In his book Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot, Al Franken (D-Minnesota) recounts how he resolved to listen to Limbaugh everyday for research purposes.
But after Rush spent 15 minutes defending his line of neckties against accusations that they were “conservative” in design, Franken wandered from the room. When he returned to the show 45 minutes later Rush was again (still?) talking about the non-conservative design of his ties. So Al just paid an intern to listen to the broadcasts.
I absolutely understood what Franken was referring to.
Limbaugh has 3 or 4 hours of air time to fill and after 12 minutes of listening it’s wrist-slashing time (His? My own? It doesn’t matter.)
And when his interminable ramblings are persecuting Bill Clinton and encouraging the rascals trying to impeach him it makes matters much worse.
And when he’s defending Bush’s embrace of torture and wars of aggression as vital American values it makes matters worse still.
To sum up: Boring, evil and smug sounding. A charmer.
True that. If anything, Limbaugh is practically genteel when compared with the likes of Glenn Beck (who’s crazier), Sean Hannity (who’s more blindingly patriotic and self-righteous), and Michael Savage and Mark Levin (who are both angrier and more abrasive).
Incidentally Essured, what country are you from? Do you have any radio talk shows with a partisan political bent?
As someone who can’t stand to listen to Rush for more than a minute or so (it’s the supercilious blowhard factor as much as the politics), I have a question for those who’ve managed to suck it up and catch him more frequently.
Does he ever put a caller on the air who disagrees with him, or who calls him on his lies and distortions of fact? Or is it a steady parade of “dittoheads” (aw, that’s just so…cute)?
Has anyone ever heard such an exchange, and if so, how did it go? It seems to me that a “good” little radio talk show host would be able to deal with such callers, rather than avoiding them in favor of only like-minded ones.
I actually used to be quite the Rush Limbaugh fan: I listened to him daily, I owned both The Way Things Ought to Be and See, I Told You So. I watched his brief, failed foray into television (he had some sort of talk show way back when. Although I don’t remember any guests, just him talking.) I am somewhat embarrassed to admit this, but I even wrote my college entrance essay about him (and they still accepted me, that bastion of liberalism that academia is. :))
I’m not sure how to phrase this exactly but, at the time, he did speak to me and my perceived injustices in the world, against what appeared to be the corruption of values in the “liberal” media, against “political correctness,” the “thought police,” “Feminazis,” etc. I mean, at the time, he really did seem to be a voice of reason–or at least a counteracting viewpoint–to what seemed like liberalism run amok.
But, over time, I came to different conclusions about the world, I guess. I started to feel all those bogeymen were deliberately exaggerated to manipulate his audience and play into their deepest fears. Rush’s rhetorical tricks began to annoy me. His squelching of opposing viewpoints on his show, without any attempt at having a real discussion or meeting of minds began to actively piss me off. And then I came to the conclusion that he was simply lying or weaseling on most things. Basically, when I got access to the internet and more opposing viewpoints, I started moving away from Rush Limbaugh-style populist conservatism towards William Buckley intellectual conservatism. Well, I overshot and ended up on the liberal side of things. (Although fiscal conservatism still has its appeal to me.)
When my college roommate in 1993 listened to him, no, he never did. One time only, someone did disagree with him but he hung up on them and complained how they must have lied to the screeners just to be able to talk to him.
He does so VERY frequently. He actually enjoys debating with someone who disagrees with him. More often than not, it’s the caller who tries to shout him down in the middle of his arguments than Rush silencing the caller.
Unlike his poor imitators Hannity, Savage and Levin (and I’m conservative), Rush has a sense of humor which makes it possible to listen to him for an extended amount of time, and rarely shouts at callers. I have not listened to him since Obama became president - and only seldom when Bush II was (my current work schedule does not really afford me the time to listen to radio in mid-day), but I thought he was hilarious (I loved the song parodies) and usually very cogent during the Clinton era. And I own his first book (“The Way Things Ought to Be”) which was written before Clinton was president, and think it’s a very coherent read (although it’s pretty darned dated now). If he’s gone off the deep end since then I couldn’t rightly say, but most people who don’t like him now didn’t like him when I regularly listened either, so take that for what you will.
You might want to inform our foreign OP friend that the Royals have never won a single baseball game, ever*, so it’s easy to see how someone could gain valuable truth-twisting experience by serving as their promotions director.
(*Okay, so I twisted the truth there a bit, myself. But not by much!)
He did it often enough–I would say at least once per show. And, you’re right, he doesn’t normally shout down the caller, but at no point is there an attempt at rational discussion (I suppose one can say, by either party, but this was often not the case.) I have listened to it enough when there were more moderates calling in with opposing viewpoints, and I distinctly got the impression Rush was deflecting their criticisms rather than trying to understand them or factually argue them. That’s when I started re-evaluating my stance on him and eventually drifted away.
Granted, you can find this behavior on some more liberal talk shows, too, (although my worldview gives me the impression that it happens more on the other side, else I’d probably still be a conservative.) At the very least, Rush taught me to trust very little of what I hear on talk radio, whether liberal or conservative, without doing some research first.
Yes, he carefully screens for the biggest liberal whacko he can find. He never brings on a calm rational person on, because that would make him look bad.
He shouts at them if one of the screeners lets someone with half a brain on. I remember listening to him in my car during the 2008 election, and the topic of whether or not Sarah Palin was a good role model for women came up. They let one of the libruls on, who asserted she was not. [List set of grievances about Palin here] Rush, obviously, disagreed, and a debate ensued. Librul caller remains calm, continues his lift of grievances, while Rush became increasingly agitated. He started throwing out his typical right-wing sound bytes, rife with lies, twisted logic, and attacks on Hillary Clinton (for some reason), to which the caller did not respond with similar ire and foolishness. Eventually Rush started yelling over the caller, “Sarah Palin is real woman!”, you know, unlike that dyke Hillary Clinton, then hung up on him. He then closed his segment with a delightful comment that went something like, “Well, she’s no Barney Frank.” Charming.
Another reason the left hates him is that he succeeded where Air America failed.
Before Air America, the idea was that Rush was successful because he lies and vilifies his opponents. Thus all that was going to be needed was a series of left-wingers who would lie and vilify, except from the left. Then Air America went bankrupt. and instantly the idea became that Air America had failed because the left was so smart and sophisticated.
The notion that there might be more to Rush’s success that the Left’s caricature of him doesn’t seem to occur very much.
If Rush were “lying” as much as he does and spinning as much as he does, but from the left instead of the right, the SDMB would love him. But he would not be nearly as successful, because as I mentioned, entries into the market for left-wing political commentary have a lot of competition already.
The problem with Air America was it was aimed at an audience that isn’t big on talk radio. Conservatives love talk radio IF they are only subjected to opinions that they already agree with. Liberals just aren’t that into it. Rush’s audience tunes in every day to be told what their opinions are, liberals make up their own minds using information from sources other than talk radio.
He plays to his audience of troglodytes, reinforcing what they already want to believe and he’s not a fraction as funny as he thinks he is, so his attempts at humour come off as simple meanspiritedness barely above grade-school-recess level.
Air America was just boring. It really didn’t work as a concept. I listened to it for awhile, and couldn’t stand the left trying to imitate everything I hated about right-wing radio. I got bored of it on right-wing radio, and it certainly wasn’t any more entertaining when it was coming more from my current political philosophy.
(Although fiscal conservatism still has its appeal to me.)