After last week’s Republican primary debate, Rush Limbaugh responded to a caller who commented on Limbaugh’s influence in Republican politics. Limbaugh agreed and declared that:

“I alone have the power to move the [Republican] base.”

That’s an audacious statement, to say the least. I would certainly concede that he can throw his considerable weight around in right-wing circles, but to claim that he “alone” has this power reeks of delusions of grandeur. And he wasn’t through:

“The exercise of my ‘power’ – it’s not something I’m really conscious of on a daily basis, but it would be foolish and silly for me to deny that I possess it […] It’s the elephant in the room. Why deny it?”

The elephant in the room is Limbaugh’s ego, which is so big that it obscures his view of reality, to say nothing of humility. It even obstructs his ability to see the semantic risk in referring to his corpulent self and elephants in the same paragraph. But you’ve got to give him credit for skillfully associating his famous girth and his mammoth ego and his jumbo imagination with the traditional symbol of the GOP, or Grand Ole Pachyderms.