Limbaugh proves he’s no buffoon

SEE, I TOLD YOU SO, by Rush Limbaugh, Pocket Books, 364 pages, $24.

A merry heart doeth good like medicine. Not, however, when the practitioner is jolly Rush Limbaugh and the patient is a liberal. But I digress. Suffice to say that the nation’s No. 1 radio talk show host is back in print with his second fast-selling book in whose introduction he proclaims with his customary bravura: “Like everything else I touch, this book is on the cutting edge of societal evolution. It explodes the hypocrisy, fraud, and deceit of the liberalism that is holding this nation captive. It shatters the lies of the Clinton administration that are routinely covered up by the dominant media. And it sets the agenda of conservative thought through the remainder of what historians will someday refer to as the Era of Limbaugh.”

Having fired his opening volley, he follows through with 27 chapters bearing such rousing rubrics as “The New Democrat, Yeah, Yeah,” “The Dumbing Down of America,” and “There They Go Again.” He puts under close scrutiny the man he holds responsible for blueprinting Clinton’s “Rebuild America” economic program, Derek Shearer, a former Tom Hayden-Jane Fonda ally, who invented the term “economic democracy,” a euphemism for socialism. Insists Limbaugh, “Shearer, you should know, along with Labor Secretary Robert Reichhhhhh and socialized-medicine czar Ira Magaziner, has been a longtime Bill Clinton confidant, going back to their days together at Oxford in the late 1960s.”

Rush contends that Clinton greased the skids to the White House with his stealth campaign of portraying himself as a moderate (a.k.a. “New”) Democrat whose promise included a middle-class tax cut, deficit reduction, welfare reform, federal spending cuts, and a massive Reaganesque slashing of the bureaucracy. “He lied,” says Rush flatly. “After all, he was and remains unencumbered by the constraints of conscience and, aside from me, there was no one around to hold him accountable.” By way of a coda to this chapter there are seven pages of documentation setting forth proofs of Clinton’s “avalanche of falsehoods.”

Like a swallow swooping to the eaves of a barn, Rush’s book homes in on the subject of education. “People were better educated before the American Revolution with no public funding than they are now, when we spend in excess of $100,000 per classroom,” he points out. “The present-day public school system is a failed monopoly.” He believes that the solution to the problem calls for a return to the old standard of excellence, accountability of the school establishment, and the revival of success through competition.

Even before their daughter, Chelsea, was enrolled in an exclusive private school, Bill and Hillary had begun to unroll their extreme leftist blueprint for rank-and-file America, declares the author. It included, he continues, gays in the military, women in combat, federally subsidized abortion, fetal experimentation, “a jobs stimulus package, ostensibly to create make-work government jobs, but in reality to pay off special interest constituencies, and universal health care.”

In his droll “Politically Correct Liberal Lexicon,” he showcases definitions for such terms as “Boy Scouts of America: subversive paramilitary organization; workers: what liberals, socialists, and communists call employees; and taxes: lifeblood of liberalism.”

Liberals have learned that Rush Limbaugh cannot be shrugged off as an entertaining buffoon. Behind the laughter he evokes is a brilliant, dedicated conservatist who has rallied millions of Americans to the cause of a return to traditional values and family unity. A “harmless little fuzzball”? Hardly. In “See, I Told You So” he is a lion on the prowl.

Bea Goodrich’s reviews are a monthly Books in Review feature. She also writes a review column and is the author of the award-winning nature series, “Happy Hollow Stories by Judge Tortoise.”