Rush Limbaugh, the drug-addled radio entertainer and provocateur, used the New York Times article suggesting John McCain had a too-cozy relationship with a female lobbyist a decade ago — a story sourced to, and apparently leaked by, Republican operatives in the 2000 McCain presidential campaign — to castigate McCain with a rambling discourse on his dark and paranoid view of Americans who do not share his political views:
Limbaugh’s swipe at Sen. Kennedy’s drinking is particularly rich coming from a man who ingested so many opoids that he was rendered profoundly deaf.

The lesson is liberals are to be defeated. You cannot walk across the aisle with them. You cannot reach across the aisle. You cannot welcome their media members on your bus and get all cozy with them and expect eternal love from them. You are a Republican. Whether you’re a conservative Republican or not, you are a Republican. At some point, the people you cozy up to, either to do legislation or to get cozy media stories, are going to turn on you. They are snakes. If the right lesson is not learned from this, then it will have proved to be of no value. There’s a great opportunity here for Senator McCain to learn the right lesson and understand who his friends are and who his enemies are. He’s had that backwards for way too long. He has thought the New York Times is his friend. He has thought Chris Matthews and these other people in the Drive-By Media are his friends. They aren’t. That’s the lesson today.

The story is not the story. The story is the Drive-By Media turning on it’s favorite maverick trying to take him out. The media picked the Republican candidate. The New York Times endorsed that candidate while they sat on this story, and now with utter predictability, they are trying to destroy him. This is what you get when you walk across the aisle and try to make these people your friends. Why should any of us be surprised or even angry at what the New York Times is doing here trying to take out John McCain? Those of you who listen regularly should have been expecting this all along because it’s utterly predictable. It’s as predictable as the sun rising in the morning. It’s as predictable as Ted Kennedy finding a bar at happy hour.

The swipe at Sen. Kennedy’s drinking is particularly rich coming from a man who ingested illegally obtained Oxycontin in such huge quantities that he may have rendered himself profoundly deaf.

Rush’s discourse, which is part of what he unironically calls the “Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies,” is classic transference: It is Republicans like Rush and his millions of easily deluded Dittohead followers who view politics as a zero-sum game. He and others of his ilk — Karl Rove, Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity to name a few — play by just one rule: Win at any cost.

For these conservatives, no lie is too small. No smear is too unfounded. No political trick is too dirty.

The last thing they are interested in is calls for unity. Without divisiveness and rancor, their livelihoods — the millions they rake in from propagandizing for the oligarchs and corporatists in their books and on their radio and television shows — would disappear.

This is the field of battle they have chosen. Unfortunately, the only way to play against them is to annihilate them. The only way to teach them a political lesson is to defeat them utterly.