Limbaugh freaks: Melissa Harris-Perry a 'foreign' Marxist who wants to steal children

The conservative pundit class is outraged over MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry's recent ad spot about public education, and Rush Limbaugh, not wanting to be left behind by the likes of Glenn Beck, took his best swing at the university professor on Monday, describing her with the words "foreign," "Marxist" and "communist," and suggesting she wants to steal children away from conservative families.

"This is Marx, Mengele, communist manifesto, the nuclear family has always been under attack by communists, leftists," he said. "The nuclear family, just like religion, must be destroyed, and in its place the community, the collective. So while this is outrageous in its self-contained form, it isn't anything new."

He added that conservative apathy has left America in such a state where "all of these things that we thought were never gonna happen, are now happening." And that, he said, is why "there is no reason for Melissa Harris-Perry to be worried about any negative fallout or feedback on this, because as far as she's concerned everybody thinks this now."

Harris-Perry, for the record, says in her recent MSNBC ad that the "private notion of children" as exclusively belonging to their parents has led to under-investment in public education. "Once it's everybody's responsibility and not just the household's, then we start making better investments," she concludes.

Rush, seemingly apoplectic, fired back: "We're going bankrupt on education! We're getting nothing for it! ...We never invested as much in public education as we should have? We're throwing money down a rathole drain on public education! We lead the world in public education spending."

Limbaugh added that the idea of "the state claiming ownership of your kids" is "so foreign" that most Americans "never, ever took it seriously."

"And yet these people keep plugging away," he scowled.

While he's right that the U.S. spends more on public education than any country, those dollars do not appear to be as effective as spending in Canada, South Korea and France, where students produce much higher test scores in math and science. He's also woefully wrong that the U.S. is "going bankrupt" over education spending, which amounts to $69.8 billion in the president's 2013 budget -- about two percent of the overall budget, according to the Office on Management and Budget.

By contrast, the Department of Defense proposed a 2013 budget of $525.4 billion, second only in the budget to mandatory spending on social safety net programs like Medicare and Social Security.

This audio is from "The Rush Limbaugh Show," aired Monday, April 8, 2013.