Let Us Now Praise Rush Limbaugh

“Lowering the flags to honor someone when they die is rare. Wisconsin didn’t even lower the flags for Henry Aaron (and we should have) when he died recently.

“Vos knows this. He’s just using the death of Limbaugh to appeal to the Republican base and ‘own the libs’ at the same time.”

Former governor Scott Walker offered a personal touch, tracing his rise to political prominence to Limbaugh: “#RushLimbaugh made talk radio and opened the door for regional and local hosts across the country. When I ran for County Executive in a deep blue area, talk radio made the difference. Long before @Twitter, It was a way to talk directly to the voters,” Walker tweeted.

Indeed, Walker was a little known state representative, even to Republicans, when Milwaukee radio talkers Mark Belling and Charlie Sykes began using him as a conservative pundit on their Sunday talk shows. And after the Milwaukee County pension scandal erupted, Sykes and Belling tirelessly promoted Walker as the right choice for Milwaukee County Executive. And when Walker ran for governor in 2010, support from Sykes and Belling helped Walker beat Mark Neumann in the 2010 primary and defeat Tom Barrett in the general election. In a story by the New Republic, Sykes made clear that Walker had intimate ties with the two radio talkers: “He keeps in very close touch with us…I don’t make any secret we’re close to Scott.”

As the New Republic story noted, few mid-sized cities were so influenced by talk radio, with two top-rated shows on different channels. Belling was so influenced by Limbaugh he sometimes subbed for the national star, and was a very good fit. Both Belling and Sykes were heavenly influenced by Limbaugh’s approach.

As Sykes wrote in a column yesterday for the Washington Post: “Limbaugh pioneered the rise of the outrage/entertainment wing to dominance in the GOP…Limbaugh invented a new genre in which conservatism could be entertaining, even fun. He was a master at using parodies as weapons. He was outrageous and daring; occasionally funny and charming, but also often dishonest and offensive… Limbaugh also cultivated an insensitivity that normalized cruelty, racism and misogyny.”

That pretty much describes the approach used by Belling and Sykes.

But that’s not how Sykes sees it. “As a radio talk-show host myself, I admired his skill as a broadcaster, even as I was alarmed by the role he was choosing to play,” he writes. “For years, I had pushed back against the charge that talk radio was simply about entertainment, outrage and anger. I made an effort to talk about issues and struggled to find ways to repackage conservative ideas in fresh terms.”

In short, Sykes is a much better and smarter person than Limbaugh.

In case you doubted this, Sykes adds more: “Limbaugh was once a thought leader among conservatives, he ended his career very much as a follower… he spent less and less time on actual substance, leaning instead into outrage and grievance… The fact is that Limbaugh was fundamentally uninterested in ideas. But Limbaugh had succeeded in shaping Trump’s understanding of a conservative media where ridicule ruled and ad hominem attacks took the place of political substance.”

“Limbaugh’s late-stage sophistry,” Sykes piles on, featured “tortured and disingenuous rationalizations, the hint that he is letting his audience in on some ‘secret knowledge,’ and, of course, the ‘fun’ of ‘watching these holier-than-thou leftist journalists react like their moral sensibilities have been forever rocked and can never recover.'”

Apparently Sykes didn’t get the memo, don’t speak ill of the dead.

And he thinks his talk show listeners have forgotten he used the same techniques he now decries in Limbaugh. It takes one to know one.