Rush Limbaugh, Vanity Fair, James Wolcott, War On Rush

'SEMI-VACANT SKULLS'

During Escalating War On Rush, Vanity Fair Gets Personal







If there's any lingering doubt that the "progressive" left's next target is Rush Limbaugh, a new Vanity Fair hit piece puts this to rest for good. Today, the War On Rush has officially been kicked up a notch.

In a mean- spirited rampage full of highly personal slams, James Wolcott takes the smear campaign a step further by attacking Limbaugh's audience as moronic. Clearly, Wolcott's Unhinged Anger knob was set to "11".

Otherwise, we've seen elements of this in the past, where it isn't enough to portray Rush as merely wrong on the issues. Instead, he must also be a horrible person, bent on global destruction after first ruining the lives of those around him.

When the author resorts to rehashing cheap personal attacks against the piece's target, he exposes inherent weaknesses in his arguments.

Designed to reinforce a cartoonish Rush image created for "progressives" who never listen to the show, Wolcott goes so far as to republish Limbaugh's home address and rehash the addiction issue.

From the piece:

Limbaugh— a man, a mission, a mighty wind—has carved out his own principality in Florida's Palm Beach, a lion preserve where he can roam undisturbed. Drinking in the rays, puffing on those big-shot cigars, riding the range in a golf cart— he's got the complete Jackie Gleason how-sweet-it-is package deal. But just as the Great One suffered from melancholia aggravated by alcohol, Limbaugh's indulgence in his own creature comforts hasn't been able to insulate him from the demons within.

An addiction to painkillers reduced this human boom box of self-sufficiency and strict enforcement—"If people are violating the law by doing drugs," he once lectured on his syndicated TV show, "they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted
and they ought to be sent up" (up the river, that is)—to the furtive, needy ploys of any other junkie who finds the medicine cabinet running dry. After he entered rehab, his third wife, Marta, reportedly vacated the luxury estate (they would later divorce), leaving Rush a Tarzan without his Jane in what the Palm Beach Post in 2004 called his "$24.2 million, 36,500-square-foot secluded monster at 1495 N. Ocean."

Secluded for now, but perhaps after this god of the airwaves shucks his mound of flesh so that his soul can meet Reagan's in Republican Heaven (where all the angels look like June Allyson), his compound can be converted into a tourist attraction—a combination museum, shrine, gift shop, and spiritual mecca modeled on Elvis's Graceland, Dolly Parton's Dollywood.

More:

For us non-dittoheads (that is, the unconverted), a more fitting memorial to Mount Rushbo might be a diorama of the environmental destruction that he did so much to enable in his multi-decade reign of denigration. Global warming's most popular denialist, talk radio's most imitated showman, conservatism's minister of disinformation, he has injected millions of semi-vacant American skulls with a cream filling of complacency that has helped thrust this country into the forefront of backward leadership.

Here, Wolcott (with a straight face?) actually cites intellectual giant Al Franken as proof that Rush Is Wrong:

In 1996, Al Franken swung for the fences with his lyrical study Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot, having fun with Limbaugh's fictional fact-checker, Waylon, who's often baffled himself by the bizarre stuff emanating from Rush's mouth. ("Al: Okay, let's jump right in. First of all, back in 1991, Rush claimed that Styrofoam was biodegradable and paper wasn't. Waylon: Right. I remember that. That is … uh … that's totally wrong.") Anyone can make mistakes, and anyone doing a three-hour broadcast five times a week is likely to make lots of them, but Limbaugh's mistakes all lean in the same direction and leave the impression that they're intended to obfuscate and make fact-checking as time-consuming, painstaking, and futile as picking shrapnel out of the wall or mopping up after Ann Coulter.

Goebbels propagated the theory and practice of the Big Lie, in which constant thumping reiteration wears down rational resistance and fuses heartbeat and drumbeat. Postmodern conservatives prefer to let little lies proliferate and take on a viral life of their own that becomes impossible to arrest.

In many ways, the piece reads like the kind of anti- Rush attacks we saw in 1993 and 1994. What's new, however, is the escalated level of raw anger and renewed determination to yank El Rushbo off the air for good. Will they succeed?

ELSEWHERE: Newsbusters offers its own take on the VF hit piece.


ELSEWHERE: Latest Boston talk radio rumblings here.


Frankenhumpty: David A Lunde

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