But mainly, I said, I couldn't understand how my shrink, a champion of civility and personal accountability, could buy the vitriol of hate radio -- not to mention the self-serving sanctimony of a rehabee who advocated jail for all drug addicts. ("If people are violating the law by doing drugs," the pill-popping pope of WABC has opined, "they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up.")

She listened patiently, then said she didn't hear the hatred or lies I heard on his show. She wasn't defensive. She didn't care if I detested Rush, and she didn't see why I cared that she liked him, though she did admit that she should never have revealed it in therapy.

"Do you think I've helped you?" she asked.

"Absolutely," I answered.

"Does the knowledge that I listen to Rush change anything you've learned here?"

"No." But secretly I feared it would now. I felt like Larry David in the season finale of "Curb Your Enthusiasm," an episode in which he's happily being seduced -- until a photo of Bush 43 on the woman's dresser kills his passion and turns his stomach.

The next week we picked up where we'd left off two weeks earlier. Rush faded into history but continued to haunt me. There were moments when my shrink warned me about the dangers of taking responsibility for too many people around me, and I thought, "Is this just the selfish, boot-strapper, I-got-mine Republican approach to human interaction? Is it what Dr. Laura would advise?"

Outside of therapy, I wondered, Would my shrink condone Laura Ingraham's adolescent on-air mockery of people like Terri Gross? If Ann Coulter were sitting in my shrink's office saying she wished Timothy McVeigh had blown up the New York Times building, would my shrink suggest she start coming twice a week? Would the words "danger to society" come to mind?

And how would my shrink, a successful professional in New York, counsel Rush, who believes that "feminism was established so that unattractive women could have access to the mainstream of society"? Would she tell him that his dismal marital history might be rooted in his infantile belief that "if you want a successful marriage, let your husband do what he wants to do"?

Professionally, she counseled against virtually all of Rush's rhetorical techniques: name-calling, "provocative" language, finger pointing and mudslinging -- diversions, she would say, from the project of self-realization. Privately, she got something from Rush. I would never know what it was -- but by now it hardly seemed worth pondering, if it hadn't affected my therapy. Week after week, my shrink impressed me with her insights. She may have been a hate radio subscriber, but in the cloister of her own office, she didn't judge. She met me on my own terms, which required precisely the kind of tolerance Rush rejects. And she taught me lessons that changed my life.

I only wish she could do the same for Rush.

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