Privileging the Posterior
As Ian Fleming’s Auric Goldfinger said, “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.” So when I heard Rush Limbaugh’s recent comments about British Prime Minister Gordon Brown getting “anal poisoning” from slobbering over President Obama, I couldn’t help wondering whether something was going on.
And indeed, here’s Rush again, claiming “we’re being told… we have to bend over and grab the ankles” (mind you, Rush would never assume such a position voluntarily).
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | M – Th 11p / 10c | |||
| Fox News Fear Imbalance | ||||
|
||||
And here’s Tucker Carlson, opining that Jim Cramer’s wife must have been ashamed of “the butt sniffing he gave Jon Stewart.”
And Carlson again, asking why Jon Stewart wanted to be John Kerry’s “butt boy.”
I don’t want to make too much of this. Maybe there are examples of prominent left-wingers who share Limbaugh’s and Carlson’s apparent fixation. But after a while, given the richness of English and the variety of colorful references available to suggest subservience, one does start to feel that happenstance and coincidence might not be sufficient to explain things here.
Regardless, I’m sure that conservatives, who care deeply about maintaining standards of decency on the airwaves, will rise up to protect society by insisting that Limbaugh and Carlson find a way to exclude from public discourse their taste for anal idiom.