Bobo In Purgatory

Byron York reports Rush Limbaugh’s response to proto-Bobo David Brooks’ attack:

Last week House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that town-hall attendees critical of the Democratic health care makeover were “carrying swastikas and symbols like that” to meetings. The next day, Rush Limbaugh responded at length on his radio program, saying, “I have always bristled when I hear people claim that conservatism gets close to Nazism. It is liberalism that’s the closest you can get to Nazism and socialism.”

On “Meet the Press” this morning, host David Gregory played a brief clip of Limbaugh’s monologue — a sentence in which Limbaugh said, “There are far more similarities between Nancy Pelosi and Adolf Hitler than between these people showing up at town halls to protest a Hitler-like policy” — and then asked guest David Brooks to comment. “I hadn’t seen the Rush Limbaugh thing,” Brooks said. “That is insane. What he’s saying is insane.”

I asked Limbaugh for a reaction, and here is his answer:

Everyone seems to ignore that Pelosi started this, saying town hall participants were showing up with swastikas, etc. That’s calling them Nazis, as Dick Durbin referred to our Gitmo interrogators from the Senate floor. I’ve been listening to the left compare George W. Bush to Hitler for eight years. I’ve been listening to Democrats and the left compare conservatism to Nazis my whole career. This time I responded. In kind, by comparing the radical left policies of the Nazis to today’s radical left leadership of the Democrat Party. I’m not surprised they don’t like it.

If only somebody would write a book on that topic…

Found via the Professor, who believes that “what’s really going on is that Brooks was suckered by David Gregory with an out-of-context soundbite.” Ransom note-style editing? That never happens in the MSM!

Update: Welcome to those tuning in from NRO’s Corner.