'H' IS FOR HYPOCRISY, DITTOHEADS

You're Rush Limbaugh and you wonder how it went so wrong so
quickly.

Just two weeks ago, your "dittoheads" were lined up at the altar of
your ignorant utterances, yelling amen to every skewered fact you uttered.

And on weekends, you got paid a boatload of bucks to show the rest of
the world that you knew even less about football than you did about
public policy. Life was good, you thought. No, life was great!

Now you look around and you can't believe what you see. First, you win
the "Trent Lott Foot-in-Mouth Award" for saying that a pro-bowl
quarterback, who happens to be African-American, was overrated because
of the bias of the "liberal" sports media. Yeah, like John Dennis,
Jerry Callahan, and Fred Smerlas.

And no sooner did you get kicked out of your weekend gig than you got
caught in the kind of scandal that would help win you the "William
Bennett Award for Hypocrisy" over Bill himself.

You lie in your $2,000-a-night drug rehab hospital bed and think of
all the comments about drug sellers and drug users you spouted over
the airwaves.

There is nothing good about drug use," you said over the air. "Drug
use is destroying the country," you said over the air. "If people are
violating the law by doing illegal drugs, they ought to be arrested,
convicted, and sent up," you said over the air. "The answer is to go
out and find out who are getting away with it, convict them, and send
them down the river," you said over the air.

I don't buy the disease part of it," you said over the air. "We are
rationalizing all this irresponsibility and all the choices people are
making themselves and we are not blaming them," you said over the air.

It is not our responsibility, but the drug user's," you said over the
air.

And time after time you said the words over the air that haunt you
most today, "Whatever happened to personal responsibility?"

You're Rush Limbaugh and you've just hired Roy Black, the same guy you
crucified for getting William Kennedy Smith off in that Florida rape
trial. Soon he'll be earning his paycheck by humanizing and humbling
your persona. He'll have you blubbering vapid apologies next to Oprah
or Barbara Walters or Diane Saw yer. He'll have you talking about the
pressure you felt trying to figure out how to spend the $285 million
your contract called for you to earn for making fun of other people.

Maybe he'll have you roll over on some bigger players, maybe "out" a
celebrity or two who shares your weakness for perscription drugs, all
to divert attention from yourself. No doubt your big-bucks attorney
will also have you offering to talk to school kids and promising to do
public service announcements about the dangers of drugs.

Poor old Rush, he'll have them saying, a victim of his success. And
you'll pay his enormous fee, because you know he's worth every penny.
Meanwhile, you also know a lot of the dittoheads will hang in there.
Remember these are the same dopes you got to both despise Bill
Clinton, because you told them he was morally unfit to be president; a
baby killer because he supported a woman's right to choose; and a
deviant for supporting gay rights and yet love Arnold Schwarzenegger
even though he, too, supported choice and gay rights, and made Bill
look like a choirboy when it came to the babes.

You spoke, they listened. And if you could get your old pal, George
W., to do a post-treatment photo op, that would be great.
Compassionate conservatism, he'll call it. And when W. is asked why he
still opposes the right of medical doctors to prescribe marijuana to
women suffering from nausea due to chemotherapy treatment, he'll give
his half smirk and say he's not prepared to travel down that slippery
slope, not yet anyway.

Hypocrisy 101. You're Rush Limbaugh and you've had a great run, made a
ton of dough, and now find yourself the punch line in Letterman and
Leno monologues. As the old Rush Limbaugh would have told you, while
chortling over the pain, embarrassment, and humiliation you were
suffering, "look in the mirror, knucklehead, and you'll see the person
who made it all possible."