For Limbaugh, it's the net

I vaguely recall watching, as a kid, an old black-and-white movie in which this investigative journalist -- played, I think, by Stuart Whitman -- suspected sinister goings on inside the local insane asylum, so he managed to get himself committed to its "care" so that he could do some snooping around.

Well, you probably won't be surprised to learn the film's ending: He spent so long playing crazy, he actually went crazy, a tragic victim of too-clever-by-half, self-induced psychosis. So in the sinister asylum he remained, for the rest of his unnatural life.

Now, compare those fictive musings with the real-life ravings of Rush Limbaugh, who, by his own admission, has been playing it prodigiously over-the-top, for quite a number of years, in the pursuit, we are told, of a higher objective: to snake out and expose the evils of liberalism.

And here, from this week, is an example of how Rush is faring. In sorting out the why's and wherefore's of "this [Gov. Mark] Sanford business," Limbaugh said, he actually said:

This is almost like: I don't give a damn! Country's going to hell in a handbasket. I just want out of here! He had just tried to fight the stimulus money coming to South Carolina. He didn't want any part of it. He lost the battle and said, "What the hell? The Federal government is taking over! I want to enjoy life!"

Yes, it's one for the psychiatric record-books, folks: In Rush Limbaugh's increasingly dark, desperate and distorted mind, a $787 billion economic stimulus package is believable-enough stimulation to send a perfectly proper, right-thinking Southern governor into a follow-up exploration of Argentina's forbidden bush country.

So I put this to you: That's beyond strategic broadcasting; that's just plain nuts. And it just may be that Rush has been acting the lunatic for so long -- stridently bashing the left and absolving the right for ever-greater fun and profit -- he has finally become a genuine, certifiable one.