This is so much fun to read:

[cali]

How Donald Trump, Rush Limbaugh, and Other Blowhard Goliaths Meet Their David

Tyrannosaurus radio host Rush Limbaugh re-upped his contract this week for another four years, which will enable him to blow cigar smoke up his followers‘ fossilized backsides for the duration of Hillary Clinton’s first presidential term. As Eric Boehlert reports and observes in Media Matters, the rollout for Rush’s contract renewal is rather more muted this time around. In 2008, the news of Limbaugh’s $400 million dollar eight-year-contract renewal was treated like a coronation ceremony with all the royal trumpets blaring. This time, barely a bird chirp. ’Twas to be expected. (Yes, I said “’twas,” dammit.) As Boehlert notes, the business model for AM talk radio is broken, the angry white male audience is dying on the shriveled vine, and, I would add, the Trump ascendancy has scrambled the binary heroic-patriotic-religious conservative/cowardly-treasonous-godless liberal stereotype that formed the theater platform of talk radio’s (and Fox News‘s) Punch and Judy show. The decline of Limbaugh‘s radio reign was inevitable—it's impressive that it lasted this long—but it was hastened by a sharp downward break from which he never recovered: a self-inflicted blow produced in a petty fit of pique . . . an unforced error that acquired major magnitude and all because Rush was too arrogant to retreat a step or two and apologize. And this week Donald Trump (whom Rush is in the tank for—one old bro supporting another) made the same mistake, drilling a hole in the bottom of his dinghy, glub, glub.

It was, in case you need a refresher course, Rush Limbaugh’s scurrilous attack on Sandra Fluke that led to his irreversible unraveling. In 2012, Fluke, then a law student at Georgetown University, testified before a congressional oversight and reform committee on the need for contraception coverage in the university’s health plan. From Wikipedia: "She...stated that 40% of Georgetown Law School's female population suffered financial hardship as a result of birth control not being covered by the student health insurance plan, and that the lack of contraception coverage in the university insurance plans would induce many low income students to go without contraceptives. She then shared the stories of friends affected by such policies, citing a friend with polycystic ovary syndrome."''

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This cautionary tale of hubris has now been reenacted on a bigger stage with bigger stakes, demonstrating yet again George Santayana’s adage that those who do not learn from the past will louse up even worse the next time. (Santayana may have phrased it a bit differently.)

The Khans are Donald Trump’s Sandra Fluke. After Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the parents of a captain killed in Iraq in 2004, made their powerful, emotional appearance at the Democratic convention, with Khizr Khan issuing the rebuke of rebukes by presenting his pocket Constitution and offering to lend it to Trump so that he could acquaint himself with our founding document, Trump could have respectfully acknowledged their loss, honored their son’s sacrifice, and Risen Above It. After all, Fox News didn’t even carry the Khans live, ensuring that most of Trump’s legions would have remained lulled in their usual state of unknowing. He didn’t have to make an issue of them, just as Limbaugh didn’t need to single out Fluke. But elegant deflection and rising about are not what a Limbaugh or Trump do. They descend below it, whatever ”it“ may happen to be, scuba-diving in the fever swamp that has become Republican conservatism’s nature preserve. Like Rush with Fluke, Trump didn’t ease up, acting as if he were the injured party, going after the Khans with kamikaze zeal while they, like Fluke, stayed composed, resolved, unruffable—portraits of fortitude and integrity that revealed Trump as the all-thumbs smear artist and opportunist that he is.

Much more:

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/08/how-donald-trump-rush-limbaugh-and-other-blowhard-goliaths-meet-their-david