The New York Times Magazine pens a love letter to Rush Limbaugh

Every so often you come across an article so utterly lacking in any journalistic integrity whatsoever, you are left dumbstruck by the ability of writer and editors alike to fall head over heels in love with their subject—all at the expense of the reader.

Such events aren't worth mentioning when they involve glowing portraits of George Clooney or Cate Blanchett in People or Vanity Fair. But when the subject is Rush Limbaugh and the outlet is the New York Times Magazine, it is mesmerizing to witness the capacity of so many supposedly sentient human beings to simultaneously suspend disbelief.

No one is better at this kind of thing than Zev Chafets. Chafets is a Detroit boy turned right-wing Israeli, a former press secretary for Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin who has long since expanded his portfolio to promote everyone on the American right from Mike Huckabee to Rush Limbaugh. And the New York Times Magazine is only too happy to oblige him.

In his profile of Limbaugh, this unusually successful huckster combines sycophancy with gee-whiz reactions over the way waiters fawn over his subject at restaurants, the number of expensive cars he owns, and the ridiculous McMansion he occupies in Florida. Here are some of Chafets' choicest findings:

• Operation Chaos, in which Republicans were encouraged to vote for Hillary to prolong the primary campaign with Obama, was "a triumph of interactive political performance art. Limbaugh appointed himself Supreme Commander, deputized his listeners and turned them into merry pranksters."

• Karl Rove: "Rush is an intellectual-force multiplier. His listeners are, themselves, communicators."

• Michael Harrison, editor of Talkers magazine: "'He's a phenomenon like the Beatles ... He's been to talk what Elvis was to rock 'n' roll.'"

• Ira Glass: "I disagreed with everything he was saying, yet I not only wanted to keep listening, I actually liked him. That is some chops." Limbaugh and Howard Stern "created an entire radio aesthetic." (That's for sure!)

• Rush on Rush: "I know I have become the intellectual engine of the conservative movement."

• "Like the great black singers of his generation, Limbaugh took the familiar pieties and ambient sounds of his time and place and used them to create a genre of entertainment, full of humor, passion and commercial possibility. There are many ways to look at Rush Limbaugh III: one is that he is the first white, Goldwater Republican soul shouter."

• "He is also one of the few commentators—left or right—who never speaks cloyingly about America's obligation to its children and grandchildren." There it is, greed reduced to its essence: Let us all rape and pillage as much as we can right now, just for us—and woe unto anyone who still wants to inhabit this earth after we're gone.

• One quote from Al Sharpton, for "balance": "...[H]e's the most dangerous guy we have to deal with on the right, including O'Reilly and Imus. They come at you with an ax. He uses a razor."

• And then, my personal favorite: When he started out, "Limbaugh said things that people had never heard on the radio. He mocked the women's movement ('feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women access to the mainstream of society'); scoffed at sex education ('condoms work only during the school year'); and took on conventional wisdom ('using federal dollars as a measure, our cities have not been neglected but poisoned with welfare-dependency funds'). It is hard to imagine, so many years later, how strange and rebellious, how simply wrong, such sentiments sounded."

Imagine what a backward society we used to live in: Just a few years ago, normal people used to think that radio personalities making mindless attacks on women's liberation and sex education were idiots!

During those rare moments in the article when Chafets isn't fellating his subject, he displays the kind of journalistic thoroughness for which he has long been famous. "Democrats have blamed him for everything from invading their primaries to starting scurrilous rumors about Michelle Obama. Limbaugh denies the latter accusation, but he happily embraces the former."

Of course, a quarter-second Google search leads you to the scurrilous rumor in question—right on Rush's own website, no less.

"There's a rumor that there's a tape—the Republicans have it, and we're waiting to use it in October—of Michelle going nuts in the church, too," said Limbaugh, "talking about whitey this and whitey that." Of course, that hearsay has long since been discredited, but Chafets doesn't even bother to mention what the false rumor is—because Rush has denied it.

How does something like this happen in the great liberal newspaper of Manhattan? It's quite simple, actually: This piece is "counterintuitive"—and that makes it absolutely irresistible to post-ideological journalists like Times Magazine editor Gerald Marzorati, who is most famous for his "packaging" skills.

And why shouldn't such a piece be irresistible to all of us? After all, the only victim here is the truth.

Postscript: Any reasonable reader might ask, How could FCP have had any expectations for the magazine after it published Emily Gould's 7,950-word masturbatory exercise in May, one of the most execrable pieces of all time?

Answer: I had avoided reading it until today, when a Radar colleague pointed out how superior Zev's effort was to Emily's.

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Special thanks to FCP contributor T.K.

Seen Something? E-mail to alert me to anything you see that warrants high praise or high dudgeon.

Charles Kaiser is the author of The Gay Metropolis and 1968 in America. He has been media editor for Newsweek, a member of the metro staff of the New York Times, and a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, where he covered the press and book publishing. To learn more, visit charleskaiser.com.

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