"Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but what is good for necessary edification, that it may impart grace to the hearers."
           –Ephesians 4:29

"Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking be put away from you, with all malice."       
           –Ephesians 4:31

They are 12 percent of the population. Who the hell cares?
           –Rush Limbaugh, to a caller who said black people need to be heard.        

          I told myself I wasn't gonna do it; I wasn't going to give him any more attention than he already gets.  There have already been books about this fellow (Al Franken's, among others) that have done the yeoman's work in exposing the holes in his game and deconstructing the Limbaugh mystique–not that you should feel sorry for him.  But Rush Limbaugh has too much influence to ignore.  As I have already mentioned him several times, I might as well get it out there on the table–I think Rush Limbaugh is one of the most dangerous men in America.  He would no doubt revel in that title, and in fact has used it on himself.
          I have listened to Rush on and off for over twenty years.  I lived in Sacramento when he had a slot on KFBK, before he went "big-time" with the EIB network and all of that.  I used to listen to Rush all of the time, despite myself, because although I disagreed with about 90% of what he said, 1) he was always entertaining, 2) he was often funny, and 3) there was always the sense that he knew he was just entertainment, and he didn't take himself completely seriously.  The song parodies that he had cooked up were hilarious, and his imitation of Bill Clinton was spot-on.  I would often yell back at the radio at him, but at the end of the day, I was entertained.
          Somewhere around the end of the Clinton presidency or the campaign of 2000, he changed.  I couldn't put my finger exactly on when, but he stopped being funny.  Part of his "charm," such as it was, was that his humor took the edge off of his ranting.  As it stands now, all you have left is the ranting.  He has, for the most part, forgotten that he is entertainment, and you can't really blame him.  He has been put on a throne and anointed the King of the Angry White Men. He is the tail wagging the dog in right-wing political circles.  He has given birth to all kinds of imitators, male and female, each vying in their own way to outdo the King in being more controversial, angrier, more pedantic, more reactionary, and more mean-spirited.  He has spawned an imitator on the left in the form of the failing Air America. Al Franken was much more controlled, and much more cerebral than Rush.  He was not very funny either anymore, and often seemed half-asleep, but he didn't spew the vitriol and hate that Rush does. Ed Schultz sounds like him, but doesn't hate like him.  Stephanie Miller is a comedienne, and while her liberal act gets monotonous at times, she is still funny.  If there were a mirror image of Rush on Air America, it would probably have been Mike Malloy.  That is no compliment, Mike.   More recently, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann has risen to the rank of designated pit bull on the left.
          What Rush does is speak in an authoritarian way, not unlike a fundamentalist preacher, making people believe that his version of the truth is as unfailingly inerrant as the Bible itself.  He uses every single tactic that he accuses his enemies of using to make his points.  He is mean-spirited while accusing his opponents of being mean-spirited; he name-calls while accusing others of name-calling; he constantly accuses the other side of using inappropriate issues as political footballs, but that is exactly his modus operandi.  What is telling is that the "other side" is getting larger and larger all of the time.  By that I don't mean that there are more and more left-wingers running around these days.  As Rush moves farther and farther out on the right limb, what he (and his fellow travelers) call "liberal" and "the left" just gets bigger and bigger.  In Rush's world, even "moderate" is a dirty word.  All those who even try to understand or come to any compromise with the people not out there on the right limb are viewed as weak, indecisive, and wrong.  Viewed through Rush's coke-bottle lenses, an old, garden-variety conservative is a centrist–someone like George Bush Sr., or John Danforth.  A Republican like John McCain borders on heresy, and is frequently cut down to size on Limbaugh's show.
          As for everyone else, from the middle on over, forget about it.  They are all tarred with the same brush: Liberals, left-wingers, Feminazis, environmentalist wackos, troublemakers, traitors, peaceniks, terrorist-lovers, appeasers, communists, and socialists.  There is no middle in Limbaugh's world, and if you do happen to be a moderate, whether nominally a Democrat or Republican, watch out–Rush saves his some of his worst venom for you.
          What I find so dangerous about Limbaugh is that so many people blindly buy into his shtick.  From his lips to millions of peoples' mouths come his words.  Rush claims that, unlike the "other" side, his listeners have been taught to be independent thinkers.  Obviously, nothing could be further from the truth.  They aren't called "Ditto-heads" for nothing, even if the original meaning (which was short-hand for all of the set-up phrases that callers use, like "first-time caller, long-time listener, love your show, you're the best," etc.) has been lost.  For there is no one in the media, with the possible exception of Oprah Winfrey, that commands such a slavish following, ready to parrot his every word.  I know this from experience–you see, my brother and many of my friends in the Christian music industry and at the church I worked at wouldn't think that I would listen to Rush, but I do, as much as I can stand.  I then hear from their mouths the contents of what he has said that morning.  Whatever the listeners of Rush Limbaugh think they are, they are not free thinkers.  This is yet another example of Limbaugh claiming the exact opposite of the reality.
          Every day, Rush says something that could be easily debunked, but he does it in such a way that the Ditto-heads accept it as Gospel Truth.  For example, as the Right went into "the best defense is a good offense" mode concerning the allegations that presidential advisor Karl Rove might have been the person who leaked the name of Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame (it has turned out that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's top advisor, has been indicted for perjury over this), Rush actually claimed that Ambassador Wilson and the Democrats hatched this whole scheme up–the phony Niger documents–the uranium story that I referred to in the Iraq chapter–as a conspiracy to discredit the president.  This laughingly absurd idea sounds like something out of The Onion, except that it is a classic tactic of the Right.  If you throw enough smoke out there, however absurd it is, it sows enough confusion among people that pretty soon you have people showing up around the water coolers saying, "Well I heard that the Democrats hatched the whole thing up!” or, "I heard that Valerie Plame was just a desk jockey and it didn't really matter that she was exposed."  This is from the same group of people that managed to turn the comparison of a man with a distinguished war record (Kerry) versus a man who managed to skip the war (Bush) into an attack on the man with the distinguished war record's war record! By the time the smoke had cleared on that one, the Right had managed to sow just enough doubt in people's minds who only get their news in bits and pieces to make a huge difference.
          Rush Limbaugh is from a long line of hate-spewing radio demagogues, from Billy Sunday in the 20's, to Father Charles Coughlin and Gerald L.K. Smith in the 30's and 40's, to people like Senator Joseph McCarthy and George Wallace in the 50's, to Carl McIntire and Billy Hargis in the 60's, all in love with the sound of their own voices, all considered merely conservative in their moments of glory, but all soon exposed for the bigots that they were.
          While Rush could hardly be accused of anti-Semitism, and he is not a racist by most people's definition of the word (this chapter's epigraph notwithstanding), he is most certainly a bigot.  After all, here are some synonyms for bigot from my handy (must be left-wing) dictionary: biased, chauvinistic, dogmatic, intolerant, close-minded, narrow-minded, opinionated, and illiberal (I like that one).  The two antonyms for "bigot" are humanitarian and, guess what? Liberal.  There is absolutely nothing remotely Christian about this man.  His attitudes, which praise the wealthy at the expense of the poor, which called the horror of Abu Ghraib "frat hazing," which preach division and hatred of the classes while accusing others of doing the same, do not fall anywhere near anything Jesus ever said or did.  And yet millions of Christians listen to this man, along with other similar hate-filled bigots like Michael Savage and Bill O'Reilly, with apparently no thought to the desecration he or they bring to the Cross.  Jesus saved his strongest words for helping the poor, and for hypocrites; these men (and women) insult Jesus by celebrating the status quo in this country, by fighting against anything that reeks of leveling the playing field, while paying lip service to the "rugged individualism" of the American people.  As soon as the issue of poverty in America is brought up to the Limbaughs, the O'Reillys, the Hannittys, the Coulters, or the Savages, one is immediately accused of promoting a class war. This is a classic device of the kind I named above, whereby these folks put people on the defensive by accusing someone of doing exactly what they are doing.  For, in fact, there has been a class war in this country for a hundred years, and in the last 25 years, the rich, represented by these very same mouthpieces, have all but won.  The rich in this country are getting richer, while the poor are getting poorer.  This is not an opinion, it is a fact, by any set of reliable statistics you want to use.
          There are so many examples of blatant contradictions in Limbaugh's aural résumé, that I could fill page after page, particularly if you are looking for examples of "what Jesus wouldn't do." The very morning of the horrible terrorist attacks on the transportation system in London, Rush wasn't talking about helping the victims–no, no, no.  What he was doing was blasting the "Libs" in Congress for what he assumed they were going to say two days from then.  He was assuming that the Democrats would find a way to politicize the bombings by tying them to the war in Iraq.  He was doing exactly what he was accusing the "other" side of doing, politicizing a tragedy, only this time he had to pull it from the future.
          On November 3rd, 2008, one day before the election, Rush was obviously not a happy camper.  A woman called in, identified by Rush as a Chinese immigrant.  She started accusing Barack Obama of being the Marxist vanguard of revolution that Solzhenitsyn warned America about in a speech in 1976.  Even Rush wasn't swallowing this whopper, but it allowed him to segue into a contradictory rant. "Obama always talks about unity! I haven't seen any unity! These people are all about hate!! He has a wife that hates America, a pastor that hates America, he hates America!! It all HATE!! HATE!!! HATE!!!" spluttered Limbaugh, with all the hate he could muster.  "These people are the most miserable group of unifiers I have ever seen!!" said Limbaugh miserably.  "This is a Balkanized country we have here, folks, and it's entirely the fault of the American Left!!"
          This constant projection, accusing others of doing exactly what you are doing, is by no means confined to Limbaugh.  Take this quote from Bill O'Reilly: "It makes me sick to see intellectually dishonest individuals hide behind the First Amendment to spread propaganda, libel and slander, but this is a growing trend in America, where the exchange of ideas often degenerates into a verbal wrestling with intent to injure."  He couldn't have said that with a straight face.
          I have noticed something very telling, though, in Limbaugh in the last year or so.  As a long-time listener of the man, I could tell right away, before it was made public, when he had trouble with his hearing.  It was evident in his delivery.  I've heard something else lately.  He stutters and splutters a great deal more than he ever has before, and this is an indication to me that he has had to work a lot harder at justifying his positions, especially the glorious war in Iraq, that have been increasingly hard to justify.  It is also part of the reason that he has gotten increasingly angry, bitter, and vitriolic.  He has been forced to support increasingly unsupportable situations.  If you ever heard Rush Limbaugh during the Clinton years, for example how big of a deal he made about Clinton getting a haircut on the tarmac at LAX, you know without a doubt that if the Clinton administration had done one tenth of the lying about the situation leading up to the war in Iraq that the Bush administration has, Rush would have led the charge toward impeachment right from the beginning.
          On the day after the 2008 election of Barack Obama, Rush was at his most self-righteous, pompous, worst. He called the President-elect a "Chicago thug," and a "radical leftist extremist," and cited "closing Gitmo (the torture prison at Guantanamo, Cuba)", and "ending the war in Iraq" as two of the three examples of this. The other was national healthcare. Please, call me a radical, leftist, extremist. He again, hatefully and miserably, called the American left, including Obama, hate-filled miserable people. He derided John McCain's beautifully elegant concession speech, saying, "His whole campaign was a concession speech!" He derided civility, graciousness, and being conciliatory as the further eroding of Conservative values. He claimed that the Republicans lost, in essence, because they played "too nice," and, were not enough like him.
          The first caller to the Rush Limbaugh show on the day after the election said this, and I quote: "You, after God, are my refuge and my strength today, Rush." Christians, I urge you to listen to Rush Limbaugh with fresh ears.  He has created an entire industry based on hate, and has done it with your backing.  If you can find the principals and teachings of Jesus Christ in what Rush Limbaugh says, or what Bill O'Reilly says, or what Michael Savage says, or what Ann Coulter says, you must be using the special decoder ring they sent you.  There is very little equivalence on the left, with the exception of Air America and a few others, and these sadly smack of the very worst of imitation.  From an evangelical perspective, there is such a perception in secular America among the very people that Christians would want to evangelize that Rush Limbaugh represents the evangelical Christian (this, of course, represents stereotyping on their part), and whether this is actually true or not, perception is everything.  As long as Christians walk around repeating their favorite Limbaugh quote of the day, and parroting whatever he is going off on, then Christianity itself will be associated with this bigotry.  What am I saying? We already are.  This is our image.  I hope you like it.

          I was going to do a whole chapter on Ann Coulter, but I'd prefer not to see her name at the head of a chapter.  Instead, I'll just give a sample here.  Notice the slimy rage that oozes out of her every pore as she attributes the same feeling to liberals:

"When contemplating college liberals, you really regret once again that John Walker (Lind) is not getting the death penalty. We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors."- CPAC convention, February 2002

"My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building." -To George Gurley, New York Observer, August 21, 2002 (Looking for the New York vote on that one.)

"A central component of liberal hate speech is to make paranoid accusations based on their own neurotic impulses, such as calling Republicans angry, hate-filled, and mean." -Slander, p.19 (That's a great one- hahaha...)

"Liberals don't try to win arguments, they seek to destroy their opponents and silence dissident opinions." -Slander, p. 91

"Political debate with liberals is basically impossible in America because liberals are calling names while conservatives are trying to make arguments...It's really all the same lie [that liberals tell], that conservatives are either stupid or scarily weird and therefore you don't have to deal with their ideas." -Katie Couric Interview, Today Show, June 26, 2002 (The funny thing about Coulter is that she never says anything of substance–she just runs around making these types of hateful pronouncements about liberals making hateful pronouncements!)

"The swing voters–I like to refer to them as the idiot voters because they don't have set philosophical principles. You're either a liberal or you're a conservative if you have an IQ above a toaster. " -Beyond the News, FOX News Channel, June 4 (That's a thoughtful thing to say...)

"Progress cannot be made on serious issues because one side is making arguments and the other side is throwing eggs–both figuratively and literally. Prevarication and denigration are the hallmarks of liberal argument. Logic is not their métier. Blind religious faith is." -Slander, p.2 (That one borders on the delusional...)

"...a cruise missile is more important than Head Start." -Nov. 2001 speech rebroadcast by C-Span in Jan. 2002 (... and she's a regular Maria Montessori!)

"I think [women] should be armed but should not [be allowed to] vote. No, they all have to give up their vote, not just, you know, the lady clapping and me. The problem with women voting–and your Communists will back me up on this–is that, you know, women have no capacity to understand how money is earned. They have a lot of ideas on how to spend it. And when they take these polls, it's always more money on education, more money on child care, more money on day care." -Politically Incorrect, Feb. 26, 2001 (Well... we wouldn't want any of that now, would we?) "

The thing I like about Bush is I think he hates liberals."-Washington Post, August 1, 2000 (Compassionate conservative that he is...)

"[The] backbone of the Democratic Party [is a] typical fat, implacable welfare recipient" -syndicated column, October 29, 1999 (She called me implacable!)

"My libertarian friends are probably getting a little upset now but I think that's because they never appreciate the benefits of local fascism." -- MSNBC, February 8, 1997 (Her true colors come out.)

Tell me, please... who on the left gets to go on mainstream TV on national news programs and make outrageously, ridiculously biased statements and comments like this? Who?