Limbaugh: "The Game Has Begun"

Yes, they've already started up the slime machine. It's never too early to lie about the next Democratic administration, after all.

You'd think, at very least, they'd avoid lying outright now that fact-checking has become de rigueur. But really, has that ever stopped Rush Limbaugh?

"They're going to take your 401(k), put it in the Social Security trust fund, whatever the hell that is," Limbaugh woofed. "Trust fund, my rear end."

A slight problem with Limbaugh's report: Obama and the Democrats have proposed no such thing.

"The Obama recession is in full swing, ladies and gentlemen," Limbaugh told his radio audience of 15 million to 20 million on Thursday. "Stocks are dying, which is a precursor of things to come. This is an Obama recession. Might turn into a depression."

As in the recession we've had for months, the seeds of which were planted in years and years of poor fiscal policy which led to the housing and financial market collapse... yeah, all that is the fault of the guy that got elected a week ago. I guess from the guys that let Bush Sr. take the political hit for the Reagan's drug trafficking payoffs during the Iran-Contra scandal, and gave Reagan the credit for Carter's freeing the hostages in the Iran embassy crisis, I should have come by now to expect that sort of reasoning.

And, of course, Sean Hannity isn't much more covert about his fabrications:

Mainstream newspapers have filed plenty of unflinching accounts of Emanuel's tough, occasionally ruthless tactics as a Democratic congressional leader and onetime operative in the Clinton White House. That assessment of bare-knuckle partisanship Hannity seized on. But it wouldn't do to report another aspect of Emanuel's record -- his Clintonesque bent for the political center.

So the Fox-man simply created a new persona for Emanuel as, you guessed it, "one of the hardest left-wing radicals on the left."

Only one problem:

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham apparently didn't get the memo requiring Obama's opponents to sink immediately and mindlessly into rank partisanship.

The South Carolina senator, one of Sen. John McCain's closest allies in his bid for the presidency, praised Obama's selection of Emanuel as "a wise choice." He added that the new chief of staff could be a tough partisan, but was also "honest, direct and candid" and willing to "work to find common ground where it exists."

Oops. Well, who would take Sen. Graham's word over Hannity's? That crazy left-winger of a Senator. No wonder Hannity gets more viewers.