When examining any issue, it is of primary importance that one do so from the correct frame of reference. With that in mind, I will first place Rush Limbaugh in his proper context: that of entertainer.
Yes, that's right. I'm not going to attempt to portray Limbaugh as a trend-setter, a king-maker, or even as a political analyst. To do so would be to ignore reality, to refuse to take the subject of this inquiry at his word, and in general to skip merrily down the same errant but beaten path taken by the likes of Al Franken (Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations), Bill Clinton, and friends.
Limbaugh has always and overall claimed that his business is entertainment. Since his early days as a disc jockey -- before politics entered the picture -- his business has been to make radio listeners stop turning the dial and listen to him. And if the number of affiliates, listeners and callers to his three-hour daily program is any indication, he has been remarkably successful at doing just that. Any importance that Limbaugh has achieved in American society stems from the fact that he is a consummate entertainer. And, like others of his sort -- Howard Cosell, Garry Shandling, Barbra Streisand -- part of his professional method is to grate on the nerves of some of his listeners so badly that they fall victim to a sort of paralysis: they just can't force themselves to reach out and punch the "off" button. Like Cosell, however (but unlike Shandling or Streisand), Limbaugh is not simply a "love to hate 'em" icon. There is real talent underneath a sometimes abrasive exterior.
Which brings us to abrasiveness itself. Limbaugh practices three kinds: the very occasional outright disgustingly bad joke (Chelsea as the "White House Dog" is, I believe, the favorite example pointed to by Limbaugh's detractors), the bombastic pointing out of fact (or non-fact, at least as often as Ralph Nader, Al Gore or Mike Malloy) in a manner that suggests incompetence on the part of those who disagree with The Maharushi's interpretation thereof, and:
Poking fun at things which are held to be sacred.
It's this last, of course, that gets Limbaugh in "trouble" (if you can call an eight-figure income with all the trimmings "trouble"), that causes him to be both loved and hated. Loved, naturally, by conservative listeners, and hated, naturally, by leftists who thought they had a patent on ridicule as a political weapon.
In this post-"liberal" era, we still have plenty of mossback lefties who remember the days when Hubert Humphrey, JFK, FDR and Adlai Stevenson were names to be conjured with; when conservatives were considered the class geeks whose existence was justified only by their convenience as targets of sneers and insults and as the butt of jokes. And, to be honest, I still regard conservatives this way. Limbaugh's innovation was to point out that for every case of conservative BO, there's a big "liberal" pimple on the nose of the Democratic Party to be pointed out and giggled over. The utter failure of "liberalism" (I use the quote marks to distinguish knee-jerk reactionary leftism from true classical liberalism, now known as libertarianism) to deliver on a single one of its supposed objectives after forty years of nearly uncontested control of the nation's political apparatus has made it a legitimate laughingstock.
Limbaugh, if not actually the first one to point this out, is at least the popularizer of the pastime.
"Liberals" consider this to be the unforgivable sin.
"Who the hell is this guy to make fun of our institutions?" lefties ask themselves. "So we've had a few failures....well, okay, we've been intellectually bankrupt since the 1930's. That's no excuse for this yahoo to prance around metaphorically pantsing us in front of the entire nation! Why, it's us who should be dragging him into the bathroom for a swirlie!" And, in fact, the "liberals" have a point (other than the one on top of their collective head, that is):
Limbaugh, being a conservative, is by definition a hypocrite to at least the same extent as any "liberal." He makes fun of the silly notion that we can tax and spend ourselves into prosperity, while adopting without question the even sillier notion that we can legislate and regulate our way into a Ward, June, Wally and Beaver morality. But enough of my plug for libertarianism.
In the same sense that watching "professional wrestling" can be fun (if you're
really drunk and
Garry Shandling has been pre-empted by a Barbra Streisand concert event),
it's exhilarating to listen to Limbaugh go at it daily, up to his hips in
"liberal" blood, putting the mental midgets who still have the intellectual
cojones to refer to the Democratic Party's political line as
philosophically coherent in their place.
It has an effect beyond mere entertainment, of course: if the "liberals"
had a humorist with one-tenth the talent of Limbaugh, the GOP might not control
Congress today. I wish they did, really.
Returning to the "professional wrestling" paradigm, watching "The Masked
Limbaugh" stride around the ring doing the "piledriver" on those to
whom making fun of "liberalism" is the moral equivalent of farting
in public becomes tedious. The "liberals" need someone who can go three falls
with this guy. But please -- don't stuff Molly Ivins into anything
woven from SpandexTM. She's not in
his league anyway, and the scenery is grotesque enough as is.
Selah.
