Rush Limbaugh thinks Hillary Clinton may have faked her shoe-throwing incident
Bill Pugliano/Getty Images


Hillary Clinton was minding her own business and delivering a speech last Thursday when suddenly a shoe went whizzing by her head. Judging by her startled reaction, she had no idea it was coming — or did she?
That's the question Rush Limbaugh and other "shoe truthers," as Talking Points Memo branded them, are pondering in the wake of the bizarre incident. On his radio show Monday, Limbaugh said that though he'd yet to see footage of the event, it would be just like Clinton to fake such a story. As for her possible motive? To distract from Benghazi, of course.
"Maybe it's because in my subconscious I think it was staged or set up or whatever.
Look, folks, I know these people so well that I do not attach much genuineness to them at all, and I don't know why anybody would be throwing a shoe at Hillary unless maybe it's an attempt to make the Benghazi people look like nuts and lunatics and wackos. That's if it even had anything to do with that, which I don't know. But apparently it's not just me, folks." [Rush Limbaugh]
Limbaugh wasn't alone either. Fox News contributor Bernard Goldberg wondered in a blog post Monday if Clinton staged the story to "make her seem presidential."
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Clinton has led every early poll of the 2016 Democratic primary by yawning margins and already has a well-heeled shadow campaign to support her likely presidential bid. Which is to say, she does not need a shoe-throwing hoax to lend her a presidential aura.

Continue reading for free
We hope you're enjoying The Week's refreshingly open-minded journalism.
Subscribed to The Week? Register your account with the same email as your subscription.