Rush: Socialized Medicine, Socialized Care Policy, Social Security

Maybe this is the key to Rush Limbaugh's success: as he flits from issue to issue, Rush is a kind of whirling dervish of misinformation, confusing as he entertains.

Strategically, if irrationally, conflating the Car Allowance Rebate System with health care reform, Limbaugh Friday exhorted:

You could almost say they're the same plan. We're going to get rid of your old clunker car and we're going to get rid of your old clunker grandparents with Obama's health care. Cash for clunkers. Death for clunkers. Disastrous government programs that, it should be noted, were not inherited from George Bush, either. Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, have the gall to call various groups of Americans "villains." These greedy compensates who are trying to jam socialized medicine down our throats, which is a law designed to deny health care to those who have paid in the longest.

That's where this is going to end up. It's going to end up like Social Security: The young are going to pay for the old, pure and simple. That's what's going to end up being. Our parents, our grandparents, our great-grandparents. What kind of person would design a program to deny care for those who raised us?

Trying "to get rid of your old clunker grandparents with Obama's health care," while a humorously contemptous means of referring to the elderly, has been debunked, here at thinkprogress.org. (Medicare now pays for an end-of-life consultation for an elderly patient if the doctor initiates the subject; the amendment proposed would extend payment by Medicare to the consultation if intitiated by the patient.) The myth that Democrats want to kill the elderly was created by the Republican right to kill health care reform, apparently the impetus for Rush's reference to "deny(ing) health care to those who have paid in the longest" and "design(ing) a program to deny care for those who raised us."

But if Rush really believed that the bill targeted elderly Americans for extermination, it's unlikely he'd protest it so vehemently. In the very same stream-of-consciousness rant, he complains of the 'cash for clunkers' program

That's where this is going to end up. It's going to end up like Social Security: The young are going to pay for the old, pure and simple. That's what's going to end up being.

This, apparently, is Rush's nightmare: the car program is going to end up like Social Security! The young are going to pay for the old, pure and simple! Social Security- the beginning of the end of civilization!

Never mind that the crash of housing prices has been a multi-billion- or is it trillion- dollar subsidy from the old to the young. (Housing prices drop, retired people sell their house for far less than earlier would have been expected, said house then bought by young people at a bargain price.) Rush says health care reform is going after the elderly- and worse yet, the automobile program is going to be like that awful Social Security, in which elderly people are financially aided by younger people (who later become the elderly who are helped by the young, as the social compact is continually reinforced).

Characteristically convoluted logic by El Rushbo, whose only complaint should be that it can't be patented.

Next Rush: Frigging, frigging, and more frigging