RUSH: It has been quite instructive. This has been very, very illustrative, ladies and gentlemen. Yesterday on this program I uttered some words about the new Batman movie, and the evil villain named Bane. I made some comments about it. Doesn’t matter what. I have had more reaction to that than anything, including the Fluke thing. I’ve had my brother telling me that Twitter is going nuts. I’ve been getting hateful e-mail, supportive e-mail. More people are concerned about whatever I might have said or didn’t say about a Batman villain than they are about their own jobs. It’s incredible. But, as I say, it’s quite instructive, and it’s quite illustrative.

I never said that the villain was created by the comic book character creator to be part of the 2012 campaign. I never said that at all. Everybody’s out there running around saying I got this giant conspiracy theory that the Batman people, the creators, the comic book creators, created this thing to campaign against Romney. I never said that. I didn’t say there was a conspiracy. I said the Democrats were going to use it, which they are. Jon Stewart’s harping on it.

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RUSH: I even said yesterday at the end of my whole Batman discussion that Batman is more like Romney. I made the point that the rich, wealthy hero in the Batman movie is more like Romney and that the Bane guy seems more like an Occupy Wall Street guy. And yet here I am supposedly articulating a conspiracy between the comic book creators and the Obama campaign, that somehow they created this villain with the same name as Romney’s venture capital company, private equity company.

No. All I said yesterday was that the Democrats are going to try to make that linkage. I got our old buddy Jon Stewart here, in fact, doing the same. We got sound bites out the wazoo on this. Snerdley came in here, people were calling him at three o’clock in the morning, “You better tell Rush he’s got this all wrong. These guys are very conservative, these Batman creators, they’re very conservative.” This thing spread like wildlife. A comic book villain, a comic book character… A discussion about a comic book villain gets people more irritated and agitated than Obama’s assault on the private sector, than Obama’s assault on jobs.

Oh, and now the left is out there saying we took Obama out of context on this. “You’re not reporting on the sentence he said before. He was talking about you didn’t build the roads yourself.” You got a successful factory or successful business, you didn’t do that, you didn’t build the road. Okay, fine, if you want to make that claim. Somebody tell me, is having a road in front of your business what makes it a success? If having a road in front of your business, every business would be a roaring success. I don’t care how you leftists try to spin it, you’ve got a guy who deeply resents the private sector, deeply resents capitalism. He’s campaigning against capitalism. The president of the United States campaigning for reelection is running against capitalism, and you can try to mask that and deflect that all you want but the truth is the truth and it can’t be denied.

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RUSH: Yes, I know, Snerdley. The Batman thing, it is quite indicative, is it not? Snerdley said that it unglued him. He’s getting calls at two or three in the morning. “You tell Rush that he’s got this wrong.” You know, even the creator, Chuck Dixon, weighed in on it. I had a story in the Stack yesterday but I didn’t get to it. One the creators, Chuck Dixon, said (paraphrased), “Oh, no. Oh, no. Now Rush is gonna call me a liberal again. Hell, I’m not a liberal. He called me this on the last Batman movie.”

These Batman movies thematically, if you look at them open-mindedly, tend to be conservative in terms of right and wrong/good and evil. But like I pointed out yesterday, Batman is Romney. The good guy’s Romney. This Bane character, I pointed out the spelling is different.

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RUSH: My brother was getting tweets all night long. He calls me.

By the way, my brother’s book, the Great Destroyer, is five or six weeks now on the New York Times best-seller list. It’s far exceeded his goal, and it’s still out there. It’s being purchased in droves. The Great Destroyer. It documents everything up until the time it was published. Everything Obama has done. Everything he’s said. It is a handbook. If you get in an argument with a liberal or you’re trying to persuade anybody, doesn’t matter, it’s all right there. In fact, the best line he had about his own book is he said when he went back to start reading it from cover to cover to get ready for his interviews, he was shocked at how much was in it, and it’s his own book.

It’s called The Great Destroyer.

Okay we’re gonna start audio sound bite number five. Well, before we start with audio sound bite number five, I have here ComicBook.com: “Rush Limbaugh: Five Reasons He’s Wrong About Bane In The Dark Knight Rises — Today, Rush Limbaugh became the second talk show host to make some controversial comments regarding the upcoming summer blockbuster The Dark Knight Rises. Of course, the first was David Letterman who may or may not have spoiled the ending of The Dark Knight Rises.

“Limbaugh didn’t drop any spoilers, but he did lay out a possible political conspiracy theory revolving around the villain Bane. Limbaugh asked, ‘Do you think it is accidental that the name of the really vicious fire-breathing, four-eyed whatever-it-is villain in this movie is named Bane?’ He then went on to suggest that Bane might have been chosen as the villain as a political agenda against Mitt Romney, who ran a venture capital company called Bain. Here’s five reasons that Russ [sic] Limbaugh is wrong about Bane in The Dark Knight Rises,” and they go on to talk about the fact that Bane was created in 1993.

My point yesterday wasn’t talking about the comic book creators. I was talking about Hollywood, the people who market the movie, who determine when it’s gonna be released. So you’ve got the villain named Bane. We know that Obama is doing everything he can to discredit Bain. For crying out loud, folks, get this. The Democrats are attacking Mitt Romney over layoffs made by an Obama bundler! A steel company in Kansas City laid off a bunch of people in 2001. Bain ran the place.

Romney was not there in 2001.

He left in 1999.

The Democrats and Obama are running around claiming that Romney laid off all these people. Romney wasn’t there. The irony is that the guy running Bain Capital at the time in 2001 who laid off all these people, is now a bundler and fundraiser for Obama. So they’re blaming Romney for something that happened when he wasn’t there that was done by an Obama fundraiser. So they will do anything to keep Bain in the news, and all I was trying to say yesterday was that the Democrats are gonna take the occasion of this movie…

By the way, this did not occur to me in independent thought.

I read stories two nights ago about how this was a plan the Democrats had: an attempt to link the character in the movie to Romney because it’s the same name phonetically: Bain. (It’s spelled differently in the movie: B-A-N-E.) And the Democrats are going to try to do that. Independently of the comic book creators, independently of the movie people. The movie people, what are the odds that they’re liberal Democrats and plan on doing whatever they can to elect Obama? Pretty good. You can’t find conservatives in Hollywood that either come out of the closet or are in positions of power anywhere.

So, anyway, controversy erupted. Here’s the sound bite. We have time to squeeze this in. It’s a montage from last night, media comments about all this.

PETER ALEXANDER: Rush Limbaugh all fired up…

RUSH ARCHIVE: 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?

BERNARD MCGUIRK: Listen to Rush Limbaugh from yesterday…

RUSH ARCHIVE: This evil villain in the new Batman movie is named Bane.

MICHELLE MILLER: (b-roll noise) Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh is talking conspiracy!

RUSH ARCHIVE: Do you think that it is accidental?

GRETA VAN SUSTEREN: Rush Limbaugh says Batman’s new movie could impact the election.

RUSH ARCHIVE: This evil villain in the new Batman is named Bane. And there’s now discussion out there as whether or not this was purposeful and will influence voters.

ERIC DEGGANS: I think Rush Limbaugh should just take …

RUSH: Okay, that’s how the montage went. There are a couple of people in this whole thing that actually thought I had a point.

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RUSH: In an exclusive interview with our blowtorch affiliate in Phoenix, KFYI yesterday, the creator of Batman, Chuck Dixon, pointed out that he and the collaborator, Graham Nolan, created this Bane character back in 1992. He said: “Graham and I are both staunch conservatives, so from our angle, thereÂ’s no liberal agenda. IÂ’m a life-long right-wing extremist.” That’s KFYI, Phoenix. Now, let’s put this in perspective. The news media laughs and yawns, and then after they laugh and yawn, they decide, “You know what? We’ll run with this.” Obama, deputy campaign manager, calls Romney a felon. They laugh at it, they yawn, and then, “You know what, it’s not true but let’s run with it anyway.”

They’re having kittens ’cause I noted the bad guy in the Batman movie is named Bane and that some Democrats are gonna try to connect the evil character to Bain Capital and Mitt Romney. As I said yesterday, it was the Democrats who first made the comparison between the villain’s name and Bain, not me. I was just reporting the news that I had read a couple of nights ago. I even read a couple of conservative people: “If they think they’re gonna be able to pull that off, they’re crazy. If they think people will go watch a Batman movie with an evil character named Bane and associate the guy with Mitt Romney, they’re crazy.”

This idea was out there long before. I was just commenting on it. Again, the instructive thing here is it’s a comic book character and it’s caused all this hubbub. Here’s a guy named Michael Meehan. The guy worked for John Kerry, the haughty John Kerry, who, by the way, John Kerry, served in Vietnam. And on CBS This Morning they’re doing a story on this connection between the Batman villain named Bane and Romney’s old company, Bain Capital. Democrat strategerist Michael Meehan said…

MEEHAN: I would agree with Rush Limbaugh. If the Bain attack becomes a Bane caricature in a cartoon, in a popular movie, the Obama campaign couldn’t be happier.

RUSH: Duh. Duh. So here you have a major Democrat strategerist suggesting that I’m on to something, that they would love for you movie goers to compare or think of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital when you watch this new Batman villain regardless the intention of the creators of the comic book characters. Now we move on to The View. I thought The View was on hiatus so that all these babes could read 50 Shades of Grey. I had heard that The View had gone into reruns so that the hosts could all read that mommy porn book, 50 Shades of Grey.

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RUSH: The View babes, I thought they were on hiatus so they could all read the book. It’s as close as any of them are gonna get. But then I’m told, “No, no, no, they’re reading 50 Shades of Grey Hair, not 50 Shades of Grey.” So they’re still there. And Whoopi Goldberg, she had to chime in on this Batman business.

GOLDBERG: Rush Limbaugh is claiming that the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises, has a hidden agenda, a liberal plot to run Mitt Romney, to ruin Mitt Romney. To clear the record, Bane first appeared in Batman in January of 1993. The rough story outline was completed in 2008, which is quite before Romney got the nomination. So they would have to be pretty deep, psychic, to know that Romney was going to run and so that they should send the subliminal message of Bane being the bad guy. But to me, it’s kind of like the Teletubby, remember when they said that the Teletubby was gay? It’s Batman, fool!

RUSH: Right, and we’ve got it from Michael Meehan, Whoopi, the Democrats are gonna do everything they can to link this character to Romney. Why? They have no moral core whatsoever. They’re nothing more than radical ideologues and that’s all they’ve got. The only thing they’ve got is to try to politically kill Romney. Here’s “Maude” Behar. She had to get her two cents in.

BEHAR: Don’t you think, Rush Limbaugh is a very right-wing, extreme right-wing Republican. He wants to distract people from the fact that Romney will not release his tax returns. That’s what he’s doing.

RUSH: Right, right. So I’m talking about Batman to distract people from Romney’s tax returns.

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RUSH: Here it is: “Jon Stewart Likens Batman Villain Bane to Romney and Bain Capital.” So here you have Jon Stewart, and were the hens on The View mocking him? “Jon Stewart Likens Batman Villain Bane to Romney and Bain Capital.” So I told you this was gonna happen. The Democrats are trying to get it done, they’re trying to make this linkage. And Romney ought to release his tax returns?