Rush Limbaugh--Republican Leader?

Rush Limbaugh bothers me. I stopped listening to him in 1993—but that didn’t make him go away. I even stopped reading about him after he made the papers six years ago for taking too many drugs. That didn’t make him go away either.
I was introduced to his radio show probably in about 1990 or so. A brilliantly precocious high school age young man started raving to me about Limbaugh when his family, ours and a few others met for coffee after church. I was impressed enough by the young man’s intelligence to start listening.
At the same time, something about the young man disquieted me. He was very bright. I agreed with much of what he said—but I was struck by something about him. For all of his perceptiveness and insight, he was without ruth, lacking in a basic sense of human kindness and very ready to be contemptuous of people who disagreed with him.
In short, he might have been a close relative of Rush Limbaugh. After all, what is Mister Limbaugh but a grown up version of the sneering high school big shot who sits, surrounded by his nodding and giggling sycophants, deriding everyone and everything not in his immediate group.
One of the reasons his followers stay with him is his accuracy. He sees sometimes all too clearly the foibles of his fellow humans. (One wonders how accurate that same vision is when he looks in the mirror.) But he is without pity. There is nothing in him of the gentleness implied in the very word, gentleman. There is no empathy, no kindness, no understanding of a different point of view.
I’ve dealt with many of these jeering—often genuinely intelligent, even insightful—self-proclaimed high school savants during my years of substitute teaching. I’ve sent a few out of the room; I’ve embarrassed a few into silence; I’ve ignored some. But, in any case, they do not make anyone’s day easier or more productive.
Pollsters say Limbaugh has an audience of about 14 million devoted fans. As a percentage of 300 million Americans, that’s about the same percentage of followers—in a room of 30 students—as each of these high school wiseacres had.
The rest of the room would just shake their heads, look blank, work on their assignments. There would be an occasional laugh as the junior Limbaugh said something actually funny—but the general attitude was one of disapproval and even annoyance.
Polls say that more than 60 percent of Americans have an unfavorable impression of Rush. That fits. After all, what else is Rush Limbaugh but a sophomoric kid who hated school, had a quick mind and a sharp tongue? We all remember a few. Limbaugh is merely the “best” of that type of student.
Non-student, really. He hated class so much that he quit school and went to work as a radio jockey. Soon enough he realized the monetary advantages of being what we call a “shock jock”. He had the wit and the utter indifference to human decency to be good at it. Very good.
They say he may be the best there ever was. His earnings certainly suggest that. He’s still on the radio, commanding a huge audience, jeering, sneering, occasionally making the entire nation laugh with a well placed mot.
Furthermore, when reporters ask the Democratic leadership who actually leads the Republican Party, they answer to a man: the Shock Jock—Rush Limbaugh. Newsweek reports that the new chairman of the Republic National Committee has already backed down in front of Rush Limbaugh.
I’m sorry. However correct Mr. Limbaugh may often be in what he sees, however perceptive—his sneers and his jeering contempt keep me from being at all comfortable with such a man as a leader of a party I want to be identified with.
We Republicans are too often accused of being the party of those indifferent to the human plight for there not to be some smidgeon of truth to it. Must we loudly affirm our mocking inhumanity by allowing a Rush Limbaugh to become our de facto leader?
It took years for Republicans to find the nerve to oppose the equally glib and cruel Senator Joe McCarthy; how many months or years will it take until the entire Republican establishment stands up and censures this manifestation of the darker side of conservatism?
(In fact it took losing both houses of Congress in 1954 for the Republican leadership to realize McCarthy was hurting them. Only in the lame duck session that December did they finally censure him.)
If Rush Limbaugh is allowed, unchallenged, to go on speaking for Republicanism and conservatism, then we deserve to be out of power again—for a long, long time.