Ah, to be rich and famous.

Ah, to be rich and famous. (the latest editorial on the Limbo Mumbo Jumbo) Just think: Without those qualities, we'd have no stories about a pill-popping talk-radio host.....

More On Rush: There was no mass conspiracy of liberal secret agents shoving pills down his throat. The butler didn't do it -- not to mention the maid. It was his own damn fault. Rush Limbaugh's a bona fide drug addict. Let the "excellence in rehab" begin! Limbaugh's admission of addiction to OxyContin explains it all: the intolerance, the hypocrisy, the outlandish, extreme right-wing views. Just as with those damn hippies a generation before him, it was drugs. Limbaugh went wacko on that hillbilly heroin. Can we get everyone together for a massive chorus of "Tsk, tsk"?

Many of my readers e-mailed to say they were pleased about the karmic justice served on Limbaugh. But, certainly, there were e-mails from the Dittoheads with no one to ditto. All they could do was try, helplessly, to defend their ditto master and ask me where my compassion was. I said it was in the same place it would be if Limbaugh were to comment on his own pitiful self. Limbaugh on Limbaugh would be merciless. He'd have some drug song like "White Rabbit" or "One Toke over the Line" playing in the background, and then he'd gleefully pass judgment with a single phrase: "Moral weakling." And then he'd go to commercials.

One man did offer this telling comment in Limbaugh's defense: "Rush makes more money than you and all his critics put together." That's a "neener-neener" schoolyard-level retort if I ever head one. But it made clear what Limbaugh had fostered all these years in our national discourse. To the Dittoheads, Limbaugh was the messenger of life's ultimate value. To be rich is everything. To not be rich is to be a loser.

On his Web site the other day, after figures were released showing poverty rates up and income levels down in the United States, Limbaugh ran a bit about how the poor weren't so poor after all, because they had air conditioning. If you have A/C, you aren't poor enough. In fact, you're just rich enough to get no sympathy from Limbaugh. That's the nasty beat Limbaugh dances to. He harvests all the heartless thoughts of a nation. He liberated intolerance in Middle America and put a fine point on it for the rich. He made it OK to kick the underdog. Limbaugh was the overdog.

Now, his network will try to keep the Limbaugh franchise alive during his rehab. (What is Limbaugh, after all, but a franchise?) To hold the audience on Monday, it featured guest Ann Coulter's deadly and yet commercial mix of blond intolerance. What a marvelous coincidence that one of the headlines of the day was the beatification of Mother Theresa. Now, there's a saint with values. She's the anti-Limbaugh. But I bet she doesn't get the headlines Maha Rushie got.