Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One (33 page)

There were also profound differences. Mencken was a transcendent stylist but a terrible public speaker. He was an aggressive enemy of clericalism and gained his greatest lasting fame by ridiculing primitive, Christian anti-evolutionists at the 1927 Scopes “Monkey Trial.” But Mencken was far more reactionary that Limbaugh ever dreamed of being. The Sage of Baltimore was an outright racist who believed that blacks were inherently and permanently intellectually inferior. He was also a misogynist, an anti-Semite, a proponent of racial eugenics, a militant anti-Communist, and, during World War II, a sullen “neutral” who found Hitler no worse that Churchill or Roosevelt.

Limbaugh told me that he is planning to write another, tentatively titled
The Back Nine
, which will discuss the lessons he has learned about friendship and success. God only knows how many of those he can sell.

According to
New York Times
reporter Mervyn Rothstein, writing in
Cigar Aficionado
magazine.

In 2009, while testifying before Congress, Gore was asked if he would personally benefit from policies he was advocating for. Gore said he was proud to be in business and invest his money according to his beliefs. “If you believe the reason I have been working on this issue for thirty years is greed, you don’t know me.” Like all self-testimonials, this was not dispositive.

Mencken never forgave Roosevelt for the humiliation. When FDR died, Mencken wrote in his diary that Roosevelt had “every quality that morons esteem in their heroes.”

Michael Fortier served for approximately eleven years and was eventually released into the FBI’s Witness Protection Program.

Media Matters tried to correct its initial mistake by saying that Limbaugh had referred to phony soldiers (plural). Limbaugh responded by posting an ABC News Report titled “Phony Heroes”; the story of Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp, whose grisly first-person accounts of the war in Iraq were challenged, causing the New Republic to admit that it couldn’t stand by the articles it had published; and the fact that one of the spokesmen for Vietnam Veterans Against the War had later admitted lying about his service record.

In 2007 Air America was bought by progressive politician Mark Green and his brother Stephen. It didn’t help much. In the spring of 2008, the network’s New York station, WWRL, had a 0.5 Arbitron share of the audience, which comes pretty close to radio silence.

The disproportion of male consumers of talk and satire does not appear to be ideological.
The Daily Show
audience had a 2-to-1 male-to-female ratio;
The Colbert Report
, 62 percent to 38 percent; and NPR, 58 percent to 42 percent.
The O’Reilly Factor
audience is only 53 percent male.

According to Quantcast.

If anyone still needs evidence that the national press corps and the professoriate of elite universities are overwhelmingly liberal, and vote heavily Democratic, the data can be found in the Appendix. The data on the comparative educational level of media consumers can also be found there.