Rush: I predict a highly visible and emotional religious conversion, immediately after the election.

Sooner, if Bush's numbers keep trending.

AP

Conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh announced Friday that he and his wife, Marta, were divorcing...

It was the third marriage for both Limbaugh, 53, and his 44-year-old wife...The past several months have been difficult for Limbaugh, who announced in October that he was entering a drug rehabilitation program because he was addicted to painkillers.

See what I mean about synchronicity? It's not correlation I'm creating here. Two serious hits to credibility and sta-bility in one calendar year. (Three if you count the Abu Ghraib "it-was-just frat-boy hijinks" fiasco.)

Rush Limbaugh is a persona, a brand, in serious maturity country as product lifetimes go. As the odds increase that Kerry will be elected in November, Rush now finds himself facing a new target. But thanks to self-inflicted quality issues, many of the traditional arrows he'd sling at "decadent, disingenuous, self-centered and morally inconsistent" Democrats are bent. Hell, they're not bent, they're broke. They won't fly. Increasingly, every criticism of his will be quoted with an accompanying asterisk the size of your foot:

"...Limbaugh, currently awaiting his third divorce, remains under a legal cloud resulting from his 2003 admission of illegal precription drug use and addiction."

His lifeblood, or at least half of it, is his base of "Values Conservatives." The personal self-image wiggle room we all like to have (and tend to expand and inflate by denegrating the value decisions of others) is fast being squeezed by the blowhard from Cape Girardeau. Tipping Point city.

Limbaugh has 2 choices:

1. Back away from political commentary, reinventing himself as a more austere Springer or Maury type TV Show Host. (Although his TVQ wasn't so hot the first time around. Maybe a sidekick this time because "Juggies" are out.)

2. If he wants to do politics still--and who believes he doesn't?--he will need an abject and overwrought public cleansing in order to maintain a credible moral persona in the mind's eyes and real ears of his audience.

Six months, give or take. Cue God.


(P.S. God, again. See what I mean?)