The Burden of the Bien Pensant

By now, you've probably already come across a link to Margot Mifflin's piece on Salon describing the ordeal of introspection sparked when her therapist admitted to enjoying Rush Limbaugh — as a rhetorician, not a right-wing-nut joke — and you've already decided to watch the commercial to read the whole thing or to skip it. Well, I read the whole thing and was surprised at how seriously the piece took its subject matter.

Perhaps I missed it, but Ms. Mifflin didn't seem inclined toward the self-dispraising irony that one might have expected under such circumstances. Rather, she seems not to wonder at all whether there's something in the incident that ought to challenge her own opinion. She even writes of letting her shrink off easy in the debate over Rush's character:

I granted her that I didn't even find his recent Donovan McNabb gaffe worth losing his ESPN gig over, and neither did most of my black journalism students, but I wouldn't forgive him for telling a black caller, years ago, to take the bone out of his nose and call back later, among other cracks. She'd never heard this. I didn't mention that he'd called 13-year-old Chelsea Clinton the White House dog, or that he'd claimed that all composite illustrations of criminals look like Jesse Jackson, or that he'd joked about AIDS.

On the substance — well, look — Limbaugh has been a public figure of an entertainment sort for decades, mostly in live media. Is it surprising that FAIR can draw one-liners from throughout his career and, out of context, prove them to be factually incorrect? Not at all. It'd be surprising if his media enemies couldn't do so, but beginning with a presumption of evil, every word is turned to the most objectionable angle and piled into a mountain of proof.

The nose-bone incident captures the various bits of this process well — from the careerwide span to the removal of context to the uncharitable reaction. According to Snopes, the comment was made in the early 1970s. Moreover, the proof of the quote comes from Limbaugh himself, admitting in 1990 that he felt guilty for once having made the comment. In other words, by the time Mifflin gets to it, the line is twice removed from context. The second removal suggests Mifflin's finely tuned capacity for outrage, so sensitive that she won't forgive him for a thirty-year-old comment of which she's only aware because he expressed remorse about it. This bit of evidence for her argument is like Mifflin's reaction to the therapist in that it tells one much more about her than about either of the people to whom she's reacting, which is why the lack of self-reflection is palpable.

It would, of course, stretch things to transform this into a blanket statement about the relative behaviors of liberals and conservatives. Yet, there's some generality to be found. From personal experience, I can suggest that I react quite differently upon finding out that acquaintances are staunch liberals than they react in return. Perhaps part of it is that conservatives are outside of the media mainstream, so we're used to the discovery corresponding to what Mifflin sees as "betrayal."

Whatever the case, perhaps her therapist should have assigned her a certain number of hours of weekly Rush listening. Just pondering the subtext of his catchphrase about tying half his brain behind his back "just to make it fair" would do her a world of good.

ADDENDUM:
One last amusing note. Mifflin describes a disconnect between Limbaugh's "rhetorical techniques" and her counselor's advice to her to avoid "name-calling, 'provocative' language, finger pointing and mudslinging." Earlier in the piece, she mentions that Rush's "fabrications... helped Al Franken land a bestseller," without providing the title of that book. It was, of course, Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot.