Thursday, May 05, 2005

I Am Quitting the Mind Games with Rush Series (for now)

I have thought a lot about this exercise I started, analyzing the transcript of a Rush show from an outside perspective. I decided that Mark was right. As I am critiquing Rush for oversimplifying a person, yet I am evaluating his views based on this single transcript, and according to Mark, Rush himself thinks you should not judge him until you have listened to 30 hours of him. I have no time (or inclination, to be really blunt) to do that, even if I lived in a place where he was on the radio (which I don't), and I am not going to spend the time to read that number of transcripts. So I will jump to no conclusions about him as a person. I will say that I still think the small portion of a radio show that was represented here by the transcript, which may not even be a complete show, apparently, sounds pretty much like he is jumping to the same conclusions that he asks others to avoid about him, about Ward Churchill. But I may be wrong; there is a possibility that Rush treated the issue in depth and fairly at some earlier or later point, and made a crystal-clear logical argument for why Ward's metaphor represents all that is wrong with the "left" and what is "being taught" in our universities.

2 comments:

skaterina said...

I clicked on your homepage link at Steve Gilliard's out of curiosity and see that you are discussing Rush Limbaugh

I listen to him about once a year and yesterday was the day (believe it or not i was having a root canal).

The dentist had me on earphones to listen to music but ornery me i tuned in to Rush to keep my adrenaline up, i guess.

i wonder if you heard him talk about Ann Coulter being heckled at the U of Texas / she was on about gay marriage and how the sanctity of marriage meant just a man and a woman

A heckler than yelled out "what about husbands who only .... their wives up the ... ? RUsh refused to speak the words and played a bit coy about it.

The heckler was arrested and hustled out.

Next Rush took a call from a woman who declared that the heckler's question was/is perfectly legitimate

She pursued this line of thinking : that anal sex is a common adult activity. Rush said well he didnt know about that/ She said, C'mon, Rush, you're a man of the world / smile

To his credit Rush kept her on for a bit / he seemed singularly non-plussed

Then the dentist was done and i didnt hear anymore / does he post transcripts on his webpage ?

well, just wondering

Anna in PDX said...

No, S, I did not ever hear this guy myself - I have been living overseas for the past 12 years.

I was analyzing a transcript of a single radio show, and it gave me a mostly negative impression of him, but perhaps it is an unfair one.

I read about these people on the Internet a lot (Rush, O'Reilly, Hannity and a lot of others) but have never heard them. I am coming to the US this summer and wonder if I will have the patience/time to listen to some of these people in person.

I had a wisdom tooth pulled on Friday - not nearly as bad as a root canal, and there was no talk radio going on either. I guess I should count myself lucky.