Dark Star

Power Line points to this mostly fair and ultimately fascinating profile of El Rushbo.

I enjoyed the whole thing, but, like Power Line, I think the writer is mistaken in his Hannity questions.

But here's the part about us, the listeners:

Limbaugh's audience is often underestimated by critics who don't listen to the show (only 3 percent of his audience identify themselves as "liberal," according to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People and the Press). Recently, Pew reported that, on a series of "news knowledge questions," Limbaugh's "Dittoheads" — the defiantly self-mocking term for his faithful, supposedly brainwashed, audience — scored higher than NPR listeners.

That's probably because NPR listeners get a carefully selected queue of news stories designed to promote a liberal world view under the guise of objective reporting. While Rush listeners on the other hand are given not only the story, but the real meaning behind the story, the reason it's being reported by the drive-by media that way it is, what will probably happen in the next few days as a result of the story, and how the media will report that - and why - as well.

And he's right 99.98 percent of the time.

Funniest to me in this profile was this quote from Al Sharpton:

"I despise his ideology," Sharpton told me, "but Rush is a lot smarter and craftier than Don Imus. Limbaugh puts things in a way that he can't be blamed for easy bigotry. Some of the songs he does about me just make me laugh. But he's the most dangerous guy we have to deal with on the right, including O'Reilly and Imus. They come at you with an ax. He uses a razor."

... which remind me of the the oft-misquoted lyric in "The Big Payback," where James Brown says he don't know karate but he knows ka-razor. (Most people think he's saying "crazy,"). What I don't like about that quote is that Sharpton seems to leave it to us to figure out that Rush is a bigot, he's just not an easy bigot.

Anyway, good profile for anybody wanting to know a little more about the man behind the golden microphone.
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