The disease is “anal poisoning.”

Since English is an acquired language to me, I wrote it off to unfamiliarity with the language and asked my doctor friend, a pathologist, about it. He had never observed this phenomenon in his “patients,” nor was he familiar with the term, although he mentioned that mercury or arsenic when inserted into the proper place might produce such results.

Well, my next place for such research was, of course, Google.

And, lo and behold, there were 15,000 references for “anal poisoning.”

I thought that I had hit the mother lode on this perilous medical condition. But to my surprise, every one of the references I looked at—I stopped after about the 400th entry—was somehow related to that famous entertainer (some refer to him as the de facto leader of the GOP), Rush Limbaugh.

It was déjà vu to the time when, if one Googled “miserable failure,” a million references to George W. Bush popped up.

Still looking for a medical description of the disease, I delved a little deeper into some of the references.

One link took me to a column by Jason Linkins at the Huffington Post, a column that includes a video of the man "on loan from God" recently insulting British Prime Minister Gordon Brown “with a mental image that one must work at to un-think about, warning that if the British Prime Minister keeps ‘slobbering’ over President Barack Obama, he’ll ‘come down with anal poisoning and may die from it.’”

Another reference took me back to February, 2008, when Dr. Limbaugh implied that the disease was quite contagious and made a double diagnosis. When asked on his radio show by a caller whether he thought McCain would pick Sen. Lindsey Graham as his running mate, Dr. Limbaugh diagnosed: “I may be wrong … Lindsey Graham is certainly close enough to [McCain] to die of anal poisoning.”

Apparently this disease has been around for a while. Back on January 5, 2007, Dr. Limbaugh prematurely diagnosed the former Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe’s condition by saying that he “will die of anal poisoning because he is so close to drilling Hillary [Clinton].”

I thought that I’d finally hit upon the medical term when I came across the entry “J Anal Toxicol.”

But it was not to be. J Anal Toxicol stands for the Journal of Analytical Toxicology (JAT), the international source for practical clinical/forensic applications for isolating and identifying potentially toxic substances.

I decided to crank up the intensity a little bit by Googling “acute anal poisoning.”

There were five references to “acute anal poisoning.”

One was a “fake news” one on Rush Limbaugh’s girlfriend—obviously off limits.

Two were on Willie Nelson and George W. Bush and were not written or spoken by an authority like Dr. Limbaugh, thus to be ignored.

The last two were in Japanese, with the only English words being “acute anal poisoning.”

I don’t understand Japanese, and I decided not to pursue those references.

Not being any wiser as to this medical condition, I went back to the Joan Walsh column to see who was the latest patient thusly diagnosed by Dr. Limbaugh.

It was worse than I thought.

Apparently the disease has become pandemic.

According to Dr. Kevorkian Limbaugh, “Obama knows he’s being followed around by a bunch of sycophants who are going to die of anal poisoning…”

Horrified, I consulted a book written by soon-to-be U.S. Senator Al Franken, and was somewhat relieved when I found what could be a reason for Dr. Limbaugh’s alarming prediction and intense interest in this disease.

In his best-selling “Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot,” Franken writes about the military draft history of this man, who never served in the military:  “According to Limbaugh, the physical deferment was for either a ‘football knee from high school’ or a ‘pilonidal cyst’”

I’ll spare the reader what Franken himself calls a “disgusting” description of this medical problem.

I am sure there are other explanations for Limbaugh’s fixation with all things anal.

One day, we may know the full story.