Toward a kinder, gentler rushbo

Rick Perlstein leaves his blog after offering commentary on Rush Limbaugh's gender hour. It's quite hilarious:

Someone calls in and admits that, yes, she has a woman friend who listened to Rush once, and hated the experience. He goes into fulmination mode: how could she have any informed opinion about him if she's only listened once?

Well, the caller replies, she thought you were pompous.

"Pompous?! (literally incredulous). "Do you think I'm pompous."

I've never heard him so nervous. He's never worried about his audience before.

The caller admits that, yes, she's occasionally found Rush Limbaugh a little pomp—though she can't complete the thought because Rush interrupts her.

"Irreverent, yes!" says the man who calls himself "El Rushbo," calls his company the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, brags that he carries out his show with half his brain tied behind his back at all times, and that he's ninety-nine-point-nine percent correct about everything. "I'm not pompous."

He pauses a bit. Perhaps he realizes he's stretched credulity.

"I'm not changing that." He returns to the datum that her friend only listened to the show a single time: "Demand that you and her listen to the program together and report back."

End of call. For bumper music going into commercial, he puts on Barry White making sexual grunts.

There's also this little gem: "It's just then that I recall someone making a perfect description of Rush Limbaugh's voice: it sounds like a woman imitating her know-it-all ex-husband." You know, Limbaugh's books sold more than Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot, and this used to be something that the right used to needle the left. Ironic then that Rush is, if anything, on the downslope of his influence (he couldn't even stop "Juan" McCain from getting the GOP nomination) while Al Franken is very likely to be a U.S. Senator very soon. The moral arc of the universe at work and all that, I suppose...