Wow! You’ve really topped yourself, Rush! I thought you were pushing it when you claimed Philadelphia Eagles’ quarterback Donovan McNabb was overrated purely because he is black. But accusing Michael J. Fox of faking his Parkinson’s symptoms to sway voters? Perhaps you’d like to take a shot at Muhammad Ali? Too bad Christopher Reeve is dead or you might enjoy pushing his wheelchair off a cliff.

Way to exemplify the compassionate conservative.

Evidently, celebrities are not supposed to have a political opinion. (See The Dixie Chicks, George Clooney and Johnny Depp.) You get famous, you lose your right to free speech, especially if you’re a liberal.

By the way, this line of thought is also being extended to teachers: if you have any kind of audience, you should not talk about politics. You may have noticed a quiet but pervasive conservative movement in schools to silence any instructor voicing anything close to a liberal viewpoint. Granted, in public schools where children have little choice but to be in the classroom and they do not have the maturity to consider for themselves, politics ought to be a no-no. Of course, no one seemed to mind much when my 8th-grade science teacher distributed anti-abortion literature, complete with pictures of aborted fetuses.

But I digress. Perhaps it is not Fox’s celebrity and loving audience that upset Limbaugh. Perhaps it’s the fact that he is so ill. That is, after all, what infuriates your friend Ann Coulter about him. You and she seem to be equally frustrated by the fact that you cannot attack sick people “because that would be questioning the authenticity of their suffering” (Coulter, Godless). Oh wait! You did attack him! And you did question the authenticity of his suffering. So it’s not his illness?

Maybe you’re just upset because Michael J. Fox is a nice man. And you’re not. Hmm…nope. That’s never bothered you before.

Well, then, it must be his politics. That’s the real problem, right? Wrong.

The real problem is that you, and so many other “compassionate conservatives,” have let your party run away with you. You no longer have the capacity to question conservative politics, even when it is completely at odds with humanity and kindness and everything that is good about mankind, like our ability to empathize with people who are gravely ill and desperate for relief. You take the hard line, even when it is completely inappropriate. Annihilate free speech and condemn the sick - for the good of the Republican Party!

I considered writing this yesterday, but I was too angry. Like a good little writer, I decided to wait a day and cool off. I didn’t want to write in anger and say something un-Christian like, “I can’t wait until that fat bastard goes to hell.” I’m glad I waited. Those 24 hours gave me perspective.