Can We Please Stop Having Bulls--- from David Brooks in the New York Times Now?
National Review, September 1993, describes how it and other Republicans are sowing the wind:
James Bowman: The Leader of the Opposition: Which is the real Rush Limbaugh — the merry prankster of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, or the unifying voice of conservatives across the country? Just tune in...
To begin with, he's not Mr. Limbaugh. You've got to call the ornament of the EIB (Excellence in Broadcasting) network, the man so used to the adulation of his fans that he long ago asked them to skip the praise with which they prefaced every phone call and just say "Ditto," the man who likes to claim he has "talent on loan from God," just plain Rush. That's what the ever-courtly Ronald Reagan, who has never met him, calls him.... Reagan sent him the following unsolicited note:
Dear Rush,
Thanks for all you're doing to promote Republican and conservative principles. Now that I've retired from active politics, I don't mind that you have become the Number One voice for conservatism in our Country.
I know the liberals call you "the most dangerous man in America," but don't worry about it, they used to say the same thing about me. Keep up the good work. America needs to hear the way things ought to be."
Sincerely, Ron....
[T]o a surprising number of conservatives there is a solemn appropriateness about Reagan's passing the torch to the 42-year-old former disc jockey and college dropout. Certainly if any conservative is in line to inherit the mantle of "The Great Communicator," it is the idol of the "dittoheads," the man who presides over the country's most listened-to radio talk-show. But his twenty million listeners a week on 616 stations also make him the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the cage in which American conservatism is languishing.... Certainly, of those who might themselves be considered leaders of the opposition, no one to whom I was able to speak has a word to say against him. Their compliments sound as if they have been rehearsed in front of a mirror. "When Rush Limbaugh talks, you know you're listening to the real world," says Bob Dole.... Phil Gramm says Limbaugh "has had a profound impact on conservative thinking in America.... He says things other people are afraid to say. As an opinion maker and thinker he is very intelligent and, like Ronald Reagan, a very effective communicator. There are many days when I think he's doing a lot more good than the Republicans in the Senate are doing." Dan Quayle agrees.... Jack Kemp, who compares Rush's influence among Republicans to that of Will Rogers among Democrats in the 1930s, adds that he's certainly leading the fight against some of the far-left policies of the Clinton Administration and doing it with wit, wisdom, humor, tenacity, and an irrepressible style.... But it is... William Bennett, who must take the prize as the most convinced Rushophile.... "Rush is extremely sophisticated, extremely smart. The great thing is that, never having been through a university, he is not complicated with pedanticism. He's very serious intellectually. He knows how to frame an issue, how to debate an issue, how to argue ad finem and ad absurdum. He does both. But he is larger than a leader of the political opposition. He represents a shift in the culture. Another ten years of the political change he stands for will take us beyond Republicans and Democrats."...
It is this combination of the solid citizen and the joker which is the essential Limbaugh. His sense of fun extends also to his enthusiasm for the business side of his daily radio and television shows.... He still does his condom update theme (the Fifth Dimension singing "Up, Up and Away") and his animal-rights update theme (Andy Williams singing "Born Free" to a background of machine-gun fire) and his homeless update theme (Clarence "Frogman" Henry singing the wonderfully wacky Sixties novelty, "Ain't Got No Home"), and he has even introduced a theme for his Carol Moseley Braun updates ("Moving On Up" from the old Jeffersons television show)... delightful offensiveness....
His principal economic advisors are Lawrence Kudlow of Bear, Stearns and Thomas W. Hazlitt of the University of California at Davis, but a great many other people provide him with material which he proceeds to adapt to a popular audience. These include not only intellectual heavyweights like Bennett and George Will but the thousands of ordinary listeners....
[T]here are other similarities to Reagan. Both men grew up in small Midwestern river towns, and both got their start in radio. Both are religious believers who rarely attend church. Both combined careers as entertainers and salesmen and both have enjoyed the success of all salesmen who believe in their products, whether commercial or political. Both are raconteurs, rather than intellectuals, who combine a tendency to think in terms of personal anecdotes with remarkably shrewd political instincts. But Limbaugh is as unmistakably of the baby-boom generation as Reagan was of the generation of the Depression and the Second World War...
Today David Brooks complains about the whirlwind that he and his peers have reaped--but, he says, it was sown not by the Republican establishment of which he is such a central part but by "cynical Democrats... [and] lazy [liberal] pundits:
David Brooks, October 2009: The Wizard of Beck : Over the years, I have asked many politicians what happens when Limbaugh and his colleagues attack. The story is always the same. Hundreds of calls come in. The receptionists are miserable. But the numbers back home do not move.... In the media world, he is a giant. In the real world, he’s not.... [N]o matter how often their hollowness is exposed, the jocks still reweave the myth of their own power. They still ride the airwaves claiming to speak for millions. They still confuse listeners with voters. And they are aided in this endeavor by their enablers. They are enabled by cynical Democrats, who love to claim that Rush Limbaugh controls the G.O.P. They are enabled by lazy [liberal] pundits who find it easier to argue with showmen than with people whose opinions are based on knowledge...
Can we please stop having bulls--- from David Brooks in our New York Times now?
Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?
