'Ed, you're a butt boy'

Yesterday, I was driving from the Heritage Foundation over to my current part-time day gig as a video editor and listened to the second hour of Rush Limbaugh's show, in which he was talking about a particularly idiotic question that CNN's Ed Henry asked White House spokesman Robert Gibbs:

The question is from Ed Henry, CNN, of Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman: "The president has spoken a lot about bringing the country together. . . ."
Ed, you're a butt boy.

That caused me to laugh out loud. You have to hear the audio to appreciate the way Rush delivered that line. He started to read the entire question from Henry, preparatory to playing a sound-bite of Gibbs's response. As he began to do so, however, he halted, evidently struck by the total tee-ball nature of the question, which had zero to do with White House policy or the real work of the governing process.

That set Rush off on a memorable monologue, and understandably so. Henry was simply giving Gibbs an easy shot at Limbaugh. Here's the complete question:

"Bob, the president has spoken a lot about bringing the country together. And after the stimulus fight, there was a lot of pandering in both parties about bipartisanship. What's the White House's reaction to Rush Limbaugh saying again that he wants the president to fail, specifically on his economic plans, and how does that bode for bipartisanship in the future working with the Republicans?"

Henry asked Gibbs to give "the White House's reaction" not to any legislation in Congress or economic development on Wall Street, but rather to something said by a radio talk-show host. Imagine Ed Henry asking a White House spokesman to something said by, inter alia, Keith Olbermann or Chris Matthews. Never gonna happen.

Butt Boy Ed is not engaged in journalism. Rather, he is promoting a Democratic Party propaganda objective, to set up this "controversial" statement by Limbaugh in order to use Rush as a proxy for the Republican Party. It's a little game for Butt Boy Ed, to get the White House to officially condemn Limbaugh, so that Republican leaders in Congress can in turn be asked whether they side with the now-denounced radio host.

Butt Boy Ed is doing hammer-and-wedge work intended to divide and/or discredit the GOP, to render the conservative movement's most influential spokesman persona non grata among Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Butt Boy Ed thinks ordinary Americans are too stupid to see what it is he is doing, and that he is not engaged in genuine news reporting, but is in fact a partisan political operative propagandizing CNN viewers on behalf of the Democratic Party.

If Butt Boy Ed quit his job at CNN and went to work for the Obama administration, the first thing he'd do is collect back pay.