullshit. I'm not afraid of Limbaugh in any way, shape, or form.
But I'm terrified, all right.
Terrified of stupid people who haven't the guts or the intellectual capability of thinking for themselves.
Terrified of what happens to innocent people when stupid people don't have the guts to think for themselves.
Why should I be terrified? Why, even, should Rush's own flock be terrified?
Well, Klavan, I listened to Limbaugh's most recent rant about the global warming "hoax," and this is what Rush said, word for word:
"Now, the bottom line is, the whole man-made global warming movement is a fraud. It is a hoax. It's (sic) made-up lies. I have known this since the beginning of the movement. I'm the one who said that militant environmentalism is the home of displaced communists after the Berlin Wall came down. Now, scientists cannot rely on common sense. So the anti-global warmers have to go out there and get their own science to counter the science that the pro-global warming crowd is using, and they're making it up. I instinctively know this for two reasons. One -- and I've explained in great detail before so I'm not going to do it again because of time constraints -- is I believe in God."
If any readers can make sense of this illogical, grammatically-challenged rant, I would like to know.
This is what I hear: Your 20-year-old daughter studying environmental science in college is a communist. Global warming is a lie because scientists don't have any common sense. And Limbaugh knows, and has always known, that global warming is a physical and metaphysical impossibility because, well, he believes in God.
When all else fails, when your arguments and facts add up to a big fat bald-headed zilch, when you need to go back to sixth grade to get a lesson in proper grammar so that your listeners can decipher your babble and discern the truth from the lies, then the best possible argument for the intellectually lazy and stupid is to invoke the God card.
Because God created humans it's impossible that humans would ever "destroy the planet," says the bald, fat man.
Yeah, right.
I'll buy that -- and so will the six million Jews whom the Nazis rounded up on cattle cars, shipped to concentration camps, robbed of their watches, rings and money, then murdered in Nazi gas chambers.
If I were to borrow from Limbaugh's pathetically immoral playbook, I might say that it's impossible that the Nazis did those things. How do I know? Because I, Rush Jr., believe in God.
God's a good guy. I'm a real All-American good guy. Real Americans like me don't do bad things. Unreal, lefty dudes do bad things because they're godless. Rush says so. How do I know? I believe in God, and I believe in Rush. It's like the Holy Trinity. The right-wing version. Call this one the "Holy Rush."
All together now, genuflect to the Holy Rush.
Repeat ten times, take your Soma, and go to sleep.
Welcome to the Brave New World.