Rush Limbaugh’s webmaster, George Prayias, corrects the record: I’m the webmaster at RushLimbaugh.com. After reading your latest column on Rush – and his criticism of the Bush administration’s domestic agenda – I thought you would want to be informed that contrary to what you assert in your column, Rush has been very critical of this administration’s expansion of government for quite some time now. He has devoted many broadcasts over the past year to lamenting what he refers to as “The Big Theory” – the administration’s effort to destroy the Democratic Party by moving the liberal agenda forward. Rush was the first commentator to point this out and critique it…..
In addition, your assertion that, “A new and metastasizing federal drug entitlement wasn’t enough to convince Rush of this,” is similarly incorrect. Rush was immediately critical of the Medicare drug entitlement, again devoting many shows to vociferously arguing against it, criticizing the administration for proposing it and Republicans in Congress for going along with it. I have enclosed documentation of this as well, including a transcript of a rare on-air interview with RNC chair Ed Gillespie, in which Rush challenged him directly on the expansion of government under President Bush. In short, the theme of your column, that recently proposed NEA funding is finally what “appears to have at last caused the scales to fall from Rush’s eyes,” is just plain wrong. Rush has been leading the criticism of the administration on spending from the start. Thank you for the opportunity to correct the record.
As I told the gentleman, I’m quite pleased to discover that I’m wrong about Rush on this regard. Now, the theme of my column is by no means wrong – contrary to Mr. Prayias’ reading of it, Rush is not the theme, the Republican betrayal of conservatives is – but clearly I erred in lumping Rush in with George Will, Henry Lamb, Fred Barnes and numerous Townhall and National Review writers who have ranged from squishy to downright supine in failing to call this administration on its abandonment of conservativism. I’ve been saving clippings; I’ll post a list one of these days. I should also mention that while Rush may have been the first to articulate “the Big Theory”, he was by no means the first commentator to get down on George Delano, as both Joseph Farah and I refused to support him while he was still running for the Republican nomination.
How did I gang so far agley? Pretty simple. I don’t listen to radio and I watch very little TV. Outside of the literary world, I am a pure creature of the Internet, and I’m more up on my Greek philosophers and Austrian economists than I am on CNN talk show hosts. That’s why I was quite serious when I said before that I have no interest in my own TV show, since I don’t know who is on them or even what they do. Clearly, however, I’ll have to add Rush’s web site to my reading list.
In any event, I’m quite sorry about the failure to correctly characterize Rush’s past positions. I always do my homework on the Left, clearly I need to do a better job on the Right as well next time. This really blows. Not only is it personally embarassing, but it completely ruins that line about the great white whale, which otherwise worked on so many levels.
Bloody heck. Scrivero’ il mio prossimo articolo in italiano.