rushyMwaaaa-haaaaa-haaaaaaaa!!  It's beautiful, innit?

In a town so tough that most murders get just a few paragraphs in the paper, somebody called The Sun about 8 a.m. yesterday with a tip about a vandalized billboard.

By noon, the story was all over the Internet, Rush Limbaugh was kicking off his national radio show with it, and City Hall was fielding calls from as far away as California. By 5 p.m., the story had become one of the three most popular individual articles in the history of the paper's Web site, with nearly 200,000 page views.

There's a reason the story had legs. The paint-splattered billboard featured Limbaugh's mug. And the tipster was a spokesman for a city agency – the one responsible for cleaning up graffiti – who let it be known that he was no "dittohead."

"It looks like they took globs of paint and threw it on his face," Robert Murrow of the Department of Public Works told The Sun. "It looks great. It did my heart good." (via Romenesko)

Aw.  Mine, too. 

And all that would be well and good if the face on the billboard didn't happen to belong to the biggest goddamn crybaby in The Known Media Universe.

It wasn't long before the Drudge Report had picked it up,

Groan.  Of course it did. 

then legions of other bloggers, some of whom posted phone numbers to Public Works and the mayor's office.

Oh, hurrah!  A Right Wing fatwah!  Well, I guess all those guys in their mom's basements need something to do between re-runs of Deep Space Nine.

"It's certainly emblematic of the new information age in a couple of ways," Rainie said. "The first is, the sort of instantaneous and viral nature of the original dissemination. The general speed and velocity of information generation is one element of this."

Limbaugh began yesterday's nationally syndicated show with the Baltimore billboard flap.

"I think I'm the one that needs Secret Service protection," Limbaugh said. "All this talk about Obama and these presidential candidates. For crying out loud, I'm the one who needs it."

Aw, Christ on the Half Shell, Limbaugh!  Barack Obama is receiving real live death threats and you want a Secret Service detail becuase some group of bored high-schoolers threw paint at your billboard?

But, of course, this is part and parcel with the Right Wing Culture of Victimization.  Limbaugh's doing a Reverse Malkin here, the practice by which one launches a vicious character smear and then jumps up on a chair squealing, "Eek!  Eek!  I'M the victim here!" whenever somebody engages in a bit of, ah, colorful criticism. 

Media Matters (via Jack and Jill Politics) has some thoughts on Limbaugh and his attacks on Barack Obama, by the way.

On the May 7 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, Rush Limbaugh defended his "Barack, The Magic Negro" song — a parody mocking 2008 Democratic presidential hopeful and Sen. Barack Obama (IL) — and said, in response to reports about the controversy this parody has generated: "If I were to think about Barack Obama being in any trouble — needing Secret Service — I would look to Clinton Inc. before I looked at me. Try that, drive-by media. Get that out there."

[...]

Additionally, in response to a report by CBS Sacramento-affiliate KVOR, during which anchor Chris Burrours stated, "There are groups this morning saying that not only is the song racist, but it's putting Barack Obama at increased danger," Limbaugh asked: "[C]ould it be that these sponges who do not listen to the program — obviously found out about this from the Chicago Tribune story yesterday that — where did they hear about it? Did they hear about it from Media Matters for America?"

Eugh.  Even reading things that Limbaugh says makes me feel like I need a Karen Silkwood-style decontamination shower.

But where was I?

Oh, yes, I see this as a positive development.  As average citizens make it plain that they don't like, agree with, or support Limbaugh, he and his supporters will get caught up in their self-righteous little games of Whack-a-Mole while folks like us will be spending our time calling and writing to Congress about things like the restoration of habeas corpus.  The focus of the Right Wing Screamers is getting smaller and smaller as the list of topics they want to avoid discussing at all costs (the war, the DoJ scandal, the Toddler in Chief's plummeting poll-numbers) grows and grows.

Witness Bill O'Reilly's love you/hate you man-crush on George Soros, or Michelle Malkin's recent preoccupation with (of all things) rap lyrics.  They're starting to get really desperate.

And that would be really sad if it just wasn't so damn funny. 

Related posts:

  1. Early Morning Swim: Rachel on Right-Wing Death Threats, Eliminationist Rhetoric
  2. Another menace on our borders
  3. Early Morning Swim: Maddow on the GOP Playing the Race Card
  4. Preemptive dodging
  5. Got a Question for Rush Limbaugh?