When Rush Limbaugh uttered those fateful words earlier this week comparing an organization of Iraq War veterans who are critical of the war and the Bush administration to suicide bombers — and despite his pleas and the assertions of his apologists, there is just no other way to read his comments — he may have sounded the death bell for conservative talk radio’s influence on political discourse.
Considered within the context of Bill O’Reilly’s increasingly bizarre behavior (his use of a body-language reader, his regular reference to stray comments on liberal and progressive sites, his conflation of fringe groups with what I’ll call the mainstream left), the oddball rants of people like Glenn Beck (I support free speech, but not the speech with which I disagree) and Limbaugh’s own off-the-charts nuttiness, the Limbaugh comments are just another sign of the sputtering of a movement spinning in upon itself, unable to deal with its own growing irrelevancy.
It’s not just the war that is at issue here, but the high-partisanism (Republicans good as apple pie, all Democrats evil Nazi wimps) and the meanness. I think people are starting to get wise to the whole thing — I won’t pretend that the conservative hosts aren’t the big men on the cable campus, but their ratings shares have been shrinking despite having an advantage in sheer number of hosts and a headstart in terms of access to the airwaves.
Give the liberals some time and a shot and they will level the playing field.
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Hank Kalet 