Rush Limbaugh says people protesting Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s union-busting are “freeloaders.”

The dictionary defines “freeloading” as imposing “upon another’s generosity or hospitality without sharing in the cost or responsibility involved.”

I don’t see where sticking up for one’s rights, or the rights of others, like the Dairy State demonstrators are doing, is “freeloading.” But the definition fits Limbaugh.

So does “hypocrite.”

Limbaugh, who is 60, talks tough. He evidently never met a war he didn’t like – so long as others did the fighting.

Limbaugh has been gung ho for sending young Americans off to battle in the Middle East . A year my junior, he was also gung ho for the Vietnam War, the war of our salad days.

Limbaugh loathes communism as much as he detests unions. In the sixties and seventies, he was of the persuasion that if we didn’t stop the Viet Cong in Pleiku, they’d be in Pomona .

Yet Limbaugh actively avoided the draft.

He was all too happy to impose upon the generosity and hospitality of other young Americans to stem the Red Tide in Southeast Asia “without sharing in the cost or responsibility involved.”

In his book, The Rush Limbaugh Story, author Paul D. Colford devotes a whole chapter to explaining how Limbaugh beat the draft. Check out Snopes online, too.

Of course, Limbaugh is not the only union-hating Republican who dodged the draft while others dodged bullets.

Years ago, the New Hampshire Gazette online published a long list of saber-rattling, uber-conservative GOP “patriots” like Limbaugh who skipped military service in their youth.

The Gazette called them “chickenhawks,” meaning “public persons who tend to advocate, or are fervent supporters of those who advocate, military solutions to political problems, and who have personally declined to take advantage of a significant opportunity to serve in uniform during wartime.”

Like Limbaugh, I didn’t go to Vietnam . But I didn’t want anybody else going to Vietnam . I guess that makes me a plain “chicken.”

Anyway, Limbaugh was all for us kicking commie butt in Vietnam . But he used his butt to keep himself stateside and in civvies.

I’m not joking. A pilonidal cyst on his tailbone earned Limbaugh a coveted 1-Y classification.

It’s not likely a routine pre-induction physical would have detected a bum butt like Limbaugh’s. The best bet was to get a civilian doctor to say you had a pilonidal cyst. (One of my buddies had one, got a doctor to say so and flunked his pre-induction physical.)

Explains Snopes.com: “…Since there are no records indicating that Limbaugh was ever examined by a physician at an Armed Forces Entrance Examining Station (i.e., he never underwent a pre-induction physical), the 1-Y classification was almost certainly assigned based on a report Limbaugh had his own doctor prepare and submit to his draft board.”

The 1-Y classification meant the army wouldn’t take you unless maybe the VC really did invade Pomona .

Colford’s book was published in 1993. But it’s still timely, especially when Limbaugh, from the safety of his radio studio, keeps on slamming people he doesn’t like as “freeloaders” or “unpatriotic.”

Berry Craig