by Zev Chafets
Still, Obama wasn’t entirely wrong when he referred to FOX News as “talk radio.” In fact, Limbaugh himself had told me the same thing a year or so before. Later Rush had second thoughts and wrote to clarify that he hadn’t meant to put down Roger Ailes.
“I want to ensure that you didn’t take my comment that Fox News is Talk Radio on TV as a slam. Roger is one of my closest friends. I was speaking within the context of being proud of the things the success of my radio show spawned.”
In 1992 Limbaugh published his first book, The Way Things Ought to Be. He wasn’t a writer and he knew it—“I don’t have the iron butt you need for it,” he says.
Limbaugh enlisted John Fund, a young editorial writer at the Wall Street Journal, to tape conversations with him on the topics he wanted to discuss and shape them into a first draft. His brother, David, worked with him on the final version. “I’m more of a writer, Rush is more of a talker,” David told me. “In fact, he does his best thinking when he’s talking.” Rush dedicated the book, “To my parents, whose love and devotion made me the terrific guy I am.”
The Way Things Ought to Be, with a picture of a sweetly smiling Limbaugh on the jacket, became a publishing phenomenon. It hit number one on the New York Times best-seller list and stayed there for almost half a year. More than a million copies were sold. When it got to be too big to ignore, the Times assigned TV critic Walter Goodman to review it.
“Some passages,” Goodman wrote, “alternate between slobberings of sincerity and slaverings of invective, but it is all in the service of the same cause.”
That cause, of course, was Limbaugh’s promotion of conservatism as he understood it. “This is a work for its time,” Goodman wrote. “Despite Bill Clinton’s recent victory, right-wing populism, an American perennial, is in bloom, and at the moment Mr. Limbaugh is its gaudiest flower. His appeal is to a part of middle America—call it the silent majority or The American People or the booboisie—that feels it has been on the receiving end of the droppings of the bicoastals as they wing first class from abortion-rights rallies to AIDS galas to save-the-pornographer parties.”
When a writer uses “gaudiest flower” and “booboisie” in the same paragraph, you can be pretty sure he is attempting to channel H. L. Mencken, the journalistic patron saint of irreverence, self-promotion, brutal satire, and public combat. Mencken often expressed his contempt for the influential right-thinkers of his time with a theatrical mockery. In 1926, for example, after an issue of his magazine, The American Mercury, was banned in Boston for publishing an “obscene” story about a prostitute who conducted her business in a graveyard, Mencken publicly broke the law by selling a copy of the magazine to the famous Massachusetts moralist J. Frank Chase—comically biting Chase’s coin to ascertain its authenticity (in an odd coincidence, the offending story, “Hatrack,” was set in Farmington, Missouri, just down the road from Cape Girardeau). The New York Herald Tribune editorialized against Mencken’s “incurable vulgarity” and “business acumen,” and derided him as a “professional smart-Aleck.”
A less antagonistic reviewer might have noticed that Limbaugh and Mencken had quite a lot in common, from self-educated disdain for schoolteachers to their incendiary satire and the impact it had on the culture.1
To Goodman, Limbaugh was merely a demagogue, devoid of ideas worth considering. Like most liberal intellectuals, the reviewer knew next to nothing about American conservatism, and it showed, especially when he tried to put Limbaugh and Pat Robertson into the same bag. Limbaugh did share many of Robertson’s political views—the two men were, after all, both conservative Republicans—but Robertson was the sort of televangelist Limbaugh had been mocking since his “Friar Shuck” bits in Pittsburgh. Rush might have a daily chat or two with Jesus, but his on-air banter about adult beverages, sexual innuendo, and at times profane language was anything but pious, and he certainly didn’t share Robertson’s belief that the Reverend Robertson could perform miracles.
Goodman conceded that dogmatic liberals sometimes invited Rush’s mockery and that he was a pretty fair radio comic. “The satire here is not subtle . . . I especially like the commercial for the Bungee condom, which has a daughter bringing Dad up to date on ‘the Bungee X27 model himhugger with extra torque capability’ which came in a Kennedy Weekend dozen or the Wilt Chamberlain carry-home crate.”
The review ended with a prediction based on a quotation. “ ‘We conservatives are the future,’ announces Mr. Limbaugh, and the reader may construe that as a political promise. On the evidence of The Way Things Ought to Be, with its deference to religion and patriotism, its relentless self-promotion (which may be a put-on, but then again maybe not), its no-budge line on crime, welfare, and sexual disarray, its massagings of honest, hard-working, clean-living, do-it-on-their-own folks, I’d guess Mr. Limbaugh will be running for office before very long, as America’s white hope.” Mr. Goodman would have lost that bet. By then Rush Limbaugh was too rich and too influential to run for anything.
Limbaugh was not only rich—his income in 1993, from books, radio, television, and his other ventures, was estimated at between fifteen and twenty million dollars—he was still growing. The EIB now consisted of 636 stations with about twenty-one million listeners a week. The TV show was prospering. He founded The Limbaugh Letter, a monthly publication that quickly attracted 430,000 subscribers—five or six times more than the circulation of the leading magazines of opinion on both the left and the right. His stage show, when he bothered going on the road, packed theaters and auditoriums. And, that year, he published his second (and thus far, last) book.2
See, I Told You So was dedicated to Rush’s 102-year-old grandfather: “For Rush Hudson Limbaugh Senior, You are the Limbaugh America should know.” Joseph Farah, Rush’s “conservative soul brother” from Sacramento, replaced John Fund as the designated journalist on the project, but, once again, the tone and content were unmistakably Rushian. The book went directly to first place on the Times list, and by the end of 1994 there were an estimated 7.5 million copies of Rush’s books, in print or on audio, in the hands of his fans.3
Rush’s first book, The Way Things Ought to Be, could have fairly been entitled “The Way Things Used to Be.” He had devoted several chapters to defending the expired presidency of Ronald Reagan and attacking the defunct Soviet Union and the hapless Mikhail Gorbachev. Big Rush was dead, but his adamant anti-Communism lived on in his son’s geopolitical outlook. But the new book had a more contemporary feel. For one thing, the USSR was now gone. For another, Limbaugh was now clearly influenced by Buckley and his agenda. It is startling to realize, after rereading The Way Things Ought to Be today, how much of that agenda is still relevant; very few issues have been resolved in the past twenty years. And nowhere are they better preserved than on Limbaugh’s show. Many of the book’s targets—the Clintons, Jesse Jackson, Barney Frank, the mainstream media, Paul “the Forehead” Begala, even Jimmy Carter (“an utter disgrace and embarrassment,” Limbaugh called him in 2009)—continue to make frequent appearances in Rush’s monologues. The issues, too, are strikingly familiar, from global warming (“a hoax”) to labor unions (“goons”) to big government (“an infringement on the rights of every American”).
When Obama came into office, his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, was quoted as saying, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” The conservative bloggers lit up at the cynicism of the remark, but Limbaugh was fifteen years ahead of them. He observed in his book, and on the air, that crisis creation was standard operating procedure for the left. “They overstate a problem and work society into a frenzied state in order to justify their invariable big-government solution.”
Another theme was the failure of the Democrats to appreciate the exceptional nature of America and its role as the natural leader of the world; and Bill Clinton’s alleged belief that the country had seen better days. “Don’t believe the doomsayers,” wrote Limbaugh. “Don’t believe the negativity mongers. Don’t believe the Ameri
ca bashers—even if one of them is the President of the United States.” Sixteen years later, after Barack Obama’s first speech to the UN General Assembly, Limbaugh returned to the same complaint about the new Democratic president. “[Obama] is saying, ‘no there is nothing exceptional about our country . . . we are tarnished, stained, we have been immoral and unjust and our Constitution is flawed.’ ”
In See, I Told You So, Limbaugh also developed his thesis that environmentalism is a scam, seized upon by former Communists orphaned by the death of the USSR, to redistribute Americans’ wealth. He discerned in the movement a quasi religion (much like Communism itself) based not on empirical evidence but on faith.
“Despite the hysterics of a few pseudo scientists, there is no reason to believe in global warming,” he wrote. “The Earth’s ecosystem is not fragile and humans are not capable of destroying it.” He was especially scathing about the apocalyptic scenarios for the destruction of the planet whose purpose was to instill “terror, dread and apprehension about the future.”
It took more than a little chutzpah for a college dropout to take on the august scientists and Ivy League progressive activists who were the spokespeople for environmentalism. But Limbaugh was a skeptic, unimpressed by the expertise of the experts, and willing to challenge them.
He had been given his first chance to really take on the environmentalists in 1992, when Ted Koppel invited him to debate Senator Al Gore on ABC’s Nightline. Like the first Ali-Liston bout, it looked like a ridiculous mismatch: Al Gore, of St. Albans Prep and Harvard, the esteemed author of the critically acclaimed Earth in the Balance, up against a dumb, right-wing radio ranter (the epithet “global warming denier” had not yet been invented). Liberals were looking forward to a slaughter.
Gore opened by warning of “a global ecological crisis that is more serious than anything human civilization has ever faced.” There were many ecological challenges facing the world, he said, but singled out “the hole in the ozone layer—which now could appear above the United States,” climate change, the imminent destruction of the rain forests, and pollution of the oceans and the atmosphere.
Limbaugh was visibly amused by this litany of present and future disaster. “There is no ozone hole above the United States,” he stated flatly. “I don’t think the ecology is fragilely balanced.” He attributed such concerns to a “doomsday industry” typified by Hollywood airheads whose naïveté and need for image-building charities made them useful idiots for the environmentalist movement.
Gore responded by agreeing with Limbaugh that their key disagreement was whether the earth is fragile. He mentioned the growing number of people on the planet, an iconic concern of population pessimists since Malthus. Then, a Sunday punch—“new technologies we’ve never had before, like chlorofluorocarbons.”
Koppel was evidently impressed. “I don’t know anybody on Capitol Hill who is more knowledgeable on the subject of environment than Al Gore. You have to take seriously what he says.”
Limbaugh didn’t have to and he didn’t. He knew perfectly well that Gore wasn’t a climatologist, he just played one on TV. “If you listen to what Senator Gore said, it is manmade products which are causing the ozone depletion. Yet Mt. Pinatubo has put 570 times the amount of chlorine into the atmosphere in one eruption than all of manmade chlorofluorocarbons in one year; and the ultraviolet radiation measured on this country’s surface since 1974 has shown no increase whatsoever. And if there’s ozone depletion going on, you’re going to have UV radiation levels going way up, and they simply aren’t. The sun makes ozone, and there’s an ozone hole in the Antarctic Circle and the Arctic Circle simply because the sun is below the horizon for a portion of the year.”
In 2008 Limbaugh rebroadcast part of his debate with Gore. The ex- vice president had since won an Oscar and a Nobel Prize for his environmental endeavors. He had also become an environmental businessman and investor, parlaying his high profile and Washington connections into a multimillion-dollar empire of “green” enterprises.4 There was still no hole in the ozone layer over the United States. The world’s temperature hadn’t risen in almost a decade. Here and there you could still find some trees. “Sixteen years ago he was making the same arguments,” Limbaugh said. Limbaugh thought global warming was a hoax in 1992, and nothing that had happened since had changed his mind.
I once asked Limbaugh what he would change if he got a career do-over. He replied that there was no major issue he had ever changed his mind about, and that he regretted nothing he had ever said or done on the air. But that isn’t quite true. Early in his national program, Limbaugh did public course corrections on the way he dealt with the issues of abortion and AIDS.
In his “35 Truths,” Rush pronounced abortion “wrong” without any qualification, and he has never altered that view. But he did give up using a “caller abortions” bit, which began in 1989 when a woman called the show to argue with Limbaugh’s anti-choice position. It occurred to him that he could satirize the fraught subject through a radio theater game. Staffer Phil Latzman mixed a twelve-second recording of a roaring vacuum cleaner with a seven-second scream. Then, “for philosophical reasons,” Limbaugh contacted the phone company, asked when a phone call actually begins, and was told that it becomes a call as soon as it is answered by a second party. With mock solemnity, Limbaugh raised a moral dilemma. He personally didn’t answer his phone (screener James Golden did that). It would be wrong to leave the fate of each live call to the discretion of his staff. Limbaugh decreed that calls that remained on hold for twenty minutes or longer would be considered viable and could not be aborted.
Once this was established, Limbaugh offered his listeners a chance to become the first aborted call in radio history. A woman called in and was suddenly interrupted by a loud sucking sound mixed with a choked scream, and then silence.
The controversy was immediate and furious. A station in Seattle dropped the show, and others were threatening to do the same. After two weeks in which he “aborted” about twenty calls, Limbaugh announced that he would stop, although he didn’t apologize. In fact, he was defiant. “If you didn’t know in your heart of hearts that abortion was a savage, violent act, what I did wouldn’t have bugged you so much. I took you inside an abortion mill and some of you couldn’t take it. You can’t handle it when it was only dramatized. Yet you’re not bothered by abortion when it happens for real. Is there not a contradiction here? Think about it.”
Another misstep came on the subject of AIDS. When the disease first became infamous in the United States, in the early eighties, Limbaugh was in Kansas City, which was relatively unaffected. But Sacramento was a different story. There was a large gay community there, and the epidemic was being felt. Limbaugh had reason to know this, and to empathize; one of his mentors, Norman Woodruff, was openly gay, an AIDS activist who eventually died of the disease. By the time Limbaugh arrived in New York to do his national show, HIV-AIDS was regarded as a deadly epidemic, although there was debate about who was actually threatened. The politically correct view was that everyone was vulnerable. In reality, most American victims were gay men and their sexual partners (gay or straight) and intravenous-drug users. Limbaugh (correctly) dismissed the “everyone is equally at risk” line as liberal propaganda intended to scare the heterosexual majority into putting AIDS at the top of the health agenda (a strategy that has largely been successful).
Limbaugh’s views on homosexuality are not, as most people assume, similar to those of the Christian Right. In The Way Things Ought to Be, he wrote, “I don’t care who sleeps with whom . . . I harbor no bias, per se, against the lifestyle.” What he really didn’t like was the fact that the gay rights movement was part of the Democratic coalition. Anything he could do to call it into question served his partisan agenda. After an ACT UP demonstration at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City that disrupted a mass, he chastised “militant homosexuals” for their disrespectful behavior and shortly thereafter began broadcasting irreverent and tasteless
“AIDS update” segments introduced by Dionne Warwick’s “I’ll Never Love This Way Again.” In his traveling stage show, the Excellence in Broadcasting Tour, he did a bit when he put a condom over the microphone to illustrate “safe speech.”
The reaction to this elicited one of the very few public apologies of Limbaugh’s career. “I engaged in an AIDS update that missed the mark totally and ended up being very insensitive to people who were dying,” he said. He pledged not to do it again, and he hasn’t.
Early in 1994 Limbaugh announced a new, updated version of his “35 Undeniable Truths of Life.” These were, he said, all equally truthful and listed in no particular order. He stipulated that they didn’t replace, but simply expanded, the first thirty-five. But this was a very different list. Gone were the mock serious “truths” about Rush’s favorite pro-football teams and schoolboyish banalities on how Abe Lincoln saved the nation. There was also no mention of the Russians or the evils of Communism. The new “truths” reflected a shift in Limbaugh’s concerns and his targets. It was a congressional election year, and he offered a set of principles that would contrast with the Clinton administration’s liberal worldview and offer ammunition against Democratic congressional candidates. Here is Rush’s list (and my own completely unofficial and personal commentary, in italics).