‘The Dark Knight Rises’ Out to Sabotage Mitt Romney, Says Rush Limbaugh

OK, now we really have heard everything: on his show this afternoon, extreme right-wing radio personality Rush Limbaugh floated possibly the looniest conspiracy theory we've ever heard. And it involves 'The Dark Knight Rises.'

Progressive watchdog group Media Matters captured Limbaugh saying this afternoon that the creators of 'The Dark Knight Rises' are trying to subconsciously turn voters against presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney by naming the movie's villain Bane -- as in Bain Capital, the venture capital firm at which Romney was once CEO and which is in the middle of continued controversy about the length of his tenure there.

According to Limbaugh, the idea is that multitudes of moviegoers, especially "a lot of brain-dead people, entertainment, the pop culture crowd” are “gonna hear Bane in the movie and they’re gonna associate Bain. The thought is that when they start paying attention to the campaign later in the year, and Obama and the Democrats keep talking about Bain, Romney and Bain, that these people will think back to the Batman movie."

We'd bet a lot of Limbaugh's listeners might check out 'The Dark Knight Rises' -- does he consider them 'brain dead people'? But never mind that, someone should school Limbaugh about comic books because the character of Bane was invented in 1993 -- long before the current campaign ever began. And though Bain was founded in 1984, we'd guess the character's name comes from its actual meaning (A cause of great distress or annoyance. Or: Something, typically poison, that causes death.)

Since Christopher Nolan, David Goyer and Jonathan Nolan have been working on this movie for two years or so and pegged Bane as their villain relatively early in the process, they had to make a tremendous leap of faith that Romney would win the GOP nomination in order for their nefarious plot to work. Perhaps Joel Schumacher's was preemptively attacking Romney when he had Bane in 'Batman & Robin.'

Limbaugh added, "You may think it’s ridiculous, I’m just telling you this is the kind of stuff the Obama team is lining up. The kind of people who would draw this comparison are the kind of people that they are campaigning to. These are the kind of people that they are attempting to appeal to.”

So apparently what Limbaugh is saying is that the Nolan team has been in cahoots all along with the Obama campaign to tank Mitt Romney's presidential aspirations with this diabolical plot. This sounds like a movie itself, but we doubt any studio would touch it. You can listen to Limbaugh below. 'The Dark Knight Rises' opens this Friday.