Recent Conservative Outcry Reeks of Liberal Leanings

OK, let’s get started. My friends, here is a tale you won’t believe, but I’m not making this up.

You’ve all probably heard of this man -- rich guy, famous guy, important friends, smart man, everything going for him. He made it big on the airwaves, making fun of people he doesn’t like. Once, on TV, he says, “Did you know there’s a White House dog?” and puts up a picture of Chelsea Clinton, 13 years old. A funny guy.

Now this man, who told millions of listeners eight years ago that “too many whites are getting away with drug use,” that it’s time to “convict them and send them up the river” -- folks, I am quoting right there -- this man now admits he is addicted to something they call hillbilly heroin, OxyContin. I think that’s worth passing on.

All right -- quick break.

Actually, the break will last about 30 days. That’s how long radio host Rush Limbaugh says he’ll be in rehab to break his addiction to pain pills. Or, if things go badly for Limbaugh in what he says is an official investigation, the break might go on for years, depending on prosecutors and Florida’s sentencing guidelines.

Limbaugh’s radio colleagues and myriad fans are pleading for tolerance and patience, asking people to please withhold their judgment until all the facts are in.

Why start now, guys?

The old saying is that a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged.

The new saying -- because I just made it up -- is that a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted. Iran-Contra leading man Oliver North -- patriot, conservative, talk-show host -- invoked that pinko 5th Amendment in that radical Bill of Rights, and when his felony conviction was overturned on what GOP Sen. John Warner called a “technicality,” some incensed Republicans called Warner a traitor for saying so.

On the same 1995 show when Limbaugh demanded that more white people go to prison for drug use, he said this about crime: “ ... this country appears to be tolerant, forgive and forget.... You go out and commit the worst murder in the world and you just say you’re sorry.... We’re becoming too tolerant, folks.”

You know how it goes, Mr. Limbaugh: One man’s tolerance is another man’s justice.

If worse comes to worst, I wonder which Limbaugh would find more intolerable: doing hard time, or getting leniency and a suspended sentence from one of those liberal judges he’s railed about?

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The Limbaugh news was the perfect coda to a California governor’s election that was short on news but long on entertainment.

Limbaugh demurs that he’s a showman, a talk-show host, not a journalist.

That’s true. He’s never put in the reporter’s shoe-leather of Journalism 101, covering a fire, interviewing zoning commissioners, reporting on a trial, never had to write an obituary or follow the tedious paper trail of a fraud. “Entertainer” is good cover for hyperbole and error -- even “mendacity,” as former Michigan Republican Gov. William Milliken once characterized the Limbaugh set.

The entertainers declare that what they do isn’t news at all. Yet the ranks of people who say they get their “news” from entertainment shows is on the rise, which is like trying to get your daily protein requirement by eating a hundred peanut butter cookies.

Arnold Schwarzenegger knew this when he booked himself not on hard-news interviews, but on the sets of congenial chat-shows (Larry King), of comedy (Jay Leno), of friends (Oprah Winfrey).

Why did Schwarzenegger get a solo, and not the other 134 candidates?

Partly because broadcast’s fairness doctrine, instituted in 1949 to make sure reasonable opposing views get aired, was abandoned in 1987 -- just before Limbaugh inaugurated the Age of Rant Radio.

Congress has tried to restore the doctrine, but Limbaugh fans, among others, swamped Congress with protests. (I’m puzzled: If the broadcast media are so liberal, wouldn’t the fairness doctrine be a good thing, because it would force them to air the other side?)

And candidate Schwarzenegger was free to appear on Howard Stern’s louche radio show because the FCC declared Stern’s to be a “bona fide news interview program,” and thus not obligated to invite the other 134 candidates to be interviewed about news issues, like their policies on lap-dancing.

The L.A. Times wrote dozens of critical stories about Gray Davis’ pathological fund-raising, his cronyism with contributors and pay-for-play politics. I pointed out that the most dangerous real estate in California was between Gray Davis and a campaign contribution.

But The Times wrote about Schwarzenegger’s vulgar gropings, prompting the candidate to confess to treating women badly, and oh my, suddenly talk radio rushed to defend this poor, world-famous millionaire from the wicked, wicked press.

A colleague at a children’s birthday party in Woodland Hills on Sunday found himself defending The Times’ story. One woman cut him short with a wave of the hand: “It’s not that I don’t believe the allegations. I’m sure they’re true. And he’s probably done worse. I just don’t care.”

Voters don’t have to care. But they are obliged as voters to know, which is why this paper wrote about Davis’ money-mongering, too, and why it joined the conservative American Spectator magazine in breaking the Bill Clinton “Troopergate” sex story, and on and on. (Just where do you think the comics get the raw material for their Davis and Clinton and Schwarzenegger jokes? They pay their four bits and buy a newspaper, that’s where.)

Limbaugh and his radio empire will survive his confession. Schwarzenegger did. William Bennett, author of “The Book of Virtues” and “The Death of Outrage,” the man who gambled reported millions compulsively, ‘fessed up and is still on the rubber-rooster circuit. Lawrence Kudlow, who was Ronald Reagan’s chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget, acknowledged in the 1990s that he was a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, and he’s got a show on CNBC. Just about the only difference between their vices and Bill Clinton’s seems to be that it’s not whether you do it, but that you confess to it.

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If Howard Stern’s show really is news, then perhaps I’ve got to reassess my career priorities. Maybe I’ll give up this gig and do something big, something that matters, something that really influences the hearts and minds of millions upon millions of Americans.

I think I’ll draw a comic strip.

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Patt Morrison’s columns appear Mondays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is patt. morrison@latimes.com