Rush Limbaugh uttering something so brain dead it wouldn’t be detectable on an encephalogram while entertaining his audience of long-in-the-tooth elementary schoolboys isn’t particularly news. While his ad hominem hissy fits aimed at Sandra Fluke perhaps raised the level of rancidness and illuminated his low character with a helpful conspicuousness: big, fat rich guy with media power slandering, defaming and libeling a private citizen after she politely testifies before congress about a pertinent issue (in my opinion, she has an excellent case for defamation under current law should she choose to pursue it) it’s still a dog bites man story, or under the circumstances, a drooling, rotund mastiff mauling composed, articulate female citizen story.

Yes, Rush doesn’t know how female contraception works, which is indicative of his general self-centeredness, narcissism and knuckle-headedness. But long before this episode it was absolutely certain classic cowardly bully would be etched onto his epitaph after multiple marriages and Oxycontin. The real scandal is the monumental dishonesty of his and his Republican confederates’ position on the coverage of contraception in health insurance plans, and even more morally despicable, Republicans’ customary indifference  to the health care needs of, and health care costs for American citizens.

Rush, riding his lucrative aggrieved white man financially put upon by darker forces hobby horse, hyperventilated in typical fashion about taxpayers footing the bill, and in this case, claiming the bill is for other people’s insurance plans (and in his bizarre libels, other people’s sexual encounters) proffered a lie as big and slimy as any aspect of his pervasively putrid spiel. Though I’m blanching at the very act of placing intellectual in a sentence pertaining to Rush, the intellectual dishonesty central to his stupid premise was pungently odiferous itself. Obviously no taxpayer is being asked to pay for anybody else’s employer-based health plan. Classify this aspect of Rush’s Fluke-related wretched remarks as: Morally indefensible whopper

Worse, and more broadly harmful , while offering their tepid, pseudo rebukes of Rush’s language Republican office holders and candidates defended or implicitly endorsed the canard that something is being forced upon citizens or institutions in the Obama health care regulations regarding contraception coverage, contrary to the indisputable truth that the rights of consumers, taxpayers and citizens  are being protected from the whims of employers or theocratic impingement upon Americans’ medical care. What the demagogues don’t tell you (admittedly, truth-telling isn’t in the demagogue’s job description) we are talking about medical coverage that you pay for, along with your employer. The Republican position is that employers be given line-item veto over elements in your medical coverage. Clearly, no level of business and employer bigfooting of employees can bother Republicans, nor can any amount of business or corporate or employer oppressiveness toward consumer and taxpayer rights be among their concerns.

And as foul as the juvenilia Rush dishes out for the mentally and emotionally stunted dinosaurs that comprise his embittered audience, the Republican attitude toward Americans’ health care, their indifference toward it and inaction on it when holding power, their obstruction to reform when in the political minority, their ever vigilant defense and protection of Big Medical’s and Big Insurance’s profits at all costs are the real obscenity here. The entire Republican war on health care progress, on the modernizing and civilizing of the American health care system and on the reform of its inefficiencies, on the pursuit of a healthier citizenry and a health care infrastructure good enough for the rest of the industrialized world but not for us, according to them, is as pornographic as any execrable jive that tumbles out of the mouth of the bloated Buddha of Resentment on the radio.