OT

Happened to tune in the Rush Limbaugh show today. It would be bad for my blood pressure if I did not find Rush and his ditto-head acolytes so amusing.

Today’s show was a treat, even more of a carnival of stupid than usual.

The subject was the transfer of the Shuttle prototype Enterprise to the Intrepid museum in New York harbor. Normally, this is a newsworthy and interesting story but the Ditto-head-in-chief had to spin it into an anti-liberal screed. He pointed out that “no battery in the world could power” the 747 that carried the Shuttle to NYC, no, not even to taxi it across the field, let alone across the country.

And yet, according to Rush, this is how “liberals” want to power everything in their zeal to promote electric cars. He then went off on a rant against the electric propulsion initiative or some such program, as though being unable to power a 747 somehow rules out any lesser application of electric propulsion. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, I would point that a 747 is not a car or a golf cart. Noone proposes powering transcontinental airliners with electric motors and batteries. The impossibility of that does not mean, in and of itself, that it is impossible for cars. Rush likes to brag about his Maybach and its monstrously powerful engine. Well, Rush, that engine could not propel a 747 either, though it probably could tow it across the field, as could an electric tractor. The Maybach motor is a complicated toy compared to big plane engines.

With the electric car crazed libs out of the way, Rush proceeded to disparage long-dead American hero Gus Grissom. He pointed out that the Intrepid had been Grissom’s recovery ship on his 1961 Mercury mission. He then repeated the long discredited allegation that Grissom had panicked, blown the hatch on his spacecraft, and caused it to sink. In fact, Grissom has been comprehensively cleared of any error in the incident and went on to fly two more important space missions before his death in the Apollo One fire. Rush did backtrack on this later in the show after someone e-mailed him.

He was not finished though. He added jovially that maybe James Cameron could find and recover the sunken capsule when Cameron finishes with the Titanic. In fact, Grissom’s capsule, Libery Bell 7, was found and recovered from 14,000 feet of water in 1999 (amid great publicity). It has since been cleaned and sent on a national tour, and is now on display at the the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center.