Expecting outrage, when you click you instead find a succinct payoff on the joke, plus two news links, about advertisers dropping from the Limbaugh Show and the band Rush sending a cease and desist letter to the radio host. But mainly, it's the joke. Since the site's launch on the 7th at about 1:00 in the afternoon, people have shared it on Facebook some 16,000 times and retweeted it 1,400 times. It was on Reddit. As these things go, it's a viral hit. "Even at 3 a.m. last night it was getting a new visitor every 1 and a half seconds," says Lurig. "I never expected this. I thought, it was funny to me, and now when other people share it and laugh at it it makes my day better."

Lurig has the domain for a year, and though he's being urged to put ads on it (maybe he could pick up some of Rush's orphans ?), says, "It's just a one-off joke! I would love to know if the people at Politico [their article is one of Lurig's links] are like, we're still getting traffic from this?"

If Limbaugh does something else outrageous, Lurig says, he might change the site again. But he says DefendRush.org should also exist as a reminder. In this day in which news stories grab our attention and work us into a frenzy in a 24- or 48-hour period before we blithely move on to the next, "This is still crappy. He's still on the air, and people are giving him money to do what he does. It just feels wrong."

The biggest boon of course would be for Rush himself to comment and bring this all full-circle. "I'd love for him to come and say this is slanderous or something, and I'd say, 'How is this any different than what you do? Just because I don't have people paying me to say it?'" Lurig pauses. "I feel like I have the Internet behind me."

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

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