Double Burn

The Article: Rush to Judgment by James Wolcott of Vanity Fair details how Rush Limbaugh “attacking environmentalists as hippie-dip “wackos” who care more about spotted owls than people and use polar bears for propaganda, Rush Limbaugh has blinded millions of Americans to the climate crisis.”

The Text: Rush Limbaugh, he’s got the life. His days flick through the slot like postcards from paradise. Where most gab-show hosts report for duty at radio studios where candy bars get stuck in the vending machine and the carpeting is a certain industrial shade of indifference, Limbaugh—a man, a mission, a mighty wind—has carved out his own principality in Florida’s Palm Beach, a lion preserve where he can roam undisturbed. Drinking in the rays, puffing on those big-shot cigars, riding the range in a golf cart—he’s got the complete Jackie Gleason how-sweet-it-is package deal. But just as the Great One suffered from melancholia aggravated by alcohol, Limbaugh’s indulgence in his own creature comforts hasn’t been able to insulate him from the demons within. An addiction to painkillers reduced this human boom box of self-sufficiency and strict enforcement—”If people are violating the law by doing drugs,” he once lectured on his syndicated TV show, “they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up” (up the river, that is)—to the furtive, needy ploys of any other junkie who finds the medicine cabinet running dry. After he entered rehab, his third wife, Marta, reportedly vacated the luxury estate (they would later divorce), leaving Rush a Tarzan without his Jane in what the Palm Beach Post in 2004 called his “$24.2 million, 36,500-square-foot secluded monster at 1495 N. Ocean.” Secluded for now, but perhaps after this god of the airwaves shucks his mound of flesh so that his soul can meet Reagan’s in Republican Heaven (where all the angels look like June Allyson), his compound can be converted into a tourist attraction—a combination museum, shrine, gift shop, and spiritual mecca modeled on Elvis’s Graceland, Dolly Parton’s Dollywood. Aging dittoheads can make pilgrimages to pay their respects, rekindle fond memories, and gape reverently at the silenced TV where Rush watched the game he loved so much and understood so little, football.

For us non-dittoheads (that is, the unconverted), a more fitting memorial to Mount Rushbo might be a diorama of the environmental destruction that he did so much to enable in his multi-decade reign of denigration. Global warming’s most popular denialist, talk radio’s most imitated showman, conservatism’s minister of disinformation, he has injected millions of semi-vacant American skulls with a cream filling of complacency that has helped thrust this country into the forefront of backward leadership. He has given Republican lawmakers the rhetorical cover fire to do nothing but snicker as the crisis emerged and impressed itself on the rest of the world. He conscripted concern for nature as just another weapon in the Culture Wars. May the grasses of his favorite golf courses go forever yellow and dust storms whip from the sand traps.

From Teddy Roosevelt, who made wilderness protection a priority and created national parks, bird sanctuaries, big-game refuges, and national forests, to Richard Nixon, under whose bad-moon presidency the Environmental Protection Agency was formed and the Clean Air Act of 1970 was passed, the Republican Party carried a tradition of conservation that crumbled under Ronald Reagan, for whom nature was mostly a scenic backdrop whose resources could be exploited out of camera frame. Reagan’s selections of James Watt for the Department of the Interior and Anne Gorsuch for the E.P.A. put bureaucratic vandals in positions of stewardship, and in 1987 he vetoed re-authorization of the Clean Water Act, a veto that fortunately was overridden. It is a measure of how awful the George W. Bush administration has been on the environment that some activists miss the old, upfront hostility of the Reagan era, when at least the political and corporate machinations took place in open daylight. “Unfortunately, now,” lamented Daniel Weiss, an environmental activist (quoted by Amanda Griscom in her article for online’s Grist), “our leaders are much more savvy—and far more insidious. They undo laws in the dead of night.” Under Bush II, environmentalists no longer need to be engaged, because they’ve been so stridently marginalized and stigmatized as a pantheistic kook cult practicing socialism under the guise of Gaia worship. This was largely Limbaugh’s doing, and now every right-wing pundit from Cal Thomas to Michael Savage croaks the same tune.

It was Limbaugh who inscribed the term “environmentalist wackos” into the political lexicon and hung the “loser” tag on them. He caricatured the fight for wildlife preservation—a broad-visioned tradition that spans from Henry David Thoreau to John Muir to Rachel Carson to Edward Abbey to David Brower—into something weedily hippie-dip. In his 1992 debut, The Way Things Ought to Be, Limbaugh fobbed himself off with a faux barefoot humility over how far he had come in his Horatio Alger saga, the book’s cover photo presenting him as a chubby-cheeked cherub with a grinning hint of mischief—a “lovable little fuzzball,” to use his own pet phrase. “I am in awe of the perfection of the earth,” he proclaimed inside, a perfection crafted by the Creator who made us all, draping the stars in the firmament like the ultimate interior decorator. For all his wide-eyed wonderment, Limbaugh fashioned himself as less naïve than the stereotypical “long-haired maggot-infested FM-type environmentalist wacko” whom he professes to have reasoned with over the plight of the spotted owl, Rush’s ineluctable train of logic leading to the final junction: “If the owl can’t adapt to the superiority of humans, screw it.” It was during this early, jaunty period of Rush’s fame that the theme music for his “Animal Rights Update” was the title song from Andy Williams’s Born Free punctuated by gunfire and animal sounds—the perfect soundtrack for Dick Cheney hunting porn. Limbaugh acknowledged in The Way Things Ought to Be that there were “some decent environmentalists” out there, they weren’t all maggot-infested mulletheads, but portrayed even the sincere ones as socioeconomic parasites. “You and I and the vast majority of other people work for a living,” he wrote. “Most of the people running environmental groups don’t work.” They simply pass around the collection plate to support their cushy lifestyles. As demonization goes, that’s pretty mild.

With the follow-up, cash-in collection, See, I Told You So (1993), Limbaugh put aside any puckish pretense of modesty and exulted in pure gloat. Having a mega-best-seller will do that to your glands. His environmental chapter here is largely a rehash of the environmentalist-wacko section in The Way Things Ought to Be (once again he highlights how wrong Dr. Paul Ehrlich got it with The Population Bomb, in 1968, where Ehrlich prophesied that the 70s would be a massive die-in of disaster-movie proportions—a Malthusian vision of mass starvation), one of its few original additions being the introduction of a new bête noire and butt of humor that goes by the handle of Algore. Converting the name of then vice president Al Gore, whose green tract Earth in the Balance was published in 1992 (retitled by Limbaugh Earth in the Lurch), into shorthand for the entire environmental movement was a neat rhetorical trick, pinning a note of absurdity onto every mention of his crusade. “Even though quite a few scientists are now backtracking on their once-dire predictions of melting ice caps and worldwide flooding, Algore and a few hard-line doomsayers are sticking to their thermostats.” Since the publication of See, I Told You So, the “once-dire predictions of melting ice caps” have become more dire. Similarly, Limbaugh scoffed in See, I Told You So, “Despite the hysterics of a few pseudo-scientists, there is no reason to believe in global warming”—a blithe distortion then (as if Limbaugh could ID the difference between a “pseudo-scientist” and the genuine article) and a ludicrous one now, given the overwhelming consensus in the scientific community that climate change is real, unfolding, and momentous.

If Algore is sticking to his thermostat, Limbaugh is refusing to let go of his icicle. His answer to global warming is to snort, How can there be global warming when it’s so fricking cold out?—a snowflake just fell on somebody’s head! On his TV show in 1994, he mocked, “Environmentalist wackos of the past three years have been talking about global warming, and they’ve been suggesting that the Earth is warming to the point that [mock crying] ‘we’re all going to die. We’re all going to melt. We’re going to burn,’ and we just got perhaps the coldest winter on record going on in many parts of the United States.” Flash forward to February 2007 and Limbaugh is still seizing upon every frigid snap as proof that global warming is liberal propaganda. “There is one [article] in the L.A. Times today: ‘Game Over on Global Warming?’ with a question mark after it. It has some interesting statistics in it, but not one story—not one story—will we see about global warming maybe not being real, in the middle of record cold.” He appears to think that if there were true global warming the earth would crisp evenly like a baked apple.

Hence he is unperturbed by the plight of polar bears, because he is as certain as any self-intoxicated know-it-all can be that there is no plight, only contrived melodrama. Most of you innocents in the noncombatant world may not be aware that right-wing ideologues have drafted polar bears as political pawns; they—the ideologues, that is, not the polar bears—understand that these creatures, like penguins, have an adorable, vulnerable appeal to average people, and can arouse more sympathy and calls to action than any sheaf of scientific studies. “That’s how they intend to infuse you with guilt, and to make you feel sympathetic and sorry,” Limbaugh explained on his February 5, 2007, polar-bear broadcast, “so that you will sit around and the next time Hillary Clinton wants to take $40 billion of Exxon profits for global warming you’ll let her do it because you’ll feel guilty over having caused all this!” Therefore Rush and his confederates have been making a full-court effort to debunk photos of polar bears stranded on ice—as if the one photo they debunk invalidates all the other ones out there—and to contend that their number is thriving. This is primarily an optical delusion. A feature story on the official nasa Web site in September 2006 revealed that scientists from nasa and the Canadian Wildlife Service had reported that “the slow reduction in sea ice is forcing Arctic polar bears to fast for longer and longer periods, posing danger to their survival.” Such fasting affects female polar bears’ capacity to reproduce and their offspring’s ability to survive. “As the bears become thinner, they will also have a greater tendency to seek alternative food villages and hunting camps, giving the impression to some that the population is increasing [my italics].” An impression Limbaugh would be happy to fan.

washington—The harmful effects of global warming on daily life are already showing up, and within a couple of decades hundreds of millions of people won’t have enough water, top scientists will say next month at a meeting in Belgium.

At the same time, tens of millions of others will be flooded out of their homes each year as the Earth reels from rising temperatures and sea levels, according to portions of a draft of an international scientific report obtained by the Associated Press.

“Things are happening and happening faster than we expected,” said Patricia Romero Lankao of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., one of the many co-authors of the new report.

Tropical diseases like malaria will spread. By 2050, polar bears will mostly be found in zoos, their habitats gone. —Seth Borenstein, Associated Press, March 10, 2007.

Limbaugh will shrug off this report as he has shrugged off the others. If he could set his shrug to music, he could become king of the mambo beat. Valiant efforts have been made to correct the mistakes, half-truths, exaggerations, and confusions that Limbaugh coughs up like furballs during his preachings. In 1994 the Environmental Defense Fund issued a rebuttal to The Way Things Ought to Be and See, I Told You So titled “The Way Things Really Are: Debunking Rush Limbaugh on the Environment.” Where Limbaugh claimed that ozone depletion was being hyped by “prophets of doom,” the E.D.F. report stated, “Substantially reduced levels of ozone have been measured over most of the globe.” Where Limbaugh cited a Gallup poll finding that 53 percent of scientists engaged in global-climate research don’t believe that global warming has occurred, the E.D.F. discovered the numbers had been garbled. E.D.F.: “Nowhere in the actual poll results are there figures that resemble those cited by … Limbaugh. Instead, the Gallup poll found that a substantial majority of the scientists polled, 66 percent, believed that human-induced global warming was already occurring.” In 1995, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting—fair—brought out a paperback called The Way Things Aren’t: Rush Limbaugh’s Reign of Error, wrestling with such oft repeated Rushisms as his screwy notion that even if the polar ice caps did melt there’d be no rise in ocean levels, and his eye-opening discovery that there were more acres of forestland in America in 1993 than when Columbus discovered the New World, in 1492 (wrong). In 1996, Al Franken swung for the fences with his lyrical study Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot, having fun with Limbaugh’s fictional fact-checker, Waylon, who’s often baffled himself by the bizarre stuff emanating from Rush’s mouth. (“Al: Okay, let’s jump right in. First of all, back in 1991, Rush claimed that Styrofoam was biodegradable and paper wasn’t. Waylon: Right. I remember that. That is … uh … that’s totally wrong.”) Anyone can make mistakes, and anyone doing a three-hour broadcast five times a week is likely to make lots of them, but Limbaugh’s mistakes all lean in the same direction and leave the impression that they’re intended to obfuscate and make fact-checking as time-consuming, painstaking, and futile as picking shrapnel out of the wall or mopping up after Ann Coulter. Goebbels propagated the theory and practice of the Big Lie, in which constant thumping reiteration wears down rational resistance and fuses heartbeat and drumbeat. Postmodern conservatives prefer to let little lies proliferate and take on a viral life of their own that becomes impossible to arrest.

It will be objected that Coulter, Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Michael Savage and their ilk are just the lunatic fringe of a respectable movement. But in what passes for conservatism today, the lunatic fringe is respectable. In the surreal parade of Bush administration follies and sins, one singularly telling one has gone almost entirely unremarked: Vice President Dick Cheney has appeared several times on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show. Think about this: The holder of the second-highest office in the land has repeatedly chummed it up with a factually challenged right-wing hack, a pathetic figure only marginally less creepy than Coulter. —Gary Kamiya, Salon, March 13, 2007.

While Limbaugh has been able to maintain his hold on the faithful core, others, less fervent, are peeling off at the periphery, trying not to trip over their own heels as they pedal through a series of fallback positions. (1) Global warming is a hoax perpetrated by liberal social engineers scheming to hamstring growth, ban S.U.V.’s, and traduce property rights (protecting some endangered species’ nesting habitats and preventing the construction of commercial eyesores). (2) O.K., it’s not a hoax, but mankind isn’t at fault; pollution isn’t to blame—it’s the natural result of solar activity or the product of a supercyclical trend (the thesis of a new book by S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery, Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years). (3) Maybe global warming is partly mankind’s responsibility, but the cure could be worse than the disease, requiring exorbitant regulation that would stifle, even strangle, the animal spirits of free enterprise. (4) Yes, global warming is a fateful challenge; it’s here and it’s real, but (cue the heroic trumpets) mankind has always met adversity with resourceful determination—innovative technologies will come along that will allow America not merely to survive but prevail, while the rest of the world fends for itself. What’s missing from this sequence of fallback positions is the call for any real effort or cost or sacrifice, anything that would require even minor alteration of comfortable routines. Limbaugh will go down in history as a grand obstruction, a massive blockage endowed with the gift of gab. His March 12 Global Warming Update Stack included the news that “Gallup has a poll that says that most Americans are sort of ho-hum about global warming, and are not in any big hurry to do anything about it.” Perhaps that plucky comment could be placed inside Limbaugh’s future diorama near the stuffed body of a polar bear to give visitors a little jot of irony as they shuffle across the grounds.

The Analysis: And I thought I tore up Rush Limbaugh.