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It is not surprising that Rush Limbaugh’s hateful screeds against contraception have rested on a foundation of lies. Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke most certainly did not go “before a congressional committee and essentially [say] that she must be paid to have sex.” And, as he well knows, it is employers and employees, including the women themselves — not taxpayers — who pay for the insurance that covers contraceptives. If taxpayers paid for medical care, that would be a single-payer systems, which would be, you know, socialism.

Lying is just par for the course for Limbaugh, but what is shockingly hilarious is that in his rush to label women whose birth-control pills are covered by insurance as whores, Limbaugh revealed that he is woefully ignorant about how the pill works:

LIMBAUGH: This woman comes forth with this frankly hilarious claim that she’s having so much sex, and her buddies with her, that she can’t afford it. And not one person says, did you ever think about maybe backing off the amount of sex that you have?

Did you get that? Rush Limbaugh believes that women take the pill only at times when they have sex. He has no idea how it works — that the reason the pill is expensive is that it has to be taken daily in order to be effective.

What compounds the hilarity here is the fact that Rush Limbaugh has been married four times, has been known to take Viagra while vacationing in Caribbean islands that are known as hotbeds of prostitution, and he even dated former CNN anchor Darren Kagen.

And yet, at age 61, Rush Limbaugh has no children, or at least none that we know of. And, sure, this could be because he is impotent and/or sterile, but it is more likely he is childless because the women he has slept with were on the pill or some other form of contraceptive.

Politically, this error represents is a major tactical screw up for Limbaugh. His attacks last week on women who use contraceptives were structured around the premise that, in politics, when your enemies are explaining, they are on defense. And in the sort of zero-sum politics Limbaugh plays, when your enemies are on defense, they are losing and you are winning.

Limbaugh’s strategy was to trap liberals and particularly “femi-Nazis” into rushing to the media to express their outrage over his barrage of agitprop about contraceptives. Not surprisingly, again, that worked. The airwaves were filled with liberals tearing into his lies, misinformation and propaganda — in other words, explaining why he was wrong.

With his enemies explaining and therefore on defense — and therefore losing — Limbaugh was able to sit back, all smug and comfy, suck on a cigar and enjoy the show.

But now he has a problem, an unforced error. This sort of political shenanigans backfires, if, and only if, the aggressors make a factual error, because it puts them in the position of explaining why they got their facts wrong.

Let’s hope liberals press this advantage next week and manage to get Limbaugh to explain why he is ignorant about such a clear and obvious fact.

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