Damned Elitists!

“They [the Obamas] are smug, arrogant elitists.” — Rush Limbaugh

Um, yeah… Check out Rush’s digs:

And savour this excerpt from a lengthy profile that appeared in the New York Times a few months ago:

“ANTICIPATING A QUESTION,” Limbaugh said when we pulled into the garage of his secluded beachfront mansion in Palm Beach, “why do I have so many cars?”

I hadn’t actually been wondering that. Very rich people tend not to stint on transportation. For example, we drove to the house from the studio, Limbaugh at the wheel, in a black Maybach 57S, which runs around $450,000 fully loaded. He had half a dozen similar rides on his estate.

“I have these cars for two reasons,” Limbaugh said. “First, they are for the use of my guests. And two, I happen to love fine automobiles.”
He also loves space. There are five homes — all of them his — on the property. The big house is 24,000 square feet. Limbaugh lives there with a cat. He’s been married three times but has no children.

Limbaugh informed me that I was the first journalist ever to enter his home. Mary Matalin, the Republican consultant, calls the place “aspirational,” which is one adjective that fits. The place, largely designed by Limbaugh himself, reflects the things and places he has seen and admired. The massive chandelier in the dining room, for example, is a replica of the one that hung in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel in New York. The gleaming cherry-wood floors are dotted with hand-woven oriental carpets. A life-size oil portrait of El Rushbo, as he often calls himself on the air, hangs on the wall of the main staircase.

Unlike many right-wing talk-show hosts, Limbaugh does not view France with hostility. On the contrary, he is a Francophile. His salon, he told me, is meant to suggest Versailles. His main guest suite, which I did not personally inspect, was designed as an exact replica of the presidential suite of the George V Hotel in Paris.

Limbaugh is especially proud of his two-story library, which is a scaled-down version of the library at the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina. Cherubs dance on the ceiling, leatherbound collections line the bookshelves and the wood-paneled walls were once “an acre of mahogany.”

A fastidious man, Limbaugh has a keen eye for domestic detail. His staff lights fragrant candles throughout the house to greet his arrival from work each day. Limbaugh led me into his private humidor, selected two La Flor Dominicana Double Ligero Chisel stogies for us to smoke and seated me at an onyx-and-marble table in the study. The room opens onto a patio, a putting green and a beach. On the table was a brochure for Limbaugh’s newest airplane, a Gulfstream G550. It cost him, he told me, $54 million.

Really, what can you say about a man like this derisively calling others “elitist”?

Capitalism: A Love Story

I wonder how right-wingers will express their unbridled loathing for Michael Moore when he takes on the big banks and Wall Street in his new film… I suspect many of them might be forced into actually agreeing with him.

The horror… the horror!

Whatever one might think about his theatrical excesses or minor deceits as a filmmaker (that have been thoroughly documented by his many detractors) or the fact that he’s fat (something wingnuts never tire of pointing out), it’s hard to deny that he was pretty much spot on about the impending fate of General Motors, the corrosive nature of America’s gun-crazy culture, the ideological flim-flammery of the Iraq war, and the malicious bureaucracy driving the for-profit healthcare industry.

“Death Panels” Redux

Now that it’s been fairly well established that so-called “death panels” were never included (let alone envisioned) by the various healthcare reform proposals being advanced, the right-wing fear mongers have refined their line of attack into a paranoid slippery slope argument.

On Fox News this morning, the Doughy Pantload compared the controversial Veterans Administration end-of-life guide “Your Life, Your Choices” to the ethos behind Nazi eugenics, suggesting that healthcare reform would inevitably lead to a bureaucratic regime whereby certain people (the disabled and the melancholic, for example) who can no longer contribute productively to society are mercilessly “culled from the tribe.”

Update: More on the “slippery slope” argument that was trotted out on FNS yesterday.