What aura?

Omaha and I had the pleasure of riding in to work together earlier this week, and after we'd reached downtown, Omaha got off at the Seattle Art Museum. My stop was two blocks up at Pike Place Market. After she'd gotten off, a man who'd been sharing the rear of the bus with us said, "How long you two been married?"

"Oh, about nineteen years."

"Yeah, I figured it was something like that. You two got that aura."

Unfortunately, we reached our stop and I was precoccupied with putting way the laptop, which is a sudo command. I didn't have time to ask what he meant.

Rush Limbaugh, the 20th Century Pundit

This afternoon, I had to drive out and buy new headlamps for my car. While I was tooling around, I played with the radio and stumbled upon Rush Limbaugh putting forth from his pulpit. The man sounds completely detached from reality, but two things he said caught my attention.

The first was that he had heard that the blogosphere was now open talking about the possibilty of McCain's death while in office had become a talking point. "I was waiting for this," he breathed into the microphone, every syllable dripping with disdain. "You know there was someone in the Obama campaign who came up with this, and they were just looking for a way to get it out of there without anyone being able to trace it back to the campaign.

The other was while discussing the whole "Jesus was a community organizer, Pilate was a governor" meme that went around in response to the Republican hatefest last week, Rush blathered that "Someone in the Obama campaign, some Democrat operative, came up with this."

Uh, no, Rush. Actually, it came out from the bottom and sped around the Internet pretty quickly. If I'd bothered, on the first day I saw it I could probably track down who wrote it first, probably in a comment on a blog somewhere, some off-the-cuff that the rest of the Internet took in and said, "Oh, that's good." And we're perfectly capable of looking at John McCain's age and Sarah Palin's unreadiness and asking the obvious question: what if he keels over?

It's almost as if Rush simply cannot imagine a collective intelligence, an organization that is other than top-down, brainstormers deciding what will be said and the rest of the world simply sheepishly following along. He cannot grasp that it's not "operatives" coming up with this stuff, it's ordinary men and women enjoying the freedom of the press that the blogosphere has. He has unutterable contempt for the "little people," pitying those on his side, loathing those who aren't, but respecting both sides not at all.