A couple weeks ago, Rush Limbaugh did something incredibly stupid.
I know, not really surprising. But this particular thing was so catastrophically moronic that it sets a gloriously high standard for right-wing ideologues.
On Aug. 25, an obscure blogger wrote a satirical news bulletin where he “revealed” that a section of President Barack Obama’s undergraduate thesis paper from Columbia had been released to a reporter for Time magazine.
The paper, called “Aristocracy Reborn,” was extremely critical of the Founding Fathers, according to the phony bulletin. Obama was quoted as blaming the current economic crisis on the “shackles of hypocrisy” contained in the U.S. Constitution.
Two weeks ago, Rush Limbaugh’s newsgathering team — yes, he has a newsgathering team — provided Limbaugh with the bulletin to present on his radio show as concrete evidence that Obama hates America.
Not understanding the difference between sarcasm and reality is thoughtless enough. But when Limbaugh was handed an embarrassing note during his broadcast saying the entire story had been fabricated, he admitted that the truth doesn’t matter.
“I don’t care if these quotes are made up,” said Limbaugh during the program. “I know Obama thinks it.”
Of course Limbaugh knows Obama’s thoughts. His months of intense physical training in Dagobah provided him with the necessary Jedi mind reading techniques. You should see him convince Stormtroopers that these aren’t the droids they’re looking for.
Who cares about truth, anyway? We have been chained down with the ponderous burden of fact checking for too long.
We should determine political strategies like old men on porches determine the weather. I can’t understand why Obama would forge his birth certificate, Hank, but my throbbing knee pain definitely means Obama is a Muslim terrorist.
Limbaugh echoes former President George Bush’s famously brainless statement that he trusts his gut to determine right from wrong. Because using that thinking thing just makes things too, uh, complexified.
The underlying issue, however, is the insistence that undergraduate thesis projects reveal something about the character of famous political figures.
Obama’s mysterious thesis, supposedly about Soviet nuclear disarmament, was mentioned in a New York Times story in 2007. Since then, everyone has been searching for this elusive thesis, from investigative journalists to conservative bloggers desperate to find something incriminating about Obama.
This phenomenon of thesis-searching isn’t relegated to presidents, either. An investigative reporter for MSNBC wrote that Hilary Clinton’s undergraduate thesis has been described as an elusive Rosetta Stone that might finally decode her apparently indecipherable actions.
I don’t understand this fixation with undergraduate theses, anyway. These two, for example, are incredibly outdated. Barack Obama graduated from Columbia in 1983 and Hilary Clinton graduated from Wellesley College in 1969.
Their opinions about foreign and domestic policy should have evolved since then. And Obama’s thesis on Soviet nuclear disarmament was written, of course, before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
I can’t imagine anything scarier than having to answer questions about some overstuffed college essay that was thrown together from a couple primary sources.
Well, there is one thing: Rush Limbaugh with a lightsaber.
