Limbaugh Had Viagra! Assemble the Firing Squad!

An American flies in from a trip to the Dominican Republic. He has in his possession a prescription bottle of Viagra. That bottle has the names of his physicians on it, but not his. This man does, in fact, have a valid prescription for Viagra from those two doctors. The authorities keep the bottle, briefly interview the man, send him on his way, but note that there is a possibility that he could be charged with a minor criminal charge since the bottle didn’t have his name on it.

Two additional factors. First, the man is on probation. A few months earlier, he was being investigated for doctor-shopping and signed a plea agreement under which he was not found guilty of the charge and for which he agreed to serve a period of probation and to complete the drug treatment program he had already been undergoing. Second, the man admitted an addiction for prescription pain killers and voluntarily underwent a treatment program for it.

There’s the story, as it was reported. News or not?

I can’t get very excited at all about the story. Police around the country deal with thousands of minor misdemeanors every day, mostly by handling the situation without resorting to criminal charges at all. Even for people on probation. That’s the way law enforcement works. You let the minor stuff slide, especially if it’s particularly trivial minor stuff, like having the wrong name on a bottle of pills that you’re allowed to have anyhow. The story doesn’t even belong in the newspaper, except perhaps in the “Police Briefs” section that runs perhaps once a week.

So why is the story out there? Why are so many lefty blogs simply lit up about this?

Well, the guy in this incident is Rush Limbaugh, whose privacy is worth a whole lot less to his foes than yours or mine.

‘Nuff said.

Except perhaps for a few arched questions from, Blue Crab Boulevard.

You know what? I didn’t see the left dogpiling on Patrick Kennedy like this. The more right people who commented on Kennedy (that I read, anyway) were more upset at his apparent favorable treatment than gloating over his problem. Not so the left. Isn’t that interesting? Isn’t that revealing?

The word “typical” comes to mind, though. This story doesn’t have a thing to do, really, with Limbaugh or his drug addiction, since best I can tell Viagra and pain killers are two different pharmaceutical animals. The story has nothing to do with the public interest, and wouldn’t even have shown up in the blogosphere if it involved you or me or even some other celebrity.

But the story does have plenty to do with being able to strut and preen at your own perceived moral superiority. It has loads to do with clambering onto the moral high ground so that you can pelt folks below you with stones. It has everything to do with knocking someone down a notch and trying to shut them up by pointing out that they are a depraved human being not worthy of the public voice they have.

In short, it has everything to do with the dirty business of character assassination and only character assassination.

The long and short of it is that Rush Limbaugh has acknowledged his problem. He faced his demon and makes no bones about how he has to wrestle with it lest it consume him again. He has faced an investigation that lasted nearly three years on a crime that is rarely investigated in his state and saw his medical records released to a voracious media by the authorities. His bill is long paid on his transgression and it has cost him far more than it was worth.

But some folks won’t let it go. I find that despicable.