by Zev Chafets
In 2000 Limbaugh was a Bush man. Bush cast himself as a latter-day Reagan. His primary opponent, John McCain, seemed to Limbaugh to be another Bob Dole. Rush was delighted when Bush won and generally approved of his first year in office. Limbaugh didn’t care much for the new president’s “uniter-not-a-divider rhetoric” or his warmth toward Teddy Kennedy, who was invited to the White House and praised for cosponsoring the No Child Left Behind education reform. But Bush cut taxes, which was the highest item on Limbaugh’s small-government, business-oriented agenda. And he wasn’t Bill Clinton. Those weren’t Rush-more credentials in Limbaugh’s eyes, but they were more than enough to win his approval.
Then came the attacks of 9/11. Communism, not Islamic extremism, had been Limbaugh’s lifelong foreign enemy of choice, but not even the Ruskies had bombed New York City or the Pentagon. This was war, flat-out, and he wanted it fought no-holds-barred, without nuances or niceties, World War II-style. Limbaugh realized, as many more sophisticated commentators did not, that the attack on America was not an isolated criminal act launched by a group of fanatics operating out of Afghanistan. If it had been, there would not be cheering on the rooftops of Baghdad, Ramallah, Cairo and Damascus and Teheran. This was the logical next step in the wild anti-Americanism that had dominated Middle Eastern political culture—pan-Arab secular and Islamic fundamentalist, Nasserite and Ba’ath, Arab and Persian, Sunni and Shia—for decades. Limbaugh didn’t believe in winning the hearts and minds of these enemies; he had no respect for either. What he wanted was a victory so brutal and so decisive that it would leave the countries of the Middle East prostrate and remorseful, like the Germans and the Japanese of an earlier era. Afghanistan was a good place to start, if that’s what Bush wanted, but capitulation would mean a killer punch into the centers of the enemy. Baghdad was one of those centers, and the United States had an outstanding debt to collect from Saddam Hussein. If there were weapons of mass destruction there, as the Bush administration had said, so much the better. But with them or without them, total war was justified until the Arabs cried uncle.
At first, Democrats as well as Republicans supported the war in Iraq. Even Bill Clinton and the New York Times were caught up in the enthusiasm for taking down Saddam Hussein. But Limbaugh thought the Democrats would go wobbly eventually, and he was right. The hard left had never liked these wars, which they saw as examples of American imperialism. They rallied under the banner “Bush Lied, People Died,” a slogan that became more strident when it turned out that Saddam Hussein actually didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. Clinton himself said publicly that he, too, had thought Saddam had WMD, based on the assessments of U.S. and other Western intelligence. No matter: The Democratic base had never forgiven the president for “stealing” the election of 2000, or for his Texas smirk. Charles Krauthammer, who is a psychiatrist as well as a columnist, diagnosed it as “Bush Derangement Syndrome,” and it infected the Democratic mainstream in time for the acrimonious 2004 election campaign. Liberals were inflamed by Bush’s “Axis of Evil” conception of the world, his demand that NATO allies contribute to the fight in Iraq, and his refusal to admit that he had made mistakes in the conduct of the war. Part of this was simple politics. Democrats saw an opportunity to make Iraq Bush’s Vietnam, and they took it. Limbaugh understood this kind of hardball. What he didn’t understand was the concern the left was demonstrating for the previously undiscovered civil rights of enemy combatants. He reminded listeners that the sainted FDR had ordered the execution of German spies in Long Island during wartime, not to mention the internment of Japanese American citizens.
When pictures surfaced of American soldiers mistreating Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Rush dismissed them as examples of high-spirited bad behavior akin to hazing at a college frat house.
And as conditions at the prisoner of war camp in Guantánamo Bay became an international human rights cause célèbre, Rush countered with a commercial for “Club Gitmo, the luxury resort for terrorist wannabes . . . paradise on earth on the west coast of Cuba, overlooking the bay. Every visitor, every check-in at no charge gets a new Koran, a new prayer rug, Moslem chefs, Moslem dietary laws, five prayer sessions a day. Reserve your spot today!” He also began selling Club Gitmo gear in his online store. Items with quips like “My Mullah Went to Club Gitmo and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt,” “Your Tropical Retreat from the Stress of Jihad,” and “What Happens in Gitmo Stays in Gitmo” flew off the cyber shelves.
Limbaugh further incensed liberals in 2006 when he took on actor Michael J. Fox, and this time he went too far. Stem cell research was a hot issue in the off-year election. The pro-life movement saw experimenting on discarded human embryos as immoral. Liberals regarded it as a promising route to a cure for serious diseases, including Parkinson’s. This was not a debate that Limbaugh had paid much attention to, until it became a partisan debate that threatened a Republican senator, Jim Tenant, of Missouri, Rush’s home state.
Tenant was against stem cell research. His opponent, Clair McCaskill, was for it. Michael J. Fox, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease, made a campaign commercial for her. He said that what happened in Missouri mattered to “millions of Americans like me.”
Limbaugh denounced the ad as cynical and fake. Fox wasn’t an expert on stem cell research; he was an actor. His illness, while lamentable, did not confer any authority on his opinion. Rush speculated that Fox, who shook from side to side during the commercial, had skipped his medication that day to dramatize the effect. The studio webcam picked up Rush imitating Fox’s gyrations. It was a cruel and insensitive performance. To make matters worse, Fox subsequently revealed that his symptoms in the ad were actually the result of taking too much medication. Limbaugh replied that this proved his point. “I was wrong . . . he did take his medications, and now he took too much medication. The point is, he did something differently to appear in this ad.” That may have been true—the ad was taped in advance and Fox does sometimes show fewer symptoms—but it didn’t wipe away the ugly images of Limbaugh flopping around in his chair in front of the EIB microphone. It was a case he wasn’t going to win, probably his worst public relations gaffe since he had mocked AIDS activists in the early ’90s.
Limbaugh stuck with Bush’s wars to the end of his second term, but he parted with the Republican president in his second term on two issues of cardinal importance: the future of American jurisprudence and the threat to national sovereignty.
In October 2007, Bush nominated White House Counsel Harriet Miers of Texas to the Supreme Court. She and Bush were old friends, and like the president she was a born-again Christian who had the support of the religious right wing of the party. Limbaugh considered her a lightweight as well as a potentially unreliable centrist. He led the charge against Miers, and this time he was not alone; cerebral right-wing commentators like George Will, Charles Krauthammer, and William Kristol were equally opposed to the choice. Bush saw which way things were going and signaled Miers to step away. She did, and three weeks later the president nominated Samuel Alito, a much more conservative and prestigious jurist.
Bush and Limbaugh clashed again, this time over immigration. What to do about undocumented arrivals was an unresolved problem going back decades. In 1986 Ronald Reagan signed an amnesty bill for illegal workers who had been in the United States for at least five years; in return, the law would crack down on employers who hired illegals and stop the flow. Reagan called it a way to “humanely regain control of our borders and thereby preserve the value of one of the most sacred possessions of our people: American citizenship.” That didn’t happen. In the next twenty years, millions entered the country without permission, and by 2003 the U.S. Census Bureau announced that Hispanics were now the nation’s largest minority group—thirty-nine million and counting.
You didn’t have to be a xenophobe to see a problem; no country can remain sovereign if it can’t control its territory. At the same time, a free society can’t function if tens of millions of people live, witho
ut rights, in a permanent underground. The issue came to a head in March 2006, when supporters of amnesty staged mass rallies across the country, chanting in English and Spanish and waving Mexican flags. These scenes outraged Limbaugh, who acidly noted that in Mexico itself it is illegal to protest under a foreign flag.
Both political parties realized that something had to give. Bush believed that a solution had to be bipartisan. Nobody wanted to wind up on the wrong side of this. Limbaugh had no such concern. He was appalled by the brazen nature of the demonstrations. One of his Undeniable Truths is “Words mean things.” But what was the meaning of the term “illegal” when throngs of people publicly flouted the immigration laws?
In May of 2007, the Secure Borders, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Reform Act was introduced in the Senate. The bill’s sole sponsor was Majority Leader Harry Reid, but it had the support of both Senator Ted Kennedy and Senator John McCain. As its name suggests, the bill was the product of compromise. Like the 1986 legislation, it promised to regularize the legal status of millions of undocumented immigrants and take strong action to staunch the flow of illegals. Reid said he wanted to pass it by Memorial Day; Bush said he had hoped to sign it by the end of the summer.
“This bill is worse than doing nothing,” Limbaugh said. “The thing about this that just doesn’t make any sense is that we’re treating the illegals as though we are doing something wrong, as though we’ve been bad and we’re guilty of something. We want them to forgive us!”
Limbaugh was not merely opposed to the legislation. He saw the entire immigration issue as an abdication of U.S. sovereignty and a threat to America’s traditional American cultural heritage. He was adamantly opposed to the entire theory of multiculturalism. The very first axiom on his most recent list of Undeniable Truths is “There is a distinct, singular American culture—rugged individualism and self-reliance—which made America great.” Rush was with Davy Crockett, not Santa Ana. As far as he was concerned, immigrants from Latin America were welcome if they came with a visa and an understanding that American citizenship was not a right but a privilege, one that entailed conforming to and blending in with the Judeo-Christian, English-speaking, capitalist, constitutionally-based Republican principles and heritage of American society as he understood it.
A lot of Republicans (and more than a few independents and Democrats) saw it Limbaugh’s way. Others were concerned about the effect of cheap foreign labor on the labor market. Some African Americans didn’t like the idea that Hispanics had displaced them as the largest (and potentially most influential) of the minority communities. Citizens of border states were unhappy about the stress the influx of newly arrived, largely poor immigrants placed on their social service infrastructure. Limbaugh found himself at the head of a very large, highly vocal opposition. At the start of June, a pro-reform cloture vote in the Senate lost 61 to 34. The defeat was so decisive that in debate during the Republican primaries, McCain said that he would not vote for his own bill. Bush was deprived of a legislative achievement in a second term that didn’t have much to brag about.
Neither Bush nor Limbaugh took these clashes personally. Just a couple months after the defeat of the immigration bill, Rush was invited to the White House, where the president gave him dinner and a ninety-minute briefing on the state of the world. Limbaugh found him “full of class and dignity,” unwilling to respond to his harshest critics on the war because he didn’t want to lower the level of his office. “Bush wasn’t one of our greatest presidents,” Limbaugh told me several years later, “but under him there was no corruption, no Lewinskys. He didn’t diminish the office of the president. And someday, after we are all gone, people will say that Bush dealt with a lot of dangerous things that had to be dealt with.”
This was more than he would say for Bush’s predecessor. One spring evening in 2007, Limbaugh was dining with a date at the Kobe Club in Manhattan, looked up, and saw Bill Clinton approaching. He and the ex-president have different recollections of what happened next. In Clinton’s account, which he gave in a radio interview in North Carolina, going over to the table was an act of Christian forgiveness on his part. “I just decided, after all the mean things he said about us over the years, after my heart surgery, I made up my mind that I didn’t have enough time left to be mad at anybody, and I went over and shook his hand, sat down, and visited with him. We had a really nice visit.”
The radio interviewer informed Clinton that Rush had a different version of the meeting, in which the ex-president had used his friend, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, to distract him while Clinton flirted with Rush’s date.
“Well, he ought to be ashamed of himself,” Clinton replied. “She seemed like a perfectly nice woman, but I spent all my time talking to him.”
Limbaugh played the clip of Clinton’s interview for his audience. “ ‘ She was a perfectly nice lady but I did all my talking to Rush’?” he said, mimicking Clinton’s accent. “I ought to be ashamed? I ought to be ashamed of myself making up a story like that? Yeah, he’s a married man. How could he possibly hit on my date? Right, of course, nobody would believe this. So far out of the bounds of presidential propriety, nobody would believe that the president would do something like this . . .”
Limbaugh said Clinton had come over to the table, stayed for about thirty seconds, left, and returned with Villaraigosa, whom he didn’t know and whose name he missed in the introductions. When he read the mayor’s card, he slid out of the booth and stood up to shake hands. “A minute later I looked over and Clinton’s face is three inches from my date’s.” Clinton left again, and came back again, this time with his friend Ron Burkle. Limbaugh stood up to greet Burkle, looked over, and once more caught Clinton charming his date. “Forty-five minutes later, we leave,” Rush said. “He’s still out there. He’s on the streets chatting it up with people, and as soon as I open the front door of the Kobe Club, the flash-bulbs start going nuts. Somebody had called the media, the paparazzi, so Clinton is standing about fifteen feet up the sidewalk . . . I walked up there and he acted like he didn’t know who I am. Anyway, it was a fun night.”
On September 25, 2007, Limbaugh used his daily “morning update” to talk about Jesse MacBeth, who had been appearing at anti-war rallies as a former U.S. Army Ranger and combat veteran, and as an eyewitness to American military atrocities in Iraq. He reported that MacBeth was a fraud who had been convicted of falsifying a Department of Veterans Affairs claim. “Yes, Jesse MacBeth was in the army,” Rush said. “Briefly. Forty-four days. Before he was washed out of boot camp. MacBeth is not an Army Ranger; he is not a corporal; he never won the Purple Heart; he was never in combat to witness the horrors he claimed to have seen. But don’t look for retractions, folks—not from the anti-war left, the anti-military Drive-By Media, or the Arabic Web sites that spread his lies about our troops. Fiction serves their purposes; the truth, to borrow a phrase, is inconvenient to them.”
The following day, Limbaugh got an on-air call from a man named Mike in Olympia, Washington, who had a complaint about the mainstream media. “They never talk to real soldiers,” Mike said. “They pull these soldiers that come up out of the blue and spout to the media.”
“The phony soldiers,” said Rush.
“Phony soldiers,” said Mike. “If you talk to any real soldier, they’re proud to serve, they want to be over in Iraq, they understand their sacrifice, and they’re willing to sacrifice for the country.”
“They joined to be in Iraq,” Limbaugh said. Then he retold the story of Jesse MacBeth.
Within a short time, Media Matters, a “progressive” watchdog group founded by Democrats (including Hillary Clinton) to monitor and discredit Limbaugh and other conservative commentators, reported that Rush had referred to military personnel who objected to the war as “phony soldiers.” In the Senate, John Kerry rose to brand the remark “disgusting.” On the floor of the House of Representatives, Jan Schakowsky accused Limbaugh of “sliming” the “brave men and women who h
ave served their country in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other wars.”
Limbaugh saw this as a teachable moment: “I want to thank Media Matters for America for making it so easy, ladies and gentlemen, to show how the real conspiracy works . . . how the left flashes the media, who flash the left in Congress, and voilà, you have a totally wrong, false, filled-with-lies, out-of-context story that ends up in the mainstream. What the media want is to create a story that fits into their template, their reality. Then they’ll go to their favorite Democrats for a comment, they’ll get some stupid comments from them, and run and rerun the lies so that two years from now the truth and their lies become one and the same in the minds of people. This is how it works. I want you to know it and never forget it. Thank you.”7
On Monday, October 12, Majority Leader Harry Reid addressed the Senate. “Last week, Rush Limbaugh went way over the line,” he said. “While I respect his right to say anything he likes, his unpatriotic comments I cannot ignore. During his show last Wednesday, Limbaugh was engaged in one of his typical rants. This one was unremarkable, indistinguishable from his usual drivel, which has been steadily losing listeners for years, until he crossed that line by calling our men and women in uniform who oppose the war in Iraq, and I quote, ‘phony soldiers.’ This comment was so beyond the pale of decency, and we can’t leave it alone . . .”
