Or, ‘I Am Rush Limbaugh, and So Can You!’*

Yes, tonight, I am Rush Limbaugh. I can feel my blood pressure spiking, my IQ dropping, and my waistline expanding as I write this. On Rush’s behalf, I am well and truly outraged. And so should you be.

Rush Denied

Wednesday — let’s call it Black Wednesday, with all the irony that sobriquet implies — Rush was denied his latest and probably last chance at ancillary gridiron glory. Limbaugh ducked out of military service in Vietnam because of a butt cyst was turned down by the military because of a knee blown out during his inglorious high school football career, having whatever late-night dreams he probably held of being the Great White Hope of the NFL dashed. In 2003, Limbaugh landed his dream job — NFL, uh, color commentator for ESPN. He lasted about one series of downs before his inner Klansman reared up and belched out his judgment on Eagles QB Donovan “Rastus” McNabb, then the NFL’s most visible affirmative-action hire. “I think what we’ve had here is a little social concern in the NFL,” Limbaugh thundered. “The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well. There is a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he didn’t deserve.” McNabb didn’t react to Limbaugh’s assessment very well, and neither did ESPN, whose spokesliberals called his comments “insensitive and inappropriate.” He resigned his position with ESPN a few days later, insisting that the only reason he was leaving was because he wasn’t gonna work for that clutch of latte-drinking lefties running the sports network. (No word as to Limbaugh’s opinion on those other quota hires firing blanks out of the pocket, including Doug Williams, Randall Cunningham, Steve McNair, Warren Moon, Kordell Stewart, Andre Ware, Michael Vick, Daunte Culpepper, Rodney Peete, David Garrard, or Vince Young.) In 2007, he said that NFL games “too often look like [games] between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons.” Of course, he was not making a racial comment, but was referring to the Bloods’ infamous halfback sweep and the Crips’ dominant nickel defense. Now, his bid to become a part-owner of the St. Louis Rams has gone the way of all wayward dreams, torpedoed by a coalition of Angry Liberals and Angry Black People. No NFL dream realized for Rush. Sigh.

But, I’m sure he is a hell of a fantasy football player.

After the Storm, the Storm

Well, Limbaugh’s abilities as an NFL gamesmaster might never be tested, but his denial has given him the chance to play a game he knows very well: Standing Tall for Victimhood. Limbaugh’s rejection had nothing to do with his minutely documented history of racism, he told his listeners on Thursday. It was because of black terrorists like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who joined NFL union leader DeMaurice Smith — not only a black player but an “Obama-ite,” as if we didn’t already know — in taking Limbaugh’s dream away from him. “Obama’s America on full display,” Limbaugh said with manly tears dripping onto his Lee Roy Jordan jersey. Jackson and Sharpton were nothing but “race hustlers,” Limbaugh stormed, and rightly so: had they not informed Smith, St. Louis Blues chairman Dave Checketts, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, Colts owner Jim Irsay, and the others involved in declining his bid of Limbaugh’s seemingly endless racist comments and characterizations, those guys would never have known about them, and Rush would be hanging with his fellow owners at the club right now, drinking Courvosier out of a cleated shoe and slobbering over the Dallas cheerleaders pole-dancing in front of the mechanical bull. In fact, he said, he was shown the door because of the clout wielded by the Obama administration, and the “misreporting [of the] made-up quotes, the blind hatred” of the media. So Barry Hussein bin Obama and the Liberal Media™ is behind it all! We shoulda known.

Is this fair, I ask you? Limbaugh thinks not, and he predicts that his denial as an NFL owner will turn out to be the untimely demise of the entire league: “What is happening to the National Football League, what is about to happen to it, has already happened to Wall Street, has already happened to the automobile business,” Limbaugh said. Hey, the collapse of pro football as we know it is just desserts for the Limbaugh-hating NFL! In your face, pigskin guys! America can always watch European soccer or Scottish caber throwing. Those are the real manly sports. Or ESPN can always renew its contract to broadcast Australian rules football; America’s real sports fans will stay up till 4 a.m. to watch live broadcasts from Kangaroo Poo, Queensland. Go Wallabies!

Tonight … We Are All Rush Limbaugh

But there is another voice on the dial, supporting Limbaugh’s gravelly bleatings. A fellow calling himself “tsquare” on Redstate.com has given us the manliest turn of poetical phrase since Robert Ruark rhapsodized about the beauties of letting his underpaid African beaters shoot wild game and letting him be photographed with his foot cocked, Captain Morgan-style, on top of the kill.

I wish I could quote the entirety of TS’s post, but those damned socialist copyright laws prevent me from working my will on his poesy. But here are the high points. I kid you not, by the time I was finished, I was wiping tears from my eyes. (My wife thought I was watching the Pontius Pilate scene from Life of Brian when she heard me in the office, but when she saw the empty box of Kleenex on the floor and the stricken look on my face, she snorted her sympathy and retreated, leaving me to mourn in manly solitude.) Limbaugh “crashed and burned,” our Redstate blogger wrote, “while taking withering fire” from those Blood-Crazed Liberals (who simultaneously can’t keep from poking flowers into gun barrels and blow Righteous Conservatives into hunks of vibrating blubber). “Tonight,” TS emoted, “Rush is us. And we are him.”

After I put the inadvertent memory of the Ray Milland-Rosey Grier epic The Thing with Two Heads out of my head — tagline, “They transplanted a white bigot’s head on a soul brother’s body!” — I kept reading. “Tonight Rush became the metaphor for all of us … every man woman and child in this great nation of ours.” So true, I moaned, so true, and called for my wife to come pick up the Kleenex where I had thrown it in my fit of Olympian ire. (When she failed to respond, I knew red-blooded American men like Limbaugh and myself were in worse shape than ever I had dreamed.) It was Rush’s enemies who denied him his last chance at NFL greatness, TS wailed, those “enem[ies] of this great nation … of you and me … those on the left, inside and outside of this nation abhor success … and when faced with it will destroy it … by any and all means possible.” Oh, the drama! The agony! The sheer humanity of it all! How does TS put it so vividly? Why do I have to keep correcting his punctuation? And how does he live with not signing his own name to such flights of immortal Internet prose?

The evil, America-hating leftists “proved that they will stop at nothing to end our dreams,” TS continued. (He was an investor too?) “Our dreams of success and happiness devastate their need to dominate and control you and me … and well everything and everyone.” Comma splice aside, TS hits it on the head. Those leftists, those free-clinic holding, soup-kitchen building, Habitat for Humanity-volunteering, animal shelter-manning, single-payer supporting, eco-restoring liberals want to dominate and control everything for their own evil ends. It’s all so clear now. And TS goes on to list all the victims, besides Limbaugh, of this evil left-wing tyranny envisioned by Obama and his atheist followers: “Chrysler bondholders. GM dealers. Bankers and stockbrokers. Small business owners. Medical Doctors. Oppressed people wanting freedom around the world.” How exactly Limbaugh spending some of his yearly $400 million salary on an NFL team would help free those oppressed millions, I’m not clear on, but even if I can’t figure out the lyrics, I can sure dance to the music. Sing it, TS! “The left can not and will not allow anyone to realize their dreams.” Yes, TS! Sing it to the heavens!

TS told us that “political correctness” damned Limbaugh’s chances to realize his vision for the NFL. Never mind that Limbaugh once told a black caller to “take the bone out of [his] nose,” that has nothing to do with anything. It was the African-American players once again being hypotized by those fiends on the left, who mesmerized them into coming out against Limbaugh against their own interests.

TS wanders briefly into the world of political ideology: “Tonight we are under withering fire, we on the right those in the middle.” Ah, I see. If the people on the right are actually in the middle, then the most extremist of shrieking right-wing freaks are really just buttoned-down, socially acceptable conservatives. But how far left do those lefties go? Somewhere in orbit of Alpha Centauri, I’m guessing, but certainly off the spectrum of human political ideology.

After a few more repetitions of “withering fire,” which tells me he spends plenty of his time picking up juicy turns of phrase from watching World War II movies, he concludes with the famous quote from Martin Niemöller about the Nazis first coming for the communists, then the socialists, then the trade unionists, then the Jews, and finally for me. (Well, not me personally, and not TS, either, but it’s all metaphorical.) Now, I have to say I’m confused. I understand that he’s implying that the Limbaugh-haters, the ones who make up Obama’s America, are all Nazis, that’s well established already. But is he saying that Obama is planning to come after communists? Socialists? Unionists? Jews? I thought those guys were on the other side. Are they our buddies now? The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and so forth? But they’re my enemy’s friends, aren’t they …? Someone help me out here, I’m puzzled.

Who is John Galt? And Why Can’t He Own an NFL Team?

Anyway, the Rushinator may be down but he sure ain’t out. Like the antisocial loner John Galt from Ayn Rand’s ground-breaking novel Telemachus Sneezed, or something like that, I fearlessly predict that Limbaugh will wreak his righteous revenge on the NFL in some memorable form or fashion that, well, I can’t predict. Maybe he’ll open up a snazzy, post-millennial version of Galt’s Gulch (with wet bars, 24-hour porn on the flat screen, and a fine selection of non-Communist Caribbean cigars) and snatch away all the white NFL players. Let the NFL see how that works! Maybe he’ll form a new iteration of Vince McMahon’s XFL and, yes, only let the white players join. Watch those ratings plummet!

But I promise you this: Rush may be taking Withering Fire, but he’s safely dug into his bunker in the Southern Command, and from there he will launch a counterattack the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Persians overran Thermopylae, or Obama’s Nazis took Soviet Russia by storm. It will be the Mother of All Reprisals.

In the meantime, since we are all Rush, we must all immediately boycott the NFL. Deprogram your TiVo. And ESPN was mean to our guy, so we should boycott it, too. Watch ESPN2 instead. That’ll show ‘em whose boss.

* Apologies for shamelessly riffing on Stephen Colbert’s 2007 book. He probably wouldn’t mind so much if you made up for my pilfering by buying a copy.

— Michael Tuck, who doesn’t write much about the NFL at the History Commons.