A One-Man Free Enterprise Zone : THE WAY THINGS OUGHT TO BE, <i> By Rush Limbaugh (Pocket Books: $22; 304 pp.)</i>

For someone who spends so much time exposing the hidden agendas of dangerous left-wing kooks, you’d think Rush Limbaugh would do a better job of hiding his own cherished causes.

But as you wander wide-eyed through “The Way Things Ought to Be,” trying to keep up with each new broadside against environmental wackos and bleeding-heart do-gooders, it’s easy to discern what’s really on Rush’s mind.

The real mission of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals? According to Rush: “Destroying capitalism, not saving animals.”

The key to cleaning up the environment? “Unfettered free enterprise, our system of reward.”

The hidden agenda behind the efforts of homeless advocates “To point a finger of blame at the achievers of America and the free enterprise system.”

Detect a pattern?

You can bet you won’t hear Rush complain about our sagging economy. Finally a star at 41, thanks to his popular syndicated radio program (now supplemented by a nightly TV show), Limbaugh has emerged as a fiery defender of the Reagan-era Trinity: capitalism, self-reliance and personal initiative.

The Reagan years were certainly good to Rush. By decade’s end, he had emerged as a true media-age success story. When else could a failed rock deejay have been reinvented as a major-league political player, courted by George Bush, cast on Nightline as an environmental expert, and subject of the requisite 8,000-word Vanity Fair profile?

The Round Mound of the Republican Right, Rush is the conservative equivalent of John Belushi in “Animal House,” slicing through liberal pieties the way Belushi plowed through a cafeteria line. Contemptuous of feminists, sneering at the media and spoofing multicultural bozos, he’s a corn-fed P. J O’Rourke, sharing the Ivy League-bred humorist’s contempt for compassion and do-gooderism.

Rush, however, lacks O’Rourke’s rapier wit. He doesn’t thread the needle--he hits his targets with a thick plank.

Full of scorn for Teddy Kennedy, Rush regularly plays a takeoff on Dion’s “The Wanderer,” retitled “The Philanderer.” Sample lyrics: “Well my views are on the left, got a bimbo on the right, only God will know where I’ll be passing out tonight.”

Though born into a comfortable Republican family, Rush loathes “rich, guilty liberals” who’ve never had to grovel for a paycheck. In fact, after working in radio for nearly 20 years before striking it rich (in 1983 he was making only $18,000 a year), Rush has become a one-man Free Enterprise Zone.

Rush’s translation of free enterprise: To the winner go the spoils. Whether you’re talking about the homeless or spotted owls, it’s survival of the fittest, baby.

“If a spotted owl can’t adapt, does the earth really need that particular species?” Rush wonders. “Do you hear anyone making the case that the earth would be better off if dinosaurs were still roaming the planet?”

For all his digs at the “gullible, infantile left,” Rush’s real anger is reserved for slackers, people of privilege who slide by without real jobs (like leaders of the ACLU). Even when he unleashes a whopper, comparing the leadership of the civil-rights movement to the Soviet Communist Party, his beef isn’t just with their politics but also with their lack of respect for the work ethic.

Even when he takes on Hollywood, what bugs him isn’t just movieland’s ridicule of family values and heterosexuality (how Hollywood promotes a homosexual agenda when it portrays gays almost exclusively as homicidal lesbians is a mystery left unexplained). He sees Hollywood as--gasp!--anti-capitalist.

“They disparage American heroes,” he complains, saying businessmen (his favorite heroes) are always portrayed on TV as greedy crooks or egomaniacs.

But enough with the issues. You don’t become Big Guy of Talk Radio by touting the work ethic.

What’s helped Rush achieve culture-hero status--and what’s attracted a heavily male audience--involves something more elusive, something rooted in his outrageous jibes about pushy women, homeless fakers and Hollywood poseurs.

Armed with a Stone Age sense of humor, Rush is the ultimate guilty pleasure for guys weary of being bound by the cultural straitjacket of political correctness. After Anita Hill testified against Clarence Thomas, Rush suggested a movie of the Senate hearings. Possible titles: “Driving Miss Sleazy,” “I Wish I Had Three Men and a Baby.”

Instead of hanging up on listeners, Rush performs caller “abortions,” using a sound-effect that mixes a vacuum-cleaner roar with a seven-second recording of a scream. Feminists are immortalized in Feminazi Trading Cards, complete with such vital statistics as waist, hips and number of abortions.

Wonder why these bits sound familiar? “When I drive to work, I always have one big decision,” says a card-carrying liberal pal. “Who do I tune in--Rush or Howard Stern?”

Rush and Howard, radio’s two hottest personalities, share an astounding array of favorite targets: Rev. Jesse Jackson, Teddy Kennedy, New York City Mayor David Dinkins, gays, Rodney King rioters, the homeless, the media, the federal government and tree-huggers (although Howard would be the first to hoot at Rush’s creationist claim that man can’t destroy a planet created by God).

What’s especially revealing is the way both men seem threatened and confounded by the opposite sex. Stern retaliates by treating women as pliant bimbos, bringing them into his studio to be undressed, ogled or spanked.

Rush responds with a poison dart, proposing the formation of a First Cavalry Amazon Battalion composed of women with PMS.

For anyone who came of age on a college campus in the 1970s, these jabs have a familiar ring. They recall the nasty, adolescent fury of the National Lampoon, which once ran a lavish pictorial featuring the winners of its Nude Photo of Your Girl Friend With a Bucket Over Her Head contest.

Edited by P. J. O’Rourke, the Lampoon was the missing link between ‘60s anti-war alienation and ‘80s Reagan Democrats. It’s easy to imagine a youthful Rush-let soaking up such satires as “The Hipe Report: A Purported Study of Female Sexuality,” “Sgt. Shriver’s Bleeding Hearts Club Band” and O’Rourke’s own savage “Foreigners Around the World” (Russian racial characteristic: “Brutish, dumpy, boorish lard-bags in cardboard double-breasted suits who make bicycles out of cement and can be sent to Siberia for listening to the wrong radio station”).

As it’s turned out, Rush has far more in common with the Lampoon’s anti-Establishment fervor than anyone would’ve imagined. It’s just that he sees himself as a rebel against today’s Establishment: Dan Quayle’s much-feared Liberal Cultural Elite.

Rush’s biggest drawback is that he’s an Oliver Stone conservative: He imagines conspiracies everywhere. Tree-huggers are really disgruntled Marxists. Parents who let schools distribute condoms must be abortion-on-demand advocates.

He’s also wildly inconsistent. One minute he’s condemning CNN reporters for haughtily refusing to debrief the Army on their time behind enemy lines in Baghdad, saying: “They were American journalists and they can’t take sides?” Yet two pages later, Rush lectures: “The job of a journalist is to chronicle events, not to stand up and cheer for one side or the other.”

Oh.

When all is said and done, the key to Rush’s provocative presence is somehow embedded in his fear of rejection. As a kid, he didn’t date or have a girlfriend. Even today, his relations with the opposite sex remain in a Cold War-like state of suspicion and distrust. Twice-divorced, Rush informed Vanity Fair he still isn’t dating.

“Relationships are fantasies to me now,” he said. “When I hear that women are interested in me, I don’t believe it.”

Twice bitten, now very shy, Rush argues that the real message of “Murphy Brown’s” famous motherhood episode was that “women don’t need men, shouldn’t desire them and that total fulfillment can be achieved without men or husbands.”

Wherever you look in “Ought to Be” you find sexual tension, with Rush in one corner, bare-knuckled feminists and wacko Hollywood-actress activists in the other.

There’s clearly only one solution to this impasse--Rush needs a gal.

He even gave Vanity Fair his specifications: “I want a woman who is self-sufficient, who can entertain herself without me, who’s successful at what she does and knows what she wants.”

Who could possibly be formidable enough to stimulate Rush’s intellect and tickle his senses? Hey, how about a blind date with Camille Paglia? She’s waved off Susan Faludi as “stupid,” labeled Naomi Wolf “an opportunist careerist teacher’s pet” and dismissed feminists as “Soviet totalitarians” and “weepy, whiny dogmatists.”

In a world of witless bozos, they’re the perfect match: She’s academia’s Intellectual Amazon, he’s radio’s Prince of the Politically Incorrect.

Give it some thought, Rush. You and Camille. Just imagine the pillow talk.