In case you missed it, a woman threw her shoe at Hillary Clinton last week while the former secretary of state was giving a speech in Las Vegas for an event held by the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries. The shoe did not hit its intended target, and as you might expect, Alison Ernst, the alleged assailant, does not appear to be the most mentally stable person in the world right now.
So, to recap, Clinton spoke, a shoe was thrown, the shoe missed, the alleged thrower was arrested, and the world kept spinning.
But while that would seem to most to be the end of the story, Rush Limbaugh isn't so sure.
Speaking on his radio show on Monday, the conservative talk-radio star and longtime Clinton antagonist half-joked that, while he hadn't seen video of Clinton's shoe-dodge for himself, because he doesn't care enough to Google it, he wasn't ruling out the possibility that the whole thing was staged in order to make Clinton's critics — especially those who focus on her actions in response to the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi in 2012 — look like fools.
“I’ve got people telling me her reaction wasn’t natural," Limbaugh said of the incident. "I haven’t cared enough to go try to find it. I really haven’t. Somebody threw a shoe at Hillary. Big whoop."
"Maybe it’s because in my subconscious I think it was staged or set up or whatever," Limbaugh continued. "Look, folks, I know these people so well that I do not attach much genuineness to them at all."
"I don’t know why anybody would be throwing a shoe at Hillary," he went on, "unless — maybe it’s an attempt to make the Benghazi people look like nuts and lunatics and wackos."
Yet Limbaugh is far from the only right-wing commentator to go down this route. As Talking Points Memo has documented, skepticism over the "genuineness" of the shoe-throwing kerfuffle is common on the right (though degrees of sincerity vary). So at the very least, Rush's got company.
You can hear Limbaugh go into full troll mode below, via Media Matters:
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