Hertzberg really nails him and others but is somewhat nice towards the end, I think.
COMMENT
RUSH IN REHAB
Issue of 2003-10-27
Posted 2003-10-20
"We do not need General Clark or any of the rest of you liberals. We don’t need to change the definition of patriotism in order to conform to the antiwar, hate-America-first radicalism of the Democrat leadership. And that’s what this is all about.”
In case you don’t happen to be a regular listener to “The Rush Limbaugh Show,” the above is a fair sample of the sort of thing the star of the show has been saying lately, or at any rate was saying until a week ago, when he checked in to a drug rehabilitation center. It’s not very different from what he’s been saying throughout the twenty years he’s been talking about politics on the radio. We know the sample is fair, because it was the featured quote last Thursday on the home page of Limbaugh’s own Web site, emblazoned in big blue letters right next to the smiling photograph of the patient himself. Limbaugh’s target this time was Wesley Clark, because Clark is a leading candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination. As a four-star general, Clark led nato’s first and so far only major military action, which put a stop to ethnic cleansing in Kosovo; as a combat officer in Vietnam, he was severely wounded and awarded the silver star, the bronze star, and a purple heart. The person impugning his patriotism, Limbaugh, sat out the war in Vietnam—though not very comfortably, one must assume, since, as Joe Conason noted in Salon, the future scourge of cowards and slackers avoided the draft on account of “a persistent boil on his backside.”
Limbaugh is a prime example of what is known as a Chicken Hawk—a noisy, preening master of the martial art of talking who, back when it was a question of getting anywhere near harm’s way for the sake of his country, discovered that he had (as Vice-President Cheney once put it, explaining his own absence from the fray) “other priorities.” He has now joined another élite corps—the Vice Versa Virtuecrats, they might be called—whose members crusade against “moral relativism” and in favor of absolute standards of right and wrong backed up by draconian punishments while indulging themselves in devilment on the side. Like Newt Gingrich, who vowed to attack Bill Clinton in every speech for hiding his sad little dalliance with Monica Lewinsky while he himself was carrying on a years-long affair with a congressional staffer young enough to be his daughter, and William J. Bennett, who made millions promoting flinty self-discipline while gambling away comparable amounts in Las Vegas fleshpots, Limbaugh took a stern line on demon dope (“If people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up”) while himself possessing and consuming controlled substances in prodigious quantities. In Limbaugh’s case, the difficulty goes beyond an embarrassing inconsistency between professed beliefs and private behavior, because the “problem” he has acknowledged having—being “addicted to prescription pain medication”—correlates strongly with committing acts that the law defines as crimes.
http://newyorker.com/talk/content/?031027ta_talk_hertzberg
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