Really? Bane in The Dark Knight Rises a Obama conspiracy?

After much anticipation the final installment of the Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogyThe Dark Knight Rises releases today, but is the choice of the villain, Bane, a conspiracy by the Obama government to subliminally modify the thinking patterns of American voters? According to US right wing commentator, Rush Limbaugh, it is. [caption id=“attachment_384123” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Tom Hardy as Bane in the Dark Knight rises. AP[/caption] On his popular Rush Limbaugh show, aired on 18 June, the commentator claimed that the ‘brain-dead people’ who would watch the movie might be influenced against Republican presidential hopeful Romney, given that he once worked at private equity firm Bain Capital. Elucidating his theory on his show, Limbaugh said:

So, anyway, this evil villain in the new Batman movie is named Bane.  And there’s now a discussion out there as to whether or not this is purposeful and whether or not it will influence voters.  It’s gonna have a lot of people. This movie, the audience is gonna be huge. A lot of people are gonna see the movie, and it’s a lot of brain-dead people, entertainment, the pop culture crowd, and they’re gonna hear Bane in the movie and they’re gonna associate Bain. The thought is that when they start paying attention to the campaign later in the year, and Obama and the Democrats keep talking about Bain, Romney and Bain, that these people will think back to the Batman movie, “Oh, yeah, I know who that is.”

Limbaugh’s observations come even as Obama has upped his statements against Romney and his work at Bain Capital. Unfortunately for Limbaugh, the conspiracy theory is a little hard to prove. The character Bane in The Dark Knight Rises has been around in Batman comics for a long time now, and is likely to be based on the Knightfall series. Not surprisingly a day later, Limbaugh reportedly recanted and said he had never made the statement. Director Christopher Nolan also began planning the film in 2010 and unless he’s something of a clairvoyant, its a little unlikely that the character in the film has anything to do with Romney.