Blusterbomb: New Book on Rush Limbaugh a Puff Piece Rife With Lies

[laststeamtrain]

Blusterbomb: New Book on Rush Limbaugh a Puff Piece Rife With Lies
By Eric Alterman, Center for American Progress
Posted on May 28, 2010, Printed on May 29, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/147019/

When The New York Times Magazine decided it wanted to run a profile of Rush Limbaugh in the summer of 2008, the editors turned to writer Zev Chafets, a former flack for the conservative Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin who had reinvented himself in the United States as a columnist, book author, and freelance journalist. The article contained the usual jokes about the so-called liberal media being out to get Limbaugh—“Are you the guy who’s here to do the hit job on us?” asks one of Limbaugh’s aides at the top of the piece. But its content actually shocked many readers by ignoring virtually of all of the political outrageousness that had made Limbaugh so controversial.

Chafets did have a reputation for being awfully sympathetic to conservatives—he is the author of a rapturous book about the Christian right—but he was not yet known to be such an easy a mark. And if you read that article, you would never have guessed at the combination of racism, resentment, and misinformation that forms the foundation of Limbaugh’s radio show.

Chafets presented Limbaugh as a kind of loveable teddy bear who was naturally “tickled to be taken out to eat on The New York Times.” True, he had a few quirks. Limbaugh launched “Operation Chaos” that year, instructing conservatives to vote for Hillary Clinton in crossover primaries in order to weaken the eventual nominee, Barack Obama. He pronounced his work to have “exceeded all expectations,” which Chafets parenthetically explained was Rush’s “customary self-evaluation.”

But Chafets entirely avoided the kind of sustained analysis of Limbaugh’s politics—as well as the source of his appeal—that the Atlantic’s James Fallows employed when profiling the radio host 14 years earlier. In that piece, entitled “Talent on Loan from the GOP,” the author noted the following:

<snip>

The notion that The New York Times—which is so hated by Limbaugh and his cronies and allegedly Ground Zero of the liberal media conspiracy—would actually publish a puff piece on the man should have been enough to cause some to question the entire paradigm that automatically places mainstream reporters on the opposite side of the issue as right-wing blowhards. But American conservatives’ ideology proved once again impervious to reality.

<snip>

Alas, concerning oneself with intellectual consistency in a Limbaugh love letter feels sort of unfair in the first place. And this brings us to our central point, which is not actually about Limbaugh, but about Chafets: Remember, this man was once a genuinely respected journalist whose work was nominated for awards from his colleagues. But in trying to give Limbaugh’s audience what it demands—and satisfy the man’s ego in the process—he has destroyed his reputation forever.

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http://www.alternet.org/media/147019/blusterbomb%3A_new_book_on_rush_limbaugh_a_puff_piece_rife_with_lies

[Hawkeye-X]

1. Gee.What a shocker.

[opihimoimoi]

2. Smell Test Failure: Smacks of GOP set up to cleanse the Piggy Boy

via a bought pen

[Art_from_Ark]

3. So some rightwinger is trying to puff up Oxycontin Boy?

Who'd a thunk it?