Rush Limbaugh accuses President Obama of something close to treason

I missed this over the weekend, but today’s Maureen Dowd column — yes, I read it, damnit — dredges up this little nugget from Rush Limbaugh’s weekend interview on Fox News:

In an interview on “Fox News Sunday With Chris Wallace,” Limbaugh accused the president of trying to destroy the economy — yes, the same economy that W. came within a whisker of ruining.

“I have to think that it may be on purpose,” Limbaugh said, “because this is just outrageous, what is happening — a denial of liberty, an attack on freedom.”

What the hell? One of the right’s leading political commentators is accusing the president on national television of deliberately bringing harm to his country in order to accrue power. That’s the kind of accusation that should only be made with a bushel of evidence in hand; airing it as a casual and unsupported political attack is vile hackery.

This is the point where lots of folks on the right, eager to have Rush in the corner but not always eager to have to defend his claims, pull the “Rush is just an entertainer” routine. Maybe. I certainly believe that much of what he says is an effort to maximize his audience. But the audience is largely made up of people who believe Rush’s crap. That is, verrrrry roughly, 20 million people a week. And while I don’t want to be alarmist, I do wonder how those millions of people will respond, over time, to being told not merely that the Democratic president is a bad presdient, but that he’s trying to ruin the country in order to take away their freedoms. I fear that can’t come to a good end.