John North Editor & Publisher

Mr. Rush Limbaugh
The Rush Limbaugh Show
1270 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020

Dear Mr. Limbaugh (aka a self-described “harmless, lovable little fuzz ball”):

On occasion, I eagerly tune into your daily radio show so that you can tell me where I should stand on issues and how to think about virtually everything. After all, as you repeatedly remind me and your many millions of other minions, you are the “all-knowing, all-caring, all-sensing, all-feeling, Maha-Rushdie.”

But, but, but ... wait! One ray of doubt keeps breaking through the hypnotic fog your platitudes induce. It’s this phrase that you have begun using ad nauseam, which strikes me as a cliché unworthy of your self-proclaimed brilliance — “It is what it is.”

As a self-proclaimed “glittering jewel” in a world of “colossal ignorance,” how could you use a bromide that sounds so much like your favorite whipping boy, Al Gore?

In fact, it is from Gore. Back in 2000, after winning the popular vote and possibly the electoral vote as well, but losing the presidency, Gore famously made the statement, “I strongly disagreed with the Supreme Court decision and the way they interpreted and applied the law. But I respect the rule of law, so it is what it is.”

For someone who has made a career of portraying liberals as vapid and shallow, this pontificatory pronouncement seems to me the very embodiment of the hypocrisy that you so decry.

What’s so ironic about this is how the tables have turned, thanks in great part to you for your own unrelenting diatribe against those who are not as extremist as you.

I’ve discovered that there are two ways this phrase is commonly used. One is to express resignation — as Gore was doing in the face of the Republican onslaught.

Now, you are basically throwing up your hands in the face of of the potential Democrate landslide that your rhetoric helped to bring on.

 Worse, you are lifting (or as Hillary Clinton says about fellow Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, “plagiarizing”) the phrase for your own repeated use, without crediting Gore, your arch-nemesis. We’re just waiting for the “drive-by media” to get hold of this!

In the interest of full disclosure, however, I did find one of your fellow right-wingers used that cliché in its other sense — defiance — to underline how little anyone else could do about his decisions. Specifically, ex-Secreterary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in defending the Bush administration’s willingness to launch pre-emptive strikes on “rogue states”

declared to be a threat: “You can call that defense, as I do, or you can call it pre-emptive, but it is what it is.”

But for all your “listeners in Rio Linda,” I need to point out one fatal flaw in both meanings of this sound byte that you have clamped your jaws around.

How can you be so sure in the truth of this statement?

Maybe it is what it isn’t? Maybe “it” is a figment of our imagination ....

As “a highly trained broadcast specialist” with “talent on loan from God,” who claims to be able to combat liberals “with half my brain tied behind my back — just to make it fair,” you are far from your assertion that you are on “the cutting-edge of societal evolution,” behind your glittering “golden EIB microphone.”

While you do seem to be “having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have,” I fear that your “formerly nicotine-stained fingers” will be forever soiled if you don’t drop this stupid stolen catch-phrase and stick to your own clichés.

Your critical listener,
John North
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John North, publisher and editor of the Daily Planet, may be contacted at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .