Rachel Maddow spent about half of her Friday show on the controversy surrounding Rush Limbaugh's incendiary comments about Sandra Fluke and contraception, and while lamenting his words about the law student, she told her viewers that the important part about Limbaugh's attacks was that he appeared not to understand how birth control works.

Limbaugh's statements -- he has called Fluke a "slut" and a "prostitute" and wondered why she is having "so much sex" since she wants her insurance policy to cover birth control, among other things -- have been major targets of cable outrage in recent days. Maddow joined in on that outrage, but said that Limbaugh was intentionally trying to rile people up. She opined that the more revealing thing was that a man who is having so much sway in a debate about contraception is seemingly woefully ignorant about what it actually is.

"Sometimes people are being mean because the fact that they don't understand something makes them angry," she said. "I think Rush Limbaugh doesn't know what birth control is. I think he doesn't understand what he's talking about."

She played clips of Limbaugh saying that Fluke and her friends were "going broke" because the amount of sex they were having was costing them so much in pills.

"I think that Rush Limbaugh thinks you take a birth control pill to avoid getting pregnant each time you have sex, so the more times you have sex the more birth control pills you need," Maddow said, going on to point out that this is decidedly not how birth control works.

"You just take one pill every day," she said. "It's a prescription deal ... you don't need more birth control to keep you not pregnant for more sex."

Maddow said this was the "real problem" in the debate. Addressing him directly, she said, "You're bad at this, Rush Limbaugh! You don't even understand how babies are made, let alone how people can have sex without making a baby, and you would like the government to take over decision making on these issues on your say so and you don't get it. You biologically don't get it."

She finished by calling Limbaugh a "dummy."