‘Limbaugh Challenge’
Re “Take the Limbaugh Challenge. I dare you.” Opinion, March 29
I can’t tell if Andrew Klavan’s piece is serious or satire. If satire, bravo -- it brilliantly captures the reasons why I can’t listen to Rush Limbaugh for more than five minutes. Name-calling and put-downs, for most people, went out of fashion after middle school.
If serious, it brilliantly captures the reasons why anyone who cares about moving this country beyond the disastrous policies and divisive tactics of the last eight years won’t waste their time with Limbaugh’s caustic form of entertainment.
Andrew Maltz
Sherman Oaks
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It’s nice to be informed by Andrew Klavan that I am possessed of a “scrawny chest” and “quivering liberal feet,” and that, in addition to these physical attributes, I suffer from the grievous moral failing of being a “lowdown, yellow-bellied, lily-livered intellectual coward.”
Klavan is certain that anyone who reads The Times is lying if he claims to have listened to Rush Limbaugh, yet we are supposed to take him at his word when he says he listens to left-leaning commentators. (A partial list of the radical outlets to which he objects: CBS, ABC, The Times -- heck, Andy, you forgot the PennySaver!) Why should we believe him, when he brands us as liars?
Some of us have heard plenty of Rush, whether Klavan wants to believe it or not, and still remain unbelievers in the sanctity of his pronouncements. In fact, one of the aspects of Rush’s style of “journalism” that I find objectionable is the sort of over-the-top bullying and disparaging meanness Klavan demonstrates.
It’s too bad that Limbaugh’s success has now spawned a host of imitators on the left.
Rich Eames
Los Angeles
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It’s obvious that Klavan has listened to El Rushbo even less often than we “intellectual cowards” do. How else to explain his absurd contention that he has “never heard the man utter a single racist, hateful or stupid word”?
I hope that, for his own sake, Klavan’s novel was written for very, very “young adults.” Nobody with a decent high school education could find much of value in anything he says.
Robert C. Von Bargen
Santa Monica
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I have listened to Rush since 1991 (and Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham) and find that in their pursuit to conquer and divide the country on issues of great importance, their message gets lost.
If Republicans and right-leaning journalists don’t find a way soon to get their message across in a constructive way, they will be flattened by the Obama Express, which really would not be good for the country.
We need to find a better way than Limbaugh’s. In its present state, the conservative message is divisive and nonproductive.
Andrew B. Wright
Claremont
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Like the Shakespearean jester, Klavan speaks the uncomfortable truth. Marginalizing Limbaugh is so much more expedient than considering his ideas.
Klavan does make a singular error in his otherwise insightful essay. He assumes that readers of The Times are mostly liberal. That would contradict his theory that, in contrast, conservatives actually do read opposing viewpoints.
As a conservative who has read The Times for 30 years, often with great pain, I can understand the misperception. Reading Klavan’s essay and enjoying it immensely, I too actually had a hard time imagining many Times readers making it through to the feisty end.
Bravo to The Times for a nice bit of balance. I wonder if the readers will notice.
Jordan Smith
Burbank
