Rush Limbaugh is being borked.
So is Raymond’s wife. And John, and Rick and George too.
The War of the Boomers is heating up.
One of the borkers is a Hollywood gossip, another a media critic
and, well, the list is long. I could write a book on borking, and
as it happens, I have (The Borking Rebellion). Yet it
occurred as one watched the Rush Limbaugh-Michael J. Fox episode
unwind that there is something else going on here, a curious
something else that is increasingly bubbling to the surface of our
national debates and is perfectly represented by the Hollywood
gossip reporter, one Janet Charlton, along with the media critic
Neil Gabler and others.
The Borking Rebellion was designed to serve two
purposes. First, it was a behind-the-scenes story of the
confirmation battle over a Bush judicial nominee, Judge D. Brooks
Smith — a longtime best friend of mine — who was overwhelmingly
well thought of in Western Pennsylvania legal circles. Then his
nomination arrived in Washington. The real-life story takes place
in the middle of the liberal interest-group borking-mania that
defeated Judge Charles Pickering and nominee Miguel Estrada while
stiffing nominees Priscilla Owen, William Pryor, and others. Smith
unexpectedly won in a harrowing fight against opponents who were
interested not in defeating his arguments but destroying his life.
The book told the insiders tale of just how that victory happened
and why, naming names of the bad guys in the episode, a number of
them household names.
Second, the book was meant to serve as a case study of “borking”
— how its done, what to look for, who fronts the money and
supplies everything from the questions to nominees to the
unfavorable media coverage of the nominees. Above all it discusses
the best tactics to defeat a borking. Having been in the Reagan
White House when Robert Bork was borked, I knew something about the
subject, which was a huge help when the same borking guns were
turned on my friend Judge Smith years later.
With the single difference that Rush Limbaugh holds no office,
there is no question that the furor raised over his remarks bears
some of the tale-tell traits of a borking as outlined in the book.
From the massive negative media attacks to the deliberate
misrepresentation of what he actually said (and, critically for a
radio show, how he said it) this was — and maybe still is — a
borking in progress. While he’s not a candidate for political
office, the job that his foaming critics want to eject him from is
Limbaugh’s humorously self-proclaimed job as “America’s Anchorman.”
Come to think of it, the huge reaction to all of this combined with
the size of his audience and the number of people who look to him
as their main source of news makes the term a fairly accurate
description of reality.
It was in the course of writing the case-study side of the book
that I discovered a small but curious fact that I think has some
bearing on all of this. One of the most vitriolic of Judge D.
Brooks Smith’s opponents was Washington lobbyist Ralph Neas. Neas
was then and still is the president of the far-left People for the
American Way, the special interest group founded by Hollywood
producer Norman Lear. After the attempted transformation of the
Judge from pillar of the Pittsburgh legal establishment to
right-wing crazy, an image not even Pittsburgh Democrats bought
into, I noticed from Neas’s posted schedule that for someone who
was so severely critical of a Pittsburgh judge he never seemed to
spend time in Pittsburgh, or anywhere else in Smith’s Western
Pennsylvania bailiwick either. He did route himself back and forth
on the track between Washington, New York and Los Angeles.
It became pretty clear in all of this that there was a
considerable level of contempt from Neas and friends not just for
Smith but for the people who lived in what liberal bi-coastals love
to call “flyover country.” I noted this towards the end of the
book, and moved on. But in retrospect I think Neas’s actions speak
to the core of what is unfolding in the Limbaugh-Fox episode.
RUSH LIMBAUGH, LIKE BILL GATES a college dropout, is certainly a
well-traveled, well-read and culturally current, very worldly baby
boomer. His taste in rock and roll or comedy as expressed on his
show reveal him to be what used to be called “progressive.” In this
he is not in the least atypical of his (my own) generation.
Some variation of this description would also fit actress
Patricia Heaton, the co-star of TV’s Everybody Loves
Raymond, she too a baby boomer. Their respective fan base
includes precisely the area of the country — which is to say most
of it — that Ralph Neas likes to avoid.
Yet in a nation of increasingly well-educated people, there is a
new turn in the seemingly endless tales of liberal elites and their
snobby pretensions that go beyond their disdain with the physical
and economic (middle class) heart of America, a place that many
used to call home and now view as a place from which they had to
escape. It is a place once described to me by a liberal friend as
“the belly of the beast.” That turn can be summed up in one word:
betrayal.
Educated, culturally hip baby boomers can do what we want and
succeed — or fail — at just about anything. With one glaring
exception. Were Rush Limbaugh exactly the same but a liberal, were
Patricia Heaton gifted with all of her current success, but a
liberal — there would be no controversy to be had. But both of
these people, like Judge Smith — or others like UN Ambassador John
Bolton, Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senator Rick Santorum, Justice Clarence
Thomas and most especially like Yale and Harvard educated President
George W. Bush to name a few — are not liberals. They either were
from the beginning or they gradually became conservatives. To have
the audacity to be both a baby boomer and question the prevailing
baby boomer liberal wisdom, to actually agree with middle America
on the most important issues of the day is to risk sheer,
unmitigated fury from one’s generational peers. To do this with the
credentials of politics, the law, the media or Hollywood securely
in your background is to set off a borking, the object of which is
not to disagree but destroy.
Let’s look at a few recent examples. Limbaugh, sneered liberal
media critic Neil Gabler the other night, is a “cancer to American
discourse.” (Gee, if Rush is a cancer what must Gabler think of Fox
News — his employer? Too much to stop the checks, one guesses.)
Actress Heaton’s taped opposition to Michael J. Fox’s commercial,
snarled baby boomer gossip Charlton, makes her “an embarrassment to
evolved women.” Said the gossip to the woman who thinks it a bad
idea to entice low income women with big checks so their eggs can
be removed, cloned, used, and destroyed: “Shame on you, Patricia.
This sentiment isn’t acceptable in progressive California.” Not to
be outdone is the always thoughtful Alec Baldwin, who sniffs Sunday
in the New York Times that he should be Governor of New
York because “I’m Tocqueville compared to Schwarzenegger.”
Even funnyman David Letterman let what one must now presume to
be his funny mask slip to reveal nothing more than another angry
liberal baby boomer brimming with contempt as he spoke with his
guest (guest!!!) Bill O’Reilly, the only remotely humorous thing
said being “bonehead.” Letterman has journeyed one long way from
the heart of Indiana. Then there was the appalled tone of ABC’s
Kentucky-bred Diane Sawyer as she discussed the Limbaugh-Fox
dustup, replete with the clucking disapproval of a now very liberal
lady who lunches with the likeminded of Manhattan. There was even
the buy-in of the basic anti-Limbaugh assumption from the normally
sane Fox correspondent Douglas Kennedy as he discussed where
Limbaugh got into “trouble.”
Trouble with whom?
Neither Limbaugh nor Heaton are in trouble with a whole lot of
people who are simply dismissed by those who, like professional
borker and baby boomer Ralph Neas, shuttle between the coasts or
gravitate mainly towards one of its major urban centers.
THIS KIND OF PROBLEM HAS surfaced before in American history. Two
American presidents — LBJ and Richard Nixon, smart men both —
could more than arguably have been said to suffer real inferiority
complexes at the catcalls from their Ivy League or liberal elitist
critics.
Yet there is a considerable difference today with all of this.
It’s hard not to find a boomer involved in politics or Hollywood or
the media who does not have, one way or the other, a very good
education literally or certainly culturally. In short: there is no
conservative out there involved in the political battles of the day
who, LBJ or Nixon-like, has the slightest sense of intellectual or
cultural insecurity in taking the stands that they do. They know
their critics — well. They understand their liberal generational
peers, as Limbaugh likes to kid, with every square inch of their
gloriously naked bodies.
But is this kind of liberal animosity a good thing? Does it help
educate, inform, or move a constructive and always needed dialogue
forward when we are in the middle of a war for the nation’s
survival? Of course not. Boomer Michael J. Fox is universally
regarded as a nice guy. But if he didn’t understand what would
happen before making his disingenuous commercial, certainly he
should have gotten the point in the aftermath. Maybe he did and,
sad to say, really was just interested in scoring a few political
points for the home team. If that’s the reality of Michael J. Fox,
the nice guy disappoints.
The good thing in all of this attempt to bork Rush (and make no
mistake, the idea now and with his earlier drug addiction problem
is to bork him so thoroughly it destroys not simply his arguments
but his life — that’s what a borking is about) is that
conservatives learned something as they grew into their
conservatism.
In the War of the Boomers, what conservative boomers like Rush
Limbaugh, Patricia Heaton, John Bolton, Rick Santorum, Clarence
Thomas, George W. Bush and a boatload of others (think Condi) have
going for them that drives mean-spirited critics like a Janet
Charlton, Neil Gabler, Diane Sawyer, or Alec Baldwin to such
foaming furies is this: they don’t give a damn.
And they smile, too.
