Limbaugh believes being called out for his violent rhetoric is part of a conspiracy to silence 'all of talk radio, Fox News'

-- by Dave

Well, they say that paranoia is an indicator of oncoming senility, but that would mean Rush Limbaugh has been getting senile for the past twenty years. In any event, he was in prime form yesterday:

This is not an isolated event. Every time something like this happens, some disaster, it doesn't take 30 minutes for the media to start speculating that it's talk radio, and now Fox News and the blogs on the right and everything else. I got a lot of people who sent me e-mails yesterday: "Rush, I thought you were a little bit over the top yesterday when you said the Democrat Party profits from murder, wants to profit." How else can I say this? Try to put yourself in my shoes and I want you to try to do this outside of the normal give-and-take and ebb-and-flow of the daily hardball that is politics. Here we have a deranged, obviously mentally insane young man who has fired on and killed a number of people, wounded others. On Saturday, I was in my home watching NFL football. I happened to be alone. I hadn't been to Tucson, Arizona, in 20 years and all of a sudden I read it's my fault, and I'm hearing people say it's my fault and that it's inspired by me and what I do. I want you to put yourself in my shoes. And then more and more powerful political people start standing up and making that claim, including the chief law enforcement official for that county, Clarence Dupnik, a law enforcement official who has the ability to influence jury pools.

... Now, I ask you, you all know that I am a political enemy of these people. These are the people that keep talking about limiting speech with the Fairness Doctrine. The other day Al Sharpton goes to the FCC to want hearings on me to get them to curb what I can say. He came out of there claiming the FCC's interested in holding these hearings. Look, I'm not telling you people anything you don't know. You know that there are constant assaults on the existence of this program. There are constant serious political efforts made to terminate this program and all of talk radio, Fox News and what have you. So we have this incident, and now I have to sit here and just let it roll off my back that I'm responsible for this. Anything I say is overreacting to it.

Next: The black helicopters are coming to take him away!

Isn't creeping paranoia also a sign of a guilty conscience? Who'da thunk?

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]