Rush Limbaugh Is Bald and Fat and Ugly

Any minute now, I’m expecting news that Rush Limbaugh has been fired. After all, if Don Imus was canned for making a racial slur, shouldn’t Limbaugh receive equal treatment for proving himself an ageist and a sexist?

I refer, of course, to Limbaugh’s recent comment that Americans aren’t ready to elect Hillary Clinton as president. Because we won’t want to watch her age on a daily basis—getting all gray-haired and wrinkly on us.

There are so many things wrong with that statement, I don’t even know where to begin.

How about with the notion that, to a certain extent, Limbaugh has a point. Women in our society are no longer allowed to grow old. I mean, the fairer sex has always been held to a higher standard than men in terms of personal appearance, but the extent to which this is now true would be laughable if it weren’t so frightening. Women in their 20s, 30s and 40s are having their fat sucked, tummies tucked and their boobs boosted; their foreheads are frozen, their lips are plumped, their cheeks are injected with collagen. A Ginsu knife commercial has nothing on all the slicing and dicing that goes on in the plastic surgeon’s office these days.

Why? Because we’re deathly afraid of not looking 18. Of being betrayed by un-taut necks or that flabby, flappy skin under our arms—or anything else that indicates we’ve lived a life.

I look in my medicine cabinet and I see under-eye cream and upper lip cream and regenerating serum and age-defying moisturizer and good-bye cellulite gel, all in an attempt to shave a year or two off my age. So that I won’t be marginalized or labeled irrelevant. And sometimes I think, “This is insane.”

But then Rush Limbaugh says that regular appearances by an older woman on our TV screens is almost too horrific to contemplate. It might scare the children. And there’s no hue and cry to tar and feather the sort of idiot who would make such a disgusting, prejudicial comment. So I have to assume that people agree with him.

Pass the Botox.