Now, I do not agree with Rush on most political issues -- I voted for Ralph Nader! And I definitely don't agree with him on Iraq. But Rush transformed the media landscape in America. He resurrected AM radio. From coast to coast, AM radio is buzzing and vibrant because of what Rush did. He is a master broadcaster, a master of the microphone. Anyone who is a true student of media should respect his achievements.

Is his show what it was, say, in the early '90s? No. When anyone makes it big and is suddenly hobnobbing with the rich and famous, of course he or she no longer has that fire in the belly. The outsider becomes the insider. This happened to Howard Stern too. But I've been saying to friends for several years that something was happening with Rush's show. There was less air space and free-form rumination, less comedy and satire. At times, it felt like he was going through the motions, working himself up into a partisan fever because he thought his listeners expected it. I just assumed he was relaxing more, playing golf -- which he deserved!

In the beginning of his career, Rush was an odd character who did nothing but devour the news all day long and give his take on it -- and his audience kept expanding. Since Bush was elected, the show turned too much in an Us vs. Them direction -- "us" being conservative Republicans. But Rush's fan base crosses party lines. I now see that it was the drugs that were affecting the show. Rush was functioning amazingly well, but he was losing his original wide range of ideas.

When the McNabb flap broke, Rush could have caught himself and demonstrated his genuine erudition in football -- which he's shared with his audience for years. But suddenly his isolation became dramatically clear. Where was his staff? Callers to his show challenged him, asking who exactly in the media had ever overrated McNabb? Rush kept saying vaguely, "the Philadelphia media," and I winced. The Philadelphia media have fried McNabb! For heaven's sake, a radio star here even took a mob up to New York to boo McNabb on the day he was drafted! McNabb is personally very popular, but his uneven skills as a quarterback are constantly being hashed over here.

Days passed when Rush should have been getting research data from his staff -- chapter and verse to support his position. His inability to manage basic crisis control amazed me. But through all of that public abuse and exposure, he emerged not diminished but with the dimension of a major Hollywood star, like Judy Garland, who attained semi-divinity through her drug overdoses and suicide attempts. It's as if Rush stepped over from pugilistic political commentator to mysterious, tortured myth in just a few days.

When Democratic candidates like Dean attack Rush, they don't realize how they are alienating millions of people. By blaming the messenger, all they're doing is showing that the Democrats have no answer to the policy dilemmas of our day. And that Newsweek cover story hatchet job on Rush was a total disgrace! After two years of intense debate about whether the American media is biased toward liberals, for Newsweek to produce such a pathetically underreported piece of crap is mind-boggling. Rumor has it that Newsweek stringers had gathered more positive comments about Rush's career that were junked by the top editors.

Of course the newsmagazines never honestly covered Rush Limbaugh as a major force in American media and politics since the early '90s, but Newsweek finally put him on the cover for his drug scandal. That's fine -- it's breaking news -- but then shouldn't they have interviewed some longtime Rush fans who know the show? But who do they call? Maureen Dowd -- that catty, third-rate, wannabe sorority queen. She's such an empty vessel. One pleasure of reading the New York Times online is that I never have to see anything written by Maureen Dowd! I ignore her hypertext like spam for penis extenders.

The nerve of Newsweek to be portraying Rush as a "schlub" -- as if that wouldn't describe half the big enchiladas in Hollywood! In 1992, at the glittering 25th anniversary black-tie party for "60 Minutes" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I dined at a small table with Rush Limbaugh. He was a jovial, witty, commanding figure who offered me a cigar. The distorted portrait of him in Newsweek was vile and meretricious.

Who is poised to take his place? Can anyone -- on the right or left?

O'Reilly is a crass sliver of Limbaugh. He doesn't have Limbaugh's homespun Midwestern common sense or his broad sense of the nation. But O'Reilly and Hannity are thorns in liberals' side, so there's all this talk right now about getting liberal voices on the radio to counteract them. Well, Al Franken isn't it, let me tell you right now -- or Michael Moore either. Look at them! They're like big, drooling babies -- is this the face of the Democratic Party? Big, squalling babies -- "wah wah wah!"

Liberals are the most Hollywood and media saturated -- the ones most open to popular culture. So why is it that no liberal show seems to thrive on AM radio? My analysis is that liberal humor somehow switched gears and ran off the tracks. The scathing Lenny Bruce was a tremendous influence on me and everyone in the '60s. His humor had an aggressive, ethnic edge and rhythmic style -- it was like jazz and rap, and it was made for radio. But bourgeois liberals lost continuity with that raucous, vulgar voice.

The great switch -- and I'm not sure how it happened -- was into juvenile, white-boy David Letterman style, smirky, cynical, callow, smarmy and jejune. I wonder how many black fans Letterman has. I can't stand him and never watch him. But those late-night shows became a vehicle for politicians -- the Democrats started it, and conservatives have followed. And that media marriage between liberal figures and the smirky Letterman style has perverted the entire process. The authentic voice of talk radio is raw, rude and hot, hot, hot! -- not that cool Letterman style (to use Marshall McLuhan's media terminology).

There's only one successful liberal voice on AM radio that I've ever heard, and that's Ron Kuby on New York's WABC. He's a leftist lawyer who shares a show with the conservative, obnoxious Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels. Kuby is whip-smart, funny and empathic. He shows that it is possible to get a strong liberal voice on the air. But it's got to be somebody with a quick-to-the-draw, damn-the-torpedoes rap. You can't have an unctuous, pompous Cuomo voice or a simpering, precious Al Gore voice. And the whiny Al Franken may draw comedy fans, but as a political analyst, he's the joke.

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