Rush Limbaugh named kids’ Author of the Year

Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio commentator who is a kind of a boogeyman to liberals, was honored Wednesday night with a children’s book award.

Limbaugh won the Author of the Year prize in the Children’s Choice Book Awards for his book “Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims: Time-Travel Adventures with Exceptional Americans.”

In accepting the award, Limbaugh was typically combative (if somewhat more subtly than usual standards).

“I love America. I wish everybody did,” he said. “I hope everybody will. It’s one of the most fascinating stories in human history ... and it’s a delight and it’s an opportunity to try to share that story with young people so they can grow and learn to love and appreciate the country in which they’re growing up and will someday run and lead and inherit.”

The winner was chosen by online voters. The five finalists in the category were all chosen for their place atop bestseller lists.

On March 25, not long after the finalists were announced, Limbaugh went on his radio show (which has a daily audience of several million) and asked his listeners to vote for him.

Limbaugh said: “If your children have read ‘Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims’ or if they are reading ‘Rush Revere and the First Patriots,’ second book ... and if they would like to vote, simply go to RushLimbaugh.com and we’ve got a link that will take you right to the voting page.”

The awards are organized by the Children’s Book Council, a trade association, and Every Child a Reader, a nonprofit foundation. When Limbaugh was announced as a finalist, many liberal commentators were predictably flummoxed.

“Who would inflict a book by Rush Limbaugh on a child they loved?” John Amato asked on the website Crooks and Liars.

At Kirkus Reviews, Limbaugh’s nomination for the award prompted editor Vicky Smith to take a new look at the Limbaugh books. She found poor production qualities and a notable lack of proofreading -- all of which is common, she wrote, in the growing “celebrity publishing” genre, which includes “insta–bestsellers by the likes of Jerry Seinfeld, Tori Spelling and Jay Leno.”

“Most of these books resemble Limbaugh’s in approach to quality control if nothing else: Hastily put together, they are hustled onto the market with as little attention as humanly possible paid (time is money, after all) and with the knowledge that star power will carry consumers past such minor flaws as incoherent narrative arcs and terrible prose,” Smith wrote. “The Rush Revere books have clearly been propelled onto the shelves by such thinking.”