Where’s the Left’s Reply to Limbaugh? : A list of errors will roll off him like it did off Reagan. Only a political challenge can dent him.

A dedicated band of masochists has gone over tapes of Rush Limbaugh’s performances and flagged some of the errors and distortions of reality pouring out each day from this self-advertised “truth detector.”

On the basis of this research, the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting says that “journalists, in particular, have an obligation to challenge Limbaugh’s brand of hysteria. Someone who has amassed a powerful political following through the regular use of half-truth and distortion is begging for tough media scrutiny.”

When I first heard about the FAIR study, I was puzzled. Why look for mistakes? The challenge would be to find if he’d ever got anything right. Limbaugh is virtually incapable of uttering a sentence without hijacking the truth. FAIR’s itemization just nips at the heels of his follies.

Limbaugh: “Don’t let the liberals deceive you into believing that a decade of sustained growth without inflation in America (in the Reagan 1980s) resulted in a bigger gap between the haves and the have-nots. Figures compiled by the Congressional Budget Office dispel that myth.”

FAIR: “CBO figures do nothing of the sort. Its numbers for after-tax incomes show that in 1980, the richest fifth of our country had eight times the income of the poorest fifth. By 1990, the ratio was more than 20 to 1.”

Limbaugh: “It has not been proven nicotine is addictive, the same with cigarettes causing emphysema and other diseases.”

FAIR: “Surgeon General C. Everett Koop’s 618-page 1988 report on nicotine addiction left no doubt on the subject.”

The error is to suppose that zealous itemizing of Limbaugh’s errors will make any difference.

Ronald Reagan proved the opposite once and for all. Year after year he trotted out his old favorites: welfare queens in Chicago shopping by limo; more environmental toxins put out by nature than by every industrial facility on the planet; more American Indians alive today than at the time of Columbus, etc., etc. (Many of these have been plucked by Limbaugh from the same old barrel of hokum.)

Diligent researchers tracked down Ron’s bloopers. Newspapers devoted long features to them. It never made any difference. Unabashed, Ron went on recycling the bilge, just as he’d done ever since the basic anthology was put together for him at the dawn of his political career.

Liberals used to think Reagan fooled the people. I’m not so sure. In campaign seasons I followed him around and it was clear enough that many in his audiences had already discounted for the fact that the old fellow had most of his stories wrong.

It didn’t matter to them. They were there for the act and to catch the flavor. You could prove a hundred times over that welfare recipients in Chicago never shopped by limo and it made no difference. They were ready to get riled up by welfare and Reagan had the handy anecdote there to sum up their concerns. This is what demagogues, whether Reagan or Limbaugh, do. They address peoples’ concerns, shape reality to suit the prejudices of their audience and press their own agenda.

Demagogues aren’t done in by careful itemization of error. They fizzle out because people weary of the act or because the political equation changes or because they face a real political challenge.

There’s almost no one out there fighting the political battles with Limbaugh in language ordinary people can understand and enjoy. If National Public Radio wasn’t a bunch of terrified elitist liberals with basically the same agenda as Limbaugh in more polite language they’d field a tough talk show with a radical democrat, small d.

Limbaugh is open to challenge precisely because he’s such a faker where it truly counts, not in his facts but in whom he claims to speak for. He says he’s the champion of the ordinary Joe, which is nonsense. He speaks for the elites, which is why the Republican high brass love him so. He’s a safe demagogue, sedately lunging about on the end of his chain, singing hymns to the innocence of the tobacco companies and assuring the small-business people that the Reagan tide lifted them in the ‘80s along with the super-rich.

So why can’t the liberals field their champion to go up against Limbaugh? The problem is that on issue after issue--welfare, military spending, crime--both sides are in sync, which is why Limbaugh and the right have to invent or recycle all the personal gossip about Clinton to show there’s a devil in the White House rather than someone who’s doing basically what they want.