I'd begun to wonder that myself. Fortunately, Limbaugh goes on to explain himself, but first he underscores the degree to which he took Thomas's side immediately:

I was doing an appearance on Saturday when the Anita Hill stuff really hit, and all of the outrageous allegations, the "pubic hair on the Coke can" and all the sexual harassment stuff, and I can't tell you how livid I was. I spent the entire almost two hours on stage that night (it was a Saturday) talking about this, and how sick it made me and how angry it made me. The reason that I—and I have been fully vindicated, by the way—was able to defend Clarence Thomas with total confidence against this, is that I knew he didn't do it.

But how? Having heard, amidst a live performance, about specific sexual-harassment allegations involving two people he knew almost nothing about, alleged to have taken place some years before in a private setting, how did Limbaugh instantly discern who was being truthful and feel "total confidence" in doing so?

I didn't think I was risking anything. I really didn't. If I'd had the slightest doubt of his innocence, I woulda never opened my mouth. If I thought that there was just a tiny thread of possibility that what Anita Hill was saying and what the Democrat witnesses were saying was true, I woulda stayed silent. But I didn't. I went to the equivalent of the mountaintops and started shouting. Now, why? Character, conservatism, and my knowledge of the left.

He knew that Thomas was a conservative, and that his political adversaries were leftists. And that's all it took to "know" that Thomas was innocent. Evidently, no true conservative would ever sexually harass anyone, and no leftists would tell the truth about being sexually harassed by a conservative.

Limbaugh offered all this to make a point about Christie and the dearth of people defending him:

Christie may well be worth defending, is my point. I don't know. He may well be worth a Clarence Thomas-type defense, but notice that nobody is coming forth with one. They've all got that caveat. "He's home free IF he's not lying." This is not a comment about Governor Christie, so please don't misunderstand or be confused. I'm trying to illustrate (What's the word?) the emptiness of the Republican ... I'm trying to make the point that over there in the RINO Club, the Republican establishment, the wildebeests, whatever, there's not an ideology. There's not a belief system. There's not a foundation on which to base a defense, as I had with Clarence Thomas—and, by the way, he's not alone.

Got that? Were Christie and his supporters all true conservatives, they would be assured that Christie is in the right. Whereas as non-conservatives, the only way to ascertain the truth is a dispassionate analysis, qualified with hedges such as, If he's lying about everything, then he isn't blameless after all. Christie may well be innocent, Limbaugh argues, but no one can know for sure because he isn't a conservative.