Even if you don’t read anything else today (apart, of course, from this not-to-be-missed column), you will want to read  Rush Limbaugh’s superlative reflections in The Wall Street Journal on the latest liberal libel, the idea that criticizing the Democrats’ big-government agenda is tantamount to 1. sedition (a fancy word for “treason”) and 2. inciting violence.

I know, I know: to hear them tell it, Rush Limbaugh is a barely articulate (or is he a demonically super-articulate?) neanderthal, one of those “bitter” chaps addicted to “guns and religion” that candidate Obama warned about on the campaign trail.

Yet here he is on the editorial page of the nation’s most serious newspaper sounding like a cross between James Madison and George Orwell.  How can that be?

Limbaugh begins by recalling that in 1995 President Bill Clinton accused “loud and angry voices” on the airwaves—i.e., folks like Rush Limbaugh—of inciting the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. As Limbaugh puts it, “What self-serving nonsense.”

And the nonsense is not only self-serving, it’s also malignant. I mean, it’s not just this week’s prime example of liberal hypocrisy—“Liberals,” Limbaugh points out, “are perfectly comfortable with antigovernment protest when they’re not in power.”  Then dissent is “the highest form of patriotism,” it’s OK to festoon walls with Bush=Hitler posters, etc., etc. But move the shoe onto the other foot  and suddenly it is “unpatriotic,” even (if you—per impossibile—believe Chris Matthews and Joe Klein) “seditious” to raise questions about the growth of government and the fiscal and national security policies  of the present administration.

Purely from a theatrical point of view, you have to admire the way the Alinsky-Left has deployed what Limbaugh calls “the violence card.” Virtually all the real violence has been committed by the Left: The SEIU goons send Kenneth Gladney to the hospital because they don’t like what he says at Russ Carnahan’s town hall meeting. Karl Rove goes to Claremont College to talk and someone phones in a bomb threat. Allee Bautsch, Bobby Jindal’s campaign finance director, and her boyfriend are attacked leaving a fundraiser in New Orleans.  She suffers a broken leg, he a concussion, fractured nose, and broken jaw.