I rarely get to listen to Limbaugh unless I'm driving somewhere. From my POV, the amount of time taken for the amount of content is not worth my time unless I can easily "double up" and listen while doing something else. I find him far more of an entertainer than a political personage, but I think that in itself is interesting. "Conservative entertainment" is what he does and it can be just as "fun" as the usual liberal forms, I'd argue that society would be improved if that was understood and something over 50% of entertainment was in fact conservative.
What would that mean? True "conservative" entertainment covers at LEAST "both" sides of topics (left/right) and often many more angles. It assumes that the audience is mature and open minded enough to WANT to hear what the entertainer finds to be the most important/interesting/funny/etc information on the topic from as many sides as the entertainer finds to to be important to the topic. Appropriate emotion is certainly important, but conservative entertainment sees the human as BOTH an emotional and rational being, with a balance where reason is primary being sought if not always achieved. The core of maturity (and true intelligence) is to be able to hold multiple ideas in one's attention and realize that in the human state, our task is to discern the "best currently possible". CERTAINLY realizing that part of that "best" is determined by our emotion, but also always aware that it is important that our emotion serves our reason and intellect.
Liberal entertainment is something we are well familiar with. Sadly it is mistakenly often called "mature entertainment", when in fact it should often be called "juvenile entertainment". The term "pornography" is horribly misused in our society to be generally limited to sexual pornography, when the word is MUCH more important than that. It might better be described as "looking at only a single or very limited aspect of something in order to achieve some sort of physical or emotional arousal/impact". The overt appeal is to the simplistic physical or emotional aspects of thetopic. Much of liberal entertainment, and even "news" is simply that; pornography. A specific response is the objective of the pornography purveyor, and that objective is very clear and accessible to even those with little or no maturity or knowledge of a subject. Liberal entertainment removes many dimensions of the world and leaves it seemingly simple, accessible, obvious, limited, predictable and "all about me and my easy satisfaction/titilation/emotional wallowing/feeling superior/feeling correct etc"
Liberal entertainment and reporting is extremely easy to find in our society today. In general it is all that is easily accessible to most people. Here is a great example from today's CNN headlines. A woman died in a hospital. We know very little about much of anything relative to it happening, BUT, it is clearly "an indictment of the health care system". It is a single emotionally charged incident, the MSM tells you how you ought think about it--in the unbeleiveable case that all aspects of the presentation of the information didn't already tell you how to "think" about it as easily as a provocatively dressed woman or nicely prepared meal tells you how to "think".
I believe that Chafets and the NYT did a good job here, not a hatchet job at all. No doubt that Limbaugh is a "personality" with a large ego that like all large egos sometimes gets in his own way. One doesn't become a lot of things--surgeons, fighter pilots, entertainers, CEOs and politicians come to mind as easy examples; without a large ego, it simply goes with the territory and is both a help and a hindrance in the same way as everything else that humans bring to the table is.
This quote states the obvious proof that Limbaugh is conservative entertainment pretty well I think:
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.
In general, most Limbaugh listeners (and Limbaugh himself) ENJOY discussion of key issues or the day, since they understand that there are many sides and viewpoints and the task at hand is ALWAYS selecting from conflicting alternatives the best available answers. In contrast, most liberals would like to chant "Bush lied people died" or scream "The Planet is being Raped" and walk away to talk with others that agree with what they have been manipulated to feel and think on a given topic today. If feels much better to them to see themselves as superior, they know that the mainstream culture will support them in that view, so that is the course they choose to take.
I found this discussion on Reagan to be important. I believe that many in the conservative movement today have again lost their faith in America:
Limbaugh admires many aspects of Reaganism, but he is especially animated by his belief in American exceptionalism. “Reagan rejected the notion among liberals and conservatives alike who, for different reasons, believed America was in a permanent state of decline,” he wrote to me in an e-mail message. “He had faith in the wisdom of the American people. . . . He knew America wasn’t perfect, but he also knew it was the most perfect of nations. Reagan was an advocate of Americanism.” In response to a separate question, he wrote: “America is the solution to the world’s problems. We are not the problem.”
Hat's off to the NYT, they don't ALWAYS get it wrong!
