The Ressentiment of the Reactionary Elite
Zev Chafets has padded his fawning, puddle-deep New York Times Magazine profile of Rush Limbaugh into a book, with results that are apparently so bad that World’s Nicest Reviewer Janet Maslin delivers a merciless pan. The WaPo, meanwhile, has enlisted the Good Frum to review it, with entertaining results:
“Largely decorated by Limbaugh himself, [his Palm Beach house] reflects the things and places he has seen and admired. A massive chandelier in the dining room, for example, is a replica of the one that hung in the lobby of New York’s Plaza Hotel. The vast salon is meant to suggest Versailles. The main guest suite, which I didn’t visit, is an exact replica of the Presidential Suite at the Hotel George V in Paris. There is a full suit of armor on display, as well as a life-size oil painting of El Rushbo. Fragrant candles burned throughout the house, a daily home-from-the-wars ritual.”
There is a great deal more in this vein, and not a syllable of it is meant mockingly. Yet Chafets also writes the following, with equal non-irony: “Rush wasn’t enthusiastic [about the reelection bid of George H.W. Bush]. Bush struck him as a pretty, country club moderate, an Ivy League snob.”
[...]
Chafets quotes Limbaugh telling Maureen Dowd in a 1993 interview, “You have no earthly idea how detested and hated I am. I’m not even a good circus act for the liberals in this town. . . . You can look at my calendar for the past two years and see all of the invitations. You’ll find two, both by Robert and Georgette Mosbacher.” (Robert Mosbacher was secretary of commerce under President George H.W. Bush.) Not two pages later, we hear of Limbaugh’s New York evenings with investment banker Lewis Lehrman, William F. Buckley and Henry Kissinger. And yet the aggrieved subject and biographer are fully sincere in both instances.
Limbaugh has skillfully conjured for his listeners a world in which they are disdained and despised by mysterious elites — a world in which Limbaugh’s $4,000 bottles of wine do not exclude him from the life of the common man.
This line of argument merely skims the surface of how bad the book is, but it’s certainly especially instructive. The way in which extremely wealthy and powerful conservatives have not merely portrayed themselves as endlessly put-upon victims but gotten gullible hacks like Chafets to play along is remarkable.
Four legs good. Two Oxycontin better.
Oh, come on – he used Cigar Aficionado as one of his sources for statistics! What legitimate journalist or historian doesn’t use that as a valid primary source?
What? No legitimate historian or journalist would use that kind of “source?” Oh, nevermind.
Well, at any rate that answers the question “has Saddam Hussein’s interior designer been getting any work recently?”
Which answered the question, “Has Elvis’ interior decorator been getting any work lately?”
Are we sure this isn’t a novelization of A Face in the Crowd?
It’s like a road company production of Citizen Kane, but the version where there’s no Rosebud and never has been.
[...] Post review of Zev Chafets’s Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One has already been attacked by many on the right, but his closing paragraphs make a point worth considering: Chafets acknowledges that [...]
“You have no earthly idea how detested and hated I am. I’m not even a good circus act for the liberals in this town. . . . You can look at my calendar for the past two years and see all of the invitations. You’ll find two, both by Robert and Georgette Mosbacher.”
What exactly does he expect? The guy’s entire career is based on ranting about how liberals are evil and destroying America. Why does he think liberals would want to invite him to a dinner party. And that’s before we get to his personality.
[...] The Ressentiment of the Reactionary Elite Zev Chafets has padded his fawning, puddle-deep New York Times Magazine profile of Rush Limbaugh into a book, with results that are apparently so bad that World’s Nicest Reviewer Janet Maslin delivers a merciless pan. The WaPo, meanwhile, has enlisted the Good Frum to review it, with entertaining results: … [...]
[...] Scott Lemieux at Lawyers Guns and Money [...]
The way in which extremely wealthy and powerful conservatives have not merely portrayed themselves as endlessly put-upon victims but gotten gullible hacks like Chafets to play along is remarkable.
Chafets may be a back, but he’s hardly “gullible”. He’s a right-wing Zionist neocon who knows full well how useful demagogues like Limbaugh can be in promoting his own agenda.
Rush Limbaugh’s biographer, Zev Chafets, author of Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One, talked to Mr. Media Radio on June 3, 2010, about El Rushbo’s new bride, Kathryn Rogers, and much more. Check it out by clicking HERE!
[...] don’t kid yourself, wealthy white conservatives who get excluded from apocryphal cocktail parties are the most opressed people in the world. I [...]
Somehow it’s not surprising to me that Rush would model part of his house after Versailles. I’ve always said that seeing Versailles for the first time made that whole Reign of Terror thing just a little more understandable…