LIMBAUGH EATING HIS OWN WORDS

"Too many whites are getting away with drug use. The answer is to ... find
the ones who are getting away with it, convict them and send them up the
river."

Amen, Brother Limbaugh. Good luck at the Big House Prom. I wonder if the
Oxycontin poster boy still feels the same about white guys and drug use in
2003 as he does when he made that statement in 1995.

(By the way: This isn't about politics. Rush Limbaugh has always insisted
he's "just an entertainer." Of course, he's one of those entertainers who
believes liberals like Tim Robbins or Martin Sheen should shut up and dance,
but one hypocrisy at a time, please.)

It's a classic story: A loner, multiple divorcee, admits he's smoked pot and
watched porn, turning to more powerful drugs for relief and solace from the
pains of life. Not only did he crave drugs, he allegedly forced his
housekeeper to score them, handing over boxes of cash in exchange for his
fix.

It's tempting to smirk when the stuffed-shirt moralists are caught with
their hands in the poor box, such as when it turned out that Bill "Book of
Virtues" Bennett gambled away $8 million at casinos.

Then the Fox "News" mouthpiece Bill O'Reilly got caught in a hissy fit
against Al Franken -- first urging Fox to sue the comedian, then denying
that he did -- that sent Franken's book to No. 1 and bombastic Bill to the
laughingstock shelves.

And even conservatives are beginning to suspect Ann Coulter's a little nuts,
especially after her latest screeching diatribe in which all liberals are
traitors -- including FDR, Kennedy and Truman, I suppose.

So it's been a productive, snickering year for liberals.

But drug addiction is powerful stuff, even if, according to the Rush
Limbaughs of the world, Rush Limbaugh deserves no pity. Still.

A Newsweek profile paints the portrait of a sad, lonely boy who apparently
had few friends as a child -- and maybe even fewer now -- a boy who
considered high school "a prison."

Young Rush didn't even care for trick-or-treating. When other kids came
around, he'd sometimes drop water balloons on their heads while hiding out
in his room, his mom reports.

In school, he was considered intellectually lazy -- perhaps daunted by his
overachieving family, many of whom were prospering lawyers. He only attended
college for one year.

"You need to make an outline. You need some data to support your
assertions," Limbaugh's public speaking teacher Bill Stacy told Newsweek.
"Frankly, he wouldn't do those things."

He indulged, as youth will do, battled a weight problem, got married and
divorced twice and is married again, despite being described by women he
dated as so self-absorbed they wouldn't consider seeing him a second time.

Limbaugh met his current wife, a former aerobics instructor, through a
computer bulletin-board service. He's been fired twice as a disk jockey and
was briefly on welfare (Must. Resist. Urge. To. Smirk) while out of work,
then hit big when he replaced Morton Downey Jr. (another has-been from the
right-wing radio pantheon) at a Sacramento radio station. You know the rest:
Big ratings. Big money. Big influence. Sad guy.

So yeah, I can sympathize. But I sympathize with all those in pain seeking
solace. Is it barely possible that, now, Rush will too?