Rush Limbaugh thinks Hillary Clinton may have faked her shoe-throwing incident

(Image credit: Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)

last updated 8 January 2015

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."

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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.

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Jon Terbush is an associate editor at TheWeek.com covering politics, sports, and other things he finds interesting. He has previously written for Talking Points Memo, Raw Story, and Business Insider.