Your Move, Rush

I wonder how Rush Limbaugh slept last night after hearing the news that U.S. forces had killed Osama bin Laden.

I wonder if Rush stayed up late trying to figure out not only how not to credit President Obama for the good news, but if there was a way to possibly blame Obama for the terrorist's overdue execution.

Those are the types of self-made quandaries that Obama haters in the right-wing media face this week. And let's face it, Rush Limbaugh is the poster boy for runaway Obama hatred; for Obama Derangement Syndrome. That's the malady where rational discussion about politics and policy is not encourage or even allowed. Instead, in the ODS fever swamps the President of the United States is universally, and irrationally, derided as an enemy of America.

Obama's dead-end haters in the far-right media try to convince themselves that they oppose him so ferociously because of his wrong-headed policies. (He's destroying the U.S. economy, on purpose.) But of course, that's not what's in play today, and that's not what has been in play for the last two years.

Sorry, but cheering when the United States loses its Olympic bid because the loss might make Obama look bad has nothing to do with disliking Obama's policies. That kind of warped reaction is driven by hate, plain and simple. And it's that Obama hatred that eventually blurs the line between loathing the president and rooting against America. Or an inability to root for America.

If Rush Limbaugh cannot go on the radio on a day like today and congratulate the President of the United States for overseeing the killing of bin Laden, and if Limbaugh can't walk back his previously claims about how Obama would pardon bin Laden if given the chance, or about how the president is a "sissy" with no "guts," then the mad talker will simply prove, yet again, that he's a radical fear monger who's desperately out of touch with mainstream America.

UPDATED: After opening his show with a heavy bout of sarcastic praise for Obama today, Limbaugh quickly segued into playing politics with the bin Laden story. Indeed, at one point he claimed that if the president were a shoo-in for re-election, “bin Laden would still be alive today”: