Rush Limbaugh, Siri, and the wrath of the technocrati

19.04.2012
On his Tuesday radio broadcast, conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh described a technical problem with his iPhone and 's Siri voice assistant, encountered on his drive to work that morning.

Since then, he's been abused, mocked, and disbelieved on many of Apple techsites and online forums for purportedly claiming to have been hacked, and blaming the hack on either the Obama administration or, to paraphrase former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Vast Leftwing Conspiracy. Many of the bloggers and commenters outright say he's simply a liar, having made up the story out of whole cloth.

Limbaugh posted on his website the next day a about his follow-up experience Tuesday afternoon, which clearly put the event into the "unexplained glitch" category: "But I got in the car yesterday afternoon and headed to the airport....So I tried some dictation, and it was perfect. That stuff that happened yesterday morning has not happened since. It was flawless yesterday afternoon in the car, same setup, Verizon hot spot with my Bluetooth phone system in the car, perfect."

A typical response to Limbaugh's original account is that of MacGasm's Corey Tamas, a self-described "tech journalist," who gave his post the headline "." 

The headline clearly implies that Limbaugh knows little or nothing about Siri and that, presumably, Tamas can fill in this yawning knowledge gap and account for the technical problem that Limbaugh says he encountered.

"In a story I feel like I've waited my entire professional life to cover, Rush Limbaugh has decided to take aim at Siri and continues to entrench his legendary posture of saying things which take a gigantic, steaming dump on simple logic," Tama writes.