In other words, Limbaugh is among the last desperate few still trying to hold the line in defense of BP, Halliburton and Transocean--an unregistered lobbist in the Fourth Estate, a one-man media affiliate of corporate lobbyists. As with Sarah Palin, Rand Paul, and a host of others, the ostensible rugged individualism and superficial flamboyance never pull him too far from his core position as corporate mouthpiece.
The time frame of the 2010 midterm elections may explain why the latter half of the Chafets' book seems more rushed, no pun intended. Surely, if Limbaugh's influence had been vindicated at this point in more 2010 victories and more GOP-friendly issues, the book would have come out a little later, when its juicier bits would have boosted sales? In any case, if Limbaugh's influence were being counted on in a big way in fall, associates would have wanted the book to come out closer to election time.
Forgotten but not gone
Not that Rush Limbaugh's career is over with, as long as he retains his health. They need Limbaugh--the Heritage Foundation, Rupert Murdoch's media conglomerate, the neocons. All the rightist heavies, sometimes forgotten but seldom leaving, need him--including the Bush relatives in finance and the Bush cronies in international petroleum; the extended clans in the Saudi and Kuwaiti regimes, Mr. Limbaugh's rivals in the paid-propaganda business; former Vice President Dick Cheney; and the remnants of the former Project for the New American Century (PNAC), co-founded by Cheney and GWBush brother Jeb Bush.
These people know which side their bread is buttered on. GWBush's central aim was to redistribute wealth upward. To do so, he had to make terrorism the new Communism, the way fashion industry people tried to make brown the new black. And they did it with the active and passive collusion of large media outlets, often more eager to spotlight pseudo-celebrities like Rush Limbaugh than to save lives in Iraq.
As written before--never mind that elevating guerrilla tactics into an "ism' creates automatic suspects if not opponents out of about 90 percent of the globe's young male population. Never mind that genuine public safety issues and public health issues go unaddressedand worsein the faux-glam atmosphere dizzily created by the Bush administration and its media allies, to celebrate destruction as "power,' power as status, and status as an end in itself.
$300 million, give or take, for Limbaugh from Clear Channel? Set that kind of breador butteragainst the public weal, and we know who loses. Mr. Limbaugh himself not only apparently has never met a weapons system or a war he didn't like, at least since Vietnam; he also has apparently never seen a corporate abuse that he felt impelled to address as such.
These larger issues, however, are little illuminated in An Army of One. Neither is the narrower point that the Rush mindset was decisively rejected, in the 2008 election, by a solid majority of American voters.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
