In the late 1980s one of my friends, a Lutheran pastor, recommended that I listen to his favorite radio commentator, a fellow with the unlikely name of Rush Limbaugh. I found him on WISN in Milwaukee, and since then have listened to his program on the car radio whenever I have happened to be on the road in the early afternoon. In twenty-five years that amounts to a lot of listening on my part—and on his, around seven thousand hours of broadcasting.
For a long time now I have felt I owe him something in appreciation for accurate, good tempered (considering the provocation) and well-informed political and social commentary, especially since I am a member of a class with a well-deserved reputation for despising him. Naturally he is hated—and this is not too strong a word—by secularist liberals, but there are not a few Christian intellectuals who disparage him as well. I have several guesses on why: they are put off by his bumptious and roughshod midwesternism, and/or they haven’t listened to him at any length—since, though professing to dislike him, they agree with him on nearly every matter of substance, or they run in circles, including Christian intellectual circles, where it is more than unfashionable to speak well of him.
So I hear from them criticism of his cigar-smoking, his inability to stay married (he is at this writing on his fourth wife), his struggle with addiction to prescription drugs, his alienating rudeness–especially his insults to feminists–his detachment from the church, and the company he keeps. Rush, for his part, appears to belong to a class of believer, not uncommon among conservatives in public life, who decline to wear their religion on their sleeves for a complex amalgam of personal and strategic reasons. While he occasionally identifies himself as a Christian on his weekday broadcasts, the program itself is not distinctively so, although I think it safe to say that it rests on a theistic base–namely, “talent on loan from Gawwd”–and the paradigm of natural law, including moral law, that flows from it. With a weekly audience of fifteen millions, he is with little doubt the most effective popular advocate of the natural law outlook at work today, for he has made a specialty of aggressive common sense which he (more studied and far more intelligent than his detractors will admit) understands in terms of a compelling universality, the tao as C. S. Lewis describes it, and not as merely a partisan tool.
It is remarkable how little substantive criticism his enemies are able to mark up against him after so many thousands of hours expressing his opinions publicly. The preponderance of them appear to rest on the unmistakably correct charge that he is biased, which seems to me not unlike the accusation that the plumber is biased on behalf of efficient sanitation, and is made by those for whom bias is defined as opinion beneath contempt because it is not held by liberals. Rush is dogged by quotations of things he never said and contorted interpretations of things that he did say. Like all controversial public figures, liberal and conservative, he has a great many people seeking to take advantage of anything than can be made out as a misstep, and who are, if not enough material comes to hand, perfectly willing to invent something. (There are numerous lies in circulation about Barack Obama as well, presumably not fabricated by liberals.) Most of what I have heard against Rush, however, is unquestionably liberal invention, soiled and slovenly rhetoric intended for a “low information crowd” of mainstream media-saturated nincompoops.
I have a personal interest in what Rush says and how he is treated because the more I listen to and about him, the more I am frightened by the venom and mendacity of charges brought against the sanity and simple goodness for which he stands as a national symbol, his faults notwithstanding. Christians who speak ill of him should in justice recognize him as an ally, for if he sinks, they will sink with him, and for the same reasons. Where the hatred of his accusers, fortified by absolute faith in the rectitude of their madness, is not constrained by law and superior force, it will surely lead to persecution, eventually bloody, because that is the way of the world. Hatred must have a victim to charge with its own sins, and to visit with the appropriate punishments.
Rush seems to me something like a canary lowered into the pits of progressivism to test them for killing airs. However messy his nest may be, he is doing his job and should be appreciated for it.
I thank you for expressing what I have not been able to effectively articulate. His sins (or some of them) are visible, where as mine are more comfortably tucked away in my anonymity. He is the canary, and I am well aware that as it goes for him, it goes for conservatives, and especially Orthodox Christianity. I thank God for Mr. Limbaugh’s insight and candor about us as a society. I do not always agree but it is much more often I do. He is the little boy yelling, “the Emperor has no clothes!” Christians might say he is not loving, but I think it is more loving to say what is good than what is “kind.”
I have found Rush genial and fair.
Mr. Limbaugh, throughout his broadcast years, has been an energetic and enthusiastic voice in the wilderness. This nation is better for his presence.
Dittos, and the ‘pioneers always take the arrows’.
Let me add this in deference to people who, like my pastor, respect Rush, but just can’t bear to listen to him: Rush is, I believe, a deeply serious person, but he knows that to get a popular hearing he has to depend on histrionics richly provided by a juvenile self–to which, however, he is careful not to cede control. That juvenile overlay helps a great deal in his popularity, but is full of irritants for people with adult mentalities. My dad couldn’t stand him either.
My wife concurs, and for the same reason: “It’s not what he says, it’s how he says it.” Perhaps I’m a rough-and-tumble Midwesterner too, but I got him from the first. As he notes, he is not “brainwashing” his listeners; for the first time since we turned on the broadcast news, we found we were listening to someone who said what we believed, not mouthing the same effete bi-coastal liberal pablum that everyone else purveyed. Rush is, among other things, a man, and his presentation as well as his content is presented in a way that appeals to men — and the women who like men to be men. (My wife likes men, too, but her tastes are more refined than mine. God knows what she sees in me, but I guess she knows I love her.)
I listened to him out of Sacramento before he went National back in the 1980s. Yes, his sins are out on his sleeve and for them being public, I wish they would temper him a bit more than they do. But that might say more about me than about him.
The one thing that has kept me from being a regular listener over the last 10 years or so, is that he just doesn’t seem to be having as much fun as he was back then. The show was always entertainment first back in those days and politics was just the subject matter.
Somewhere along the way (post Gingrich and the first real success talk radio had had on real political events) he seemed to shift to being about politics but with a good sense of humor, which is a very different thing.
The change was subtle and took years to set in. But if you were to listen to a show from the mid 90s now and listen to one now, you’d really see it.
I don’t need Rush to be right 98.7% of the time, but I need him to enjoy himself 100% of the time.
I get what you mean, Mr. Dickens, and you are right about the change. But I would note how much our nation has changed in the same period, and how much darker and less promising our national outlook has become. As decay and decadence grow, anyone would find it hard to be remorselessly upbeat in discussing current events. We are not the same nation we were, even a decade ago.
Agreed. Somethings have changed for the better (e.g. a graduated decline in crime rates), but the cultural decay has gone on unabated and no one knows where the bottom is. Thomas Sowell said recently that as one ages, disillusionment leaves one less and less daunted by one’s mortality. Too true.
It had been a while since I visited this blog. I used to regularly. Indeed, I was a print subscriber to the magazine for several years, maybe a decade ago. This afternoon, I thought to myself, I should check out what’s happening at the Touchstone blog, maybe start visiting more often. So here I am. And this first post I saw was more than enough to suggest I have not missed much and don’t need to bother much in the future.
Probably not a Rush fan.
Mr. Hudock, because you are willing to tar the whole Touchstone project with the brush of its dullest and least perceptive writer, which you have seized upon here, it is reasonable to conclude you were convinced in advance that you have moved beyond the whole lot of us, all the required confirmation being discovered in a single blogsite posting. This is most impressive. Rarely does one discover a person with such intuitive powers.
Well, it had been a while since *I* visited this blog. I used to regularly. Indeed, I was a print subscriber to the magazine as well.
Gosh, I’ve missed you, Mr. Hutchens.
Thank you, Jennifer.
I invite subscribers back! You’ve missed a lot, including this beautiful piece of writing: http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=28-06-030-f
I’m neither fer him or agin’ him. What does bother me is the failure on the part of Christians to evaluate him thru the lens of the gospel.
On that I will note that “evaluation through the lens of the gospel” may be expected to lead toward a partisan opinion of Rush and away from a “neither fer him or agin’ him” attitude, given the Lord who said that who is not against us is for us. As a person who tries to evaluate everything through the lens of the gospel, I see him on the side of the angels. I also suspect that a lot of Christian “dittoheads” are his friends precisely because they evaluate him through the gospel which after years of exposure to the words of the Lord and his apostles pervades their minds–they have gone to church and paid attention–even though they might not be able to explain why they like him.
I wrote this posting primarily to discharge what I perceive as a debt of gratitude for his forceful public truth-speaking, and for which he receives little but sneering disdain from sophisticates both sacred and profane. By these presents I wish to distance myself from them by straightforward public acknowledgment that I am “fer him.”
copy that.
My mom, as childlike, Kingdom-minded, and hard working a Christian as you could hope for, adored Rush and listened every day.