Media Matters has a transcript of some interesting (?) comments made by US shock jock Rush Limbaugh on Monday:
RUSH LIMBAUGH: Have you heard, this new movie, the Batman movie — what is it, the Dark Knight Lights Up or something? Whatever the name of it is. That’s right, Dark Knight Rises, Lights Up, same thing. Do you know the name of the villain in this movie? Bane. The villain in the Dark Knight Rises is named Bane. B-A-N-E. What is the name of the venture capital firm that Romney ran, and around which there’s now this make-believe controversy? Bain. The movie has been in the works for a long time, the release date’s been known, summer 2012 for a long time. Do you think that it is accidental, that the name of the really vicious, fire-breathing, four-eyed, whatever-it-is villain in this movie is named Bane?
[…]LIMBAUGH: Anyway, so this evil villain in the new Batman movie is named Bane. And there’s now discussion out there as to whether or not this was purposeful, and whether or not it will influence voters. It’s going to have a lot of people. This movie, the audience is going to be huge, lot of people are going to see the movie. And it’s a lot of brain-dead people, entertainment, the pop culture crowd. And they’re going to hear “Bane” in the movie, and they are going to associate Bain. And the thought is that when they start paying attention to the campaign later in the year, and Obama and the Democrats keep talking about Bain, not Bain Capital, but Bain, Romney and Bain, that these people will think back to the Batman movie –“Oh yeah, I know who that is.” There are some people who think it will work. There are some people think it will work. Others think — “You’re really underestimating the American people who think that will work.”
Ignore the fact that Bane as a character was introduced in 1993’s Batman: Vengeance of Bane, by Chuck Dixon, Doug Moench and Graham Nolan, and rose to prominence later that year as “the man who broke the Bat”, crippling Batman and leading him to retire the cowl – for a bit (um, spoiler warning for a twenty-year-old comic?).
Ignore the fact that the dictionary definition of the word Bane is “a slayer, a murderer; a thing which causes death or destroys life; murder, death, destruction; ruin, woe; or a souce of ruin, harm or trouble”, and that maybe Bain should have thought about homonyms before they named their company.
And certainly ignore the fact that Limbaugh seems to believe that people will literally think that Romney used to work for a supervillain bulked up to improbable levels with the super-steroid “venom” who wears a luchadore mask and snaps peoples backs over his knee.
Rush thinks Bane is a “fire-breathing, four-eyed, whatever-it-is”? How has he managed to avoid any publicity for this film to that extent? I’ve been actively trying, and I’ve still seen the trailer enough times to know that Tom Hardy has put on a ridiculous amount of weight to play the villain.
Rush Limbaugh is your weird uncle who came up to you in 2002 and asked if you’d heard of the Spice Girls.
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