Wednesday, May 04, 2005

The Vast Right-Wing Cab-spriracy
I was listening to Rush Limbaugh yesterday morning—wait, you say, what's that about the runaway bride? No, I actually was, because my taxi driver was either a Republican or was Repub-curious or maybe spoke no English and just liked the sound of Limbaugh's mellifluous voice. Who knows.

In earlier days I might've been really annoyed by this and asked him to turn the radio off (in New York, for example, riders are entitled to silence—it's right there on the little taxi customer's bill of rights—but I wasn't sure if my lovely Gomorrah-by-the-Bay had a similar rule for me to invoke), but living in the relatively protected left-wing enclave of San Francisco has given me enough comfort that the mere sight of a right-wing bumper sticker no longer fills me with immediate nausea.

At my office, for example, a coworker recently confessed that she didn't actually know any Republicans, but just heard about them on TV. I suspect she's wrong, but the fact that she could even consider it must be difficult to imagine for anyone living in that thin sliver of America east of the Bay Bridge and west of the Lincoln Tunnel that I keep hearing about.

In any case, Mr. Formerly Fat But Now Thin but Not in a Way that Looks Healthy and Sometime Football Announcer but Later Disgraced Drug Addict but Now Rehabilitated and You’d Be an Addict Too if It Happened to You and So On—anyway, Rush was railing against Bill Clinton's new anti-obesity program, really skewering it. His gist was that the government doesn't trust you to raise your kids, so Bill Clinton and his jack-booted thugs are going to storm into your house and steal your Pringles at gunpoint, with Elián Gonzalez's aunt wailing in the background.

As I listened to Rush saying all this—especially the Monica jokes—my instant reaction was to feel sorry for him. I mean, his guys won, they've been running the country for five years, and pretty much doing whatever they want. But Rush is still partying like it's 1996, hounding Bill Clinton—when last I checked, a suburban retiree recovering from multiple heart surgeries—and I just felt pity that his vast '90s empire of vitriol had been reduced to picking away at the bleached bones of Clinton's political career (until he runs for mayor of New York, I suppose).

Of course, this was a small sample size, and it’s possible that today he started speaking truth to power about things like the Sudan genocide or North Korea's nuke party or the Abu Ghraib trials or the fact that a member of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies recently said that based on current climate models, he "wouldn't be shocked to find out that by 2100 most things were destroyed."

But I guess it warms my heart to think that in forty years he could still be dogging Clinton at his deathbed, and I'll put on my Hootie cassingles, swim out my front door, and sigh, "I love the '90s."

On an Unrelated Note
Today was a banner day for internet searches. Here’s a few:

  • dispelling horniness

  • snobby fables

  • Michelle Kwan's great ass

  • is Britney Spears bald

  • pictures of Nomar Garciaparra scratching his balls