From very early on in Limbaugh's career it always seemed to me that he didn't really care about what he was saying.  His biography always looked like kind of a slacker who got into radio through some family connections and then began casting about for ways to build an audience and be succesful.
At some point he started doing an angry white man thing and the phones lit up.  So he went with it.
The more he did it, the more people listened and the richer he got.  So he kept doing it.  But it always felt to me like he was just throwing open the mike every day and more or less guessing what the audience wanted to hear. 
He was very good at this and has changed politics, the course of our nation and the nature of discourse in this country.  (Almost entirely for the worse.)
But I don't believe for a second that he believes (or even particularly cares) about what he says.
A few decades down the road he is just still going in, flipping on the mike and guessing what his right wing nutjob audience wants to hear.  But now you can hear the weariness and laziness in the broadcast. 
His comments on Grossman were obviously insane racsit ramblings that are easily disproven by even the most casual analysis. 
But, to me, they are more.  They are the work of a man who is unhappy in his job, has lost all interest in his message and is just going through the motions.
We can laugh at how stupid this is, but this is the Rush Limbaugh formula.  Say outrageuos things only the most rabid conservative could possibly stomach, who cares what anyone else thinks, you will get millions from your core audience who tunes in to hear thier own narrow, ill-informed, backwards, racist, neo-fascists worldview confirmed.
There are @ 300 millions Americans.   If Rush can say thing that just 1% want to hear, he has an audience of 3 million.  That will pay the bills.  I just don't think he cares that 99% of the people (if they bothered to listen) can see right through his lazy, thoughtless radio efforts today that are a shadow of his former self.

by ProfRich on 02/09/2007 04:00:35 PM EST