Rush Limbaugh once haunted a road trip I made across the States. By the time I got to New Orleans I was ready to throttle him. If you don’t know who he is, he’s a right-wing talk-radio host. Here’s what the good people at Media Matters say about him:

Rush Limbaugh‘s nationally syndicated radio show has an estimated audience of nearly 15 million weekly listeners. It is syndicated by Premiere Radio Networks, a subsidiary of radio conglomerate Clear Channel Communications. Limbaugh also authored two books in collaborations with conservative writers: The Way Things Ought to Be (1992) with Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund and See, I Told You So (1993) with WorldNetDaily.com editor Joseph Farah.

Limbaugh regularly feeds his audience a diet of falsehoods, misstatements, distortions, invective, and childish put-downs in service of the conservative movement. During his long reign over the airwaves, Limbaugh has called abortion rights activists “feminazis”, told an African-American caller to “take that bone out of your nose,” referred to prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib as “blow[ing] some steam off, ” and declared that “what’s good for Al Qaeda is good for the Democratic Party.” He touts his close connections to Republicans, claiming that he “[g]ot a big hug” from President George W. Bush during a 2004 White House visit.

But hey, he’s also a human being. And strangely enough Limbaugh was on the BBC the other day, talking for all the world like a human being, about the problem of going deaf. It was a conversation with Peter White whose on-air style often bugs the hell out of me, but I listened the whole way through. You can do the same here.