Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One by Zev Chafets Page A

EIB now consisted of 636 stations with about twenty-one million listeners a week. The TV show was prospering. He founded The Limbaugh Letter , a monthly publication that quickly attracted 430,000 subscribers—five or six times more than the circulation of the leading magazines of opinion on both the left and the right. His stage show, when he bothered going on the road, packed theaters and auditoriums. And, that year, he published his second (and thus far, last) book. 2
    See, I Told You So was dedicated to Rush’s 102-year-old grandfather: “For Rush Hudson Limbaugh Senior, You are the Limbaugh America should know.” Joseph Farah, Rush’s “conservative soul brother” from Sacramento, replaced John Fund as the designated journalist on the project, but, once again, the tone and content were unmistakably Rushian. The book went directly to first place on the Times list, and by the end of 1994 there were an estimated 7.5 million copies of Rush’s books, in print or on audio, in the hands of his fans. 3
    Rush’s first book, The Way Things Ought to Be , could have fairly been entitled “The Way Things Used to Be.” He had devoted several chapters to defending the expired presidency of Ronald Reagan and attacking the defunct Soviet Union and the hapless Mikhail Gorbachev. Big Rush was dead, but his adamant anti-Communism lived on in his son’s geopolitical outlook. But the new book had a more contemporary feel. For one thing, the USSR was now gone. For another, Limbaugh was now clearly influenced by Buckley and his agenda. It is startling to realize, after rereading The Way Things Ought to Be today, how much of that agenda is still relevant; very few issues have been resolved in the past twenty years. And nowhere are they better preserved than on Limbaugh’s show. Many of the book’s targets—the Clintons, Jesse Jackson, Barney Frank, the mainstream media, Paul “the Forehead” Begala, even Jimmy Carter (“an utter disgrace and embarrassment,” Limbaugh called him in 2009)—continue to make frequent appearances in Rush’s monologues. The issues, too, are strikingly familiar, from global warming (“a hoax”) to labor unions (“goons”) to big government (“an infringement on the rights of every American”).
    When Obama came into office, his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, was quoted as saying, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” The conservative bloggers lit up at the cynicism of the remark, but Limbaugh was fifteen years ahead of them. He observed in his book, and on the air, that crisis creation was standard operating procedure for the left. “They overstate a problem and work society into a frenzied state in order to justify their invariable big-government solution.”
    Another theme was the failure of the Democrats to appreciate the exceptional nature of America and its role as the natural leader of the world; and Bill Clinton’s alleged belief that the country had seen better days. “Don’t believe the doomsayers,” wrote Limbaugh. “Don’t believe the negativity mongers. Don’t believe the America bashers—even if one of them is the President of the United States.” Sixteen years later, after Barack Obama’s first speech to the UN General Assembly, Limbaugh returned to the same complaint about the new Democratic president. “[Obama] is saying, ‘no there is nothing exceptional about our country . . . we are tarnished, stained, we have been immoral and unjust and our Constitution is flawed.’ ”
    In See, I Told You So , Limbaugh also developed his thesis that environmentalism is a scam, seized upon by former Communists orphaned by the death of the USSR, to redistribute Americans’ wealth. He discerned in the movement a quasi religion (much like Communism itself) based not on empirical evidence but on faith.
    “Despite the hysterics of a few pseudo scientists, there is no reason to believe in global warming,” he wrote. “The Earth’s ecosystem is not fragile and