Hillary’s new booster…

Hillary Clinton has a new best friend: Rush Limbaugh. The eponymous host of The Rush Limbaugh Show — which, according to its own website, is “the most listened to radio talk show in America, broadcast on over 600 radio stations nationwide” — this week began encouraging his listeners to vote for Hillary Clinton.

Urging his army of ‘DittoHeads’ (as Limbaugh’s loyal listeners call themselves) to vote for a woman whom Limbaugh has spent 16 years vilifying as the she-devil incarnate might seem a surprising move on El Rushbo’s part. But if you listen to Limbaugh regularly, it actually makes perfect sense.

“We need Hillary,” Limbaugh declared on his show on February 26. “We need the soap opera. Hillary Clinton is J. R. Ewing, and her husband, Bill, is Sue Ellen. We need to keep this soap opera going, but we also need the chaos,” Limbaugh added.
In a segment entitled, “We Started Mrs. Clinton’s Slide, But Now We Need Her to Stay Alive,” Limbaugh argued that Hillary was now the Republicans’ best hope for victory in November.

“We need somebody roughing up Obama before it’s our turn to get there, because, as it’s been demonstrated, the Republicans have a reticence in doing so,” he told his huge listening audience, apparently referring to John McCain and the Republican National Committee. “They are sending out memos, we can’t attack Obama, we’ll be accused of racism,” Limbaugh continued, referring to a recent memo from the RNC warning Republicans not to use language that could be interpreted as racist or sexist.

“Somebody’s gotta criticize him; somebody’s gotta bloody the guy up,” enjoined the self-crowned king of right-wing talk radio. “He’s shown he’s sensitive to it here, and the Clintons are the one to do this,” Limbaugh added, speaking of Obama. “If they can pull out one of these two states, Texas or Ohio, then she will go on. We need chaos in this party.”

The old saying that politics makes strange bedfellows is nowhere better illustrated in this strangest of all pairs of bedfellows: Hillary Clinton and Rush Limbaugh. But the logic is impeccable: if Barack Obama’s nomination is probable or even inevitable, then DittoHeads voting in droves for Clinton on March 4 could in theory help her win at least one or more of the Democratic primaries in Texas, Ohio, Vermont and Rhode Island and keep the race for the Democratic nomination going; and the longer the race goes on, the more time and money Obama has to spend in defeating Clinton rather than in turning his attention to the putative Republican nominee, John McCain.

“President Clinton is on our side in this,” Limbaugh declared on his Feb. 26 show. “We have to keep this going,” he added. “Look, it’s about winning, folks. It is about the Democrats being defeated. We need them at war with one another. It’s like when the enemy is eating themselves alive, you pass the salt, you get out of the way. They are tearing themselves apart. They’ve got an uncivil race war going on.”

On the page with the transcript from Limbaugh’s Feb. 26 segment, his website prominently displays a sticker that reads, “Pimp Yourself: Hillary — Keep Chaos Alive.” While Limbaugh seems to suggest that the ideal outcome would be for Hillary Clinton to get the nomination because she would be easier to beat than Barack Obama — as most of the polls now show — Limbaugh recognizes that it is not extremely unlikely that she can beat Obama, and so the right-wing radio host settles for ‘chaos’ and intraparty warfare as a second-best outcome of the Democratic primary process. “The whole point is we want the Democrat Party to do as much as it can to destroy itself,” Limbaugh concludes.

Food for thought indeed for Democrats who want to win in November.