Last night, Rush Limbaugh won the Children's Book Council's "Author of the Year Award" for Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims: Time-Travel Adventures With Exceptional Americans.
As Raw Story noted when he was nominated, nominees for the award "are determined solely based on titles’ performances on the bestseller lists." Children then vote for the winner online with the assistance of "teachers, parents, librarians, and booksellers."
Upon learning that Limbaugh had won this award, MSNBC's Al Sharpton claimed the vote must have been rigged and demanded to see "the photo ID of the kids that voted," an unsubtle jab at the radio host's belief that Democrats only win elections via massive, yet undetectable, voter fraud.
Limbaugh did, in fact, enthusiastically encouraged his audience to win him this award, regularly imploring his audience to have their children vote for Rush Revere on his popular syndicated radio program:
Ladies and gentlemen, the Children's Choice Book Awards is the only national book awards program where the winners are selected by the kids and teenagers, the people who read the books. Voting opened today and is through Monday, May 12th. That's March 25th through May the 12th. We have a link at RushLimbaugh.com that'll take you straight to the voting page.
After learning that Limbaugh had won the award, Republican Representative Tim Huelskamp of Kansas tweeted that the book should be adopted by schools across the nation in place of the Common Core curriculum:
.@rushlimbaugh congrats on being named children’s book author of the year, I say we replace common core with your book.
— Cong. Tim Huelskamp (@CongHuelskamp) May 15, 2014Limbaugh claimed that the novel about the fictional "Rush Revere" and his talking horse, Liberty, is designed to "teach children about American history."
"I love America," he said in his acceptance speech. "I wish everybody did. I hope everybody will. It's one of the most fascinating stories of human history, this country and what it has meant to the world and what it means to citizens who live here. And it's a delight and it's an opportunity to try to share that story with young people so that they can grow and learn to love and appreciate the country in which they're growing up and will someday run and lead and inherit."
The Washington Post was less impressed than Limbaugh at the quality of the historical information communicated in the Rush Revere books, calling them "historical fanfiction that Rush Limbaugh has written about himself."
