Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot

It's also a book that makes you feel good about being to the left and that we're all not bedwetting liberals.

Well, yeah, it's not the quintessential work of American liberalism, and he is playing it for laughs, but there are some good points made in the book. From the time, as well, it was an expression of the hypocrisy Franken saw in some of the Contract With America conservatives who touted family values while philandering and divorcing and just being mean.

And, also, to be fair, Rush Limbaugh is not fat anymore since he's been married to his aerobics instructor wife. I guess the third time is the charm. In fact, this was not lost on Al Franken--this is what Al had to say about it in The Nation earlier this year:

Which brings me to the "big fat" part. When Rush was last on TV regularly, he was very, very, very fat. And that, I think, is one of the reasons he wants the (Monday Night Football) job. Since my book came out, Rush has lost a lot of weight, and I don't blame him for wanting America to see that he is no longer, as doctors put it, "morbidly obese." The reality is, I saved the man's life, halting his slide into food-assisted suicide. Has he thanked me? No.

Not only is the humor intelligent and creative(e.g. the entire chapter devoted to a fictional Vietnam War story using as characters all the hawkish Republican draft-dodgers), but again and again throughout the book, the complete and utter hypocrisy of much of the Republican Party is shown. You have Gingrich the moralist who divorced his first wife while she was in the hospital for cancer surgery, many other Republicans in the moral majority also on their second wife, many of the Republican hawks whose rich dads got them out of the draft, Limbaugh who mocks the poor and yet was on the government dole for years of his life, etc.

Still, the most redeeming feature of this book in my mind is that more than once it left me literally gasping for breath because I was laughing so hard.