Rush Limbaugh’s special guest birthday callers:

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I’m just calling along with President 41 and the former governor of Florida. We’re fixing to have lunch here, and I said, “Listen, we ought to call our pal and let him know that we care,” for you. So this is as much as anything, a nice verbal letter to a guy we really care for.

RUSH: Well, thank you, sir, very much. I’m overwhelmed. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this and how much you’ve surprised me.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, that was the purpose of the phone call….

BUSH 41: Well, yeah. I’m kind of on the sidelines, but I can’t do golf and all that stuff anymore. But life is good. It’s wonderful, and it’s great having the family up here in Maine, and all is well. Do you see our man Ailes at all?

RUSH: Oh, yeah. I saw Roger at Tony Snow’s funeral.

BUSH 41: Oh, did you?

RUSH: And a couple of times earlier this summer.

BUSH 41: Are we on the radio, are we?

RUSH: (laughing)

BUSH 41: I didn’t know that. I’ll clean up my act here. I’m glad they told me.

Oh my. Let’s ignore, of course, the propriety of the President of the United States and one of his predecessors calling to congratulate a man who borrows rhetorical tropes from the Rwandan genocide.

Let us focus instead on “our man Ailes”—whoops, we’re on the air? Whyncha tell Poppy, kids?

Puts me in mind of the letters from Collis Huntington to Dave Colton, written while the Central Pacific were buying Senators and Congressmen with a zeal for fraudulence overshadowed only by the doings of the Union Pacific, including casual possession of eminent legislators:

While it was understood that heroic measures were used to cover up and destroy many of these incriminating missives, quite enough of them were given to the public to make it convincing that … C. P. Huntington had an active supporter in the Senate of the United States from the State of Georgia whose name was bandied about in the public places of the capitol as Huntington’s “man.”

Apparently, all our masters still own their own men at the commanding heights. And of course, it raises the issue I mentioned yesterday: it’s not just business buying politicians; sometimes it can work the other way ’round!

Via Harry Shearer, “43 visits 41.”