Rush Limbaugh is the Professional Wrestler of Political Commentary

Despite contentions by its most ardent fans, we all know that professional wrestling is not a real sport. It is instead a highly choreographed imitation of competitive wrestling designed to elicit strong emotional reactions through compelling enactments of real violence between two combatants. But as true competition, pro wrestling is indeed an enterprise, but ultimately a fake.

Professional wrestling has parallels in the world of political commentary. The main feature is Rush Limbaugh, whose brand of entertainment like professional wrestling is designed to elicit strong emotional reactions from his equally ardent fans. Rush Limbaugh is to real, responsible journalism what professional wrestlers are to real sport. His act is calculatedly constructed to deceive the public into thinking there is real meaning and substance behind the doctrines he communicates, but it is a ruse. His fans do however buy the exaggerations and lies as truth. Similarly, fans of professional wrestling regularly claim the sport is "real" like the blogger listed as a link on this article who says that professional wrestlers are the best athletes in the world. People apparently love to be deceived when it affirms their vicarious need to feel empowered in support of their own beliefs and interests.

But of course we must consider that even professional wrestlers themselves do not consider the sport real. On March 3, 2009, David Asman on foxbusiness.com wrote: "We all know that professional wrestling isn't real. I once interviewed "The Rock" and asked him how much of what happens in the ring is rigged. He looked at me like I was an idiot and said: "All of it!"

Another professional wrestler had this to say about fans: "The only thing that scares me about my fans is that they can vote and breed." But he was still willing to take their money. The intelligence of his fan base was no reason to decline the profit he made from a fake sport.

The exact same thing can be said of Limbaugh, whose fan legions call themselves "dittoheads" while fancying themselves the independent thinkers of our generation. Rush insists his dogmatic peregrinations somehow represent America's validated best interests. This willing self-deception is the foundation for the professional sport of political partisanship. If patriotism really is the last refuge of scoundrels, then we should ask why Limbaugh is so regularly seen charging out the back of the wrestling cage in an effort to prove himself the King of all patriots. He is the scoundrel of all scoundrels, the kind of overblown personality pro wrestling fans just love. Hulk Hogan. Stone Cold Steve Austin. These invented personalities have mass appeal to the disenchanted.

His fans do not appear to notice either that Limbaugh has pursued his success selfishly and with an almost disdainful attitude toward his listening audience. He often appears not to trust his own listeners­­ to give an opinion unless they first fawn and grovel before his media throne. At the slightest hint of on-air resistance, Limbaugh's engineer flips the dump button or else Rush begins talking over his callers with disrespectful glee. On the rare occasions when he feels listeners do have a valid point, it is usually to confirm one of his own, self-centered Rush-isms. "You are absolutely correct!" he will bluster, then use the caller's pseudo-wisdom to create more of his own self-aggrandizing propaganda. Thus the wrestler is also ringmaster.

Limbaugh is not above lifting a verbal chair or two to bash heads when the occasional liberal caller is allowed to enter the Limbaugh ring. The topics of these wicked interventions are always chosen carefully to allow Rush to sneak up on the unsuspecting caller halfway through the conversation and smack him in the back with a snappy comment before an impending break in the show. The whole production is choreographed for impact and does not reflect any sort of real dialogue on any subject of consequence. Mostly the show features gross exaggerations of public statements by politicians Limbaugh does not like. Some--in fact most--of these exaggerations qualify as outright lies about the nature and context of what has been said.

Limbaugh's twisted practice of misappropriating quotes and shading truths is so convoluted it almost defies qualitative analysis. But we can see how Limbaugh plays his game in what he had to say about a speech given in Egypt by President Barack Obama, who was seeking to impress upon Muslims around the world that America does not having anything against the Muslim religion as a faith. This is what the President said: "[I]f you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we'd be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world."

This is how Limbaugh characterized that statement: "Well, that's what Obama said. He went over there and he said that the United States is a Muslim country."

This is a lie. That is not at all what Barack Obama said or what he meant in noting the population of Muslims in America. Obama was fairly representing a fact about the population of Muslims in America as compared to other nations around the world. But Limbaugh ignored that fact in favor of misrepresenting the President's real meaning as a scare tactic to incite his listeners who are coaxed to view all Muslims as potential terrorists. This is not only irresponsible, it is bigoted, dangerous and potentially libelous behavior. Let us note that definition of libel is "anything that is defamatory or that maliciously or damagingly misrepresents." Limbaugh's many distortions of this order are not only potentially libelous, they might even be characterized as a form of treason, which is defined thus, "a violation of allegiance to one's sovereign or to one's state." Of course Limbaugh's criticisms of Obama and others he despises are generally protected the right to free speech as guaranteed under the Consitution. But when free speech damages the legitimate and documented intent of a public official, then the parties responsible should be held legally accountable. Limbaugh regularly and frequently crosses this line.

Limbaugh has also built his career on periodic vicious personal attacks on public figures. These include a very public ridicule of then pre-teenager Chelsea Clinton's physical appearance. That takes real courage and character, does it not? But we cannot legislate good taste, nor is it enforceable in any real sense.

Ironically, Limbaugh claims to be taking the high ground on matters personal and political. He apparently fancies himself a real judge of good character. That would include fawning over former Vice President Dick Cheney. Yet Cheney's support for torture interrogation methods actually qualify him as a potential war criminal. Limbaugh himself dismissed torture methods like waterboarding as harmless, joking that treatments like these were no worse than a fraternity prank. Yet when conservative radio personality Mancow Mueller of Chicago actually subjected himself to waterboarding, he quickly pronounced it a very real form of torture. Limbaugh has shown no such willingness to test his lighthearted theories. He prefers to avoid having any of his ideas or opinions subjected to the scrutiny of truth.

Limbaugh's ugly approach to entertainment includes a barely disguised racist streak and misogyny toward women (especially feminists). Limbaugh reserves particular disdain with anything to do with environmental justice and conservation, no surprise since he seems unable to connect any dots between cause and effect because he appears to doubt the verity of scientific principles such as evolution as well. Limbaugh's world is constructed from a literalistic ether, floating above the real world as if it were deigned to form the upper atmosphere our our collective intellect.

What brings Limbaugh's worldview down to earth is the fact that he is a clownish bigot who does genuine harm in this world by attacking the downtrodden and fawning over the rich. His audience appears to embrace this worldview as the solution to the world's problems. Most cynically, Limbaugh regularly plays the pity card over how difficult his job can be fighting for supposedly conservative politics in the Washington arena. Call it trickle-down cynicism. In that regard he has a truckload of fellow wastrels begging for attention.

Fellow political wrestlers Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham all enjoy the bloodsport of heckle-nomics while they make a closeted fortune preaching "woe is me" politics when they run into any real criticism of their views.

This is an age-old ploy of villains everywhere. They would all fit right in with the personality-driven soap opera of professional wrestling where empathy for the bad guys is dispensed along with mercy for the good.

The conservative medial cabal has a knack for packaging mean-spiritedness as an independent voice for justice. Their carefully orchestrated attempts to win public opinion helps them sell books and get rich. That's what they apparently care most about. The supremely vicious and creepily angry Ann Coulter emerges every six months with a new hate book bearing the world "liberal" in its title. She makes the round of talk shows to please herself and her publishers while the public has to put up with her shrewishly incisive comments. Yet what good has she done for society? Can we point to one positive change proposed by Ann Coulter? Will she conceive of something on the order of the geodesic dome in the manner of Buckminster Fuller, who famously said "You do not belong to you, you belong to the universe," before devoting himself to making the world a better place. One cannot conceive of someone so selfishly mean as Ann Coulter saying anything of such selfless or universal consequence. Coulter would call Fuller a full of crap liberal for such a statement. In truth she's just a mean bitch who fascinates people with her tragically overwrought persona. She'd be perfect for women's professional wrestling, that's for sure.

All these hardscrabble conservative personalities know the most important thing in their careers is to never, ever get into a real, fair fight. Yakker Sean Hannity used the emasculated Alan Colmes as a liberal patsy for his Fox News broadcasts. Colmes played his role all too willingly and no doubt pleased the almost exclusively conservative audience that tuned into Hannity's regular lashing of his hapless rival.

That's how Fox News approaches all its intended subjects. When it comes to real news, Fox News is a fake, just like professional wrestling is fake. Fox News was invented for one purpose only: to market the slanted news of conservatives as "fair and balanced" when in actuality Fox News repackages Republican talking points and snarky conservative opinions as actual news.

Like his brothers and sisters in crime, Rush Limbaugh also hates a fair fight. His methods indicate a genuinely fearful man who would rather stab a man in the back than enter the ring to defend his positions in a real contest of will, wit and truth.

He has not entirely gotten away with this act. Limbaugh's worst nemesis over the years has been political author, comedian and former Air American radio host who regularly skewered Limbaugh's lack of truthfulness in every form of media he could throw at him. Limbaugh and Franken's other frequent target Bill O'Reilly probably heaved a sigh or relief when Franken quit his media gig to run for Senator in Minnesota. And won.

Franken quit the media to actually put his money where his mouth was and run for public office. Unlike Rush Limbaugh, Al Franken really does care what happens to America. Running for Senator in Minnesota was a genuine career risk. Yet Franken, humorist though he be, has ever been a truth-seeker. His liberal credentials flow from wanting to know why things work, and how.

Limbaugh by comparison is decidedly incurious in this area of intellectual endeavor. He thinks he already knows how everything works. But to paraphrase Francis Bacon, "If you should always begin with certainties, you will most often end in doubt." No wonder Rush Limbaugh was a fan of George W. Bush, another man known for his incurably incurious approach to governance.

Limbaugh does not seem like a man who will ever run for election. Instead he seems to prefer his role as political professional wrestler where his ideas are part of the scripted fight against liberalism. Like Ann Coulter and the rest of the conservative cabal, the spoutings of Rush Limbaugh have never produced any real, positive social change. He lives in apparent fear that he should ever have to reconcile his carelessly constructed web of lies to reality.

Secretly he seems embittered by this fact, apparently aware he has already been exposed as a charlatan and fake. His personal life turned out to be a massive mess of illegal drugs and deception. That is why he clings to his fans in a love/hate relationship that seems to drive him increasingly mad with fervor. He is like an amalgam of the opium-smoking worm and Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland. Supremely self-possessed and crazy as a loon.

For these reasons Limbaugh can no longer even afford to try represent the truth. It is not in his nature. Instead he blathers on about his political prejudices even as he struggles with an off-the scale insecurity.

Limbaugh is a professional wrestler past his prime and pitifully adorned in royal robes, thick in the middle and even thicker in the head. He knows is time is short, and that is why he yells so loud. There is a fine line between demanding attention and expressing your worst fears in public. In Limbaugh's case those fears center on being discredited and ultimately ignored.

From there it is a short trip to the B circuit of political pro wrestling, where even the winners are losers once they leave the ring.