Wednesday, October 15, 2003

Finally, Rush Limbaugh is doing something useful for the nation's public discourse.

He is giving his critics the chance to rise above their basest instincts and grant him a degree of humanity that Limbaugh himself has gleefully denied to others in his situation, not to mention those on the other side of the political fence.

By announcing on his radio show last week that he was a drug addict on his way to rehab, the right-wing icon left himself open to a menu of lip-smacking charges from critics.

Will those who've been wounded in the past by Limbaugh's triple-D formula (demean, distort, destroy) do what he would have done had the shoe been on the other foot? Will they revel in the guy's weakness, pound on his hypocrisy, brand him with a catchy, insulting name and relentlessly demand his eviction from civilized society?

Or will they take the high road, express sympathy for his predicament and wish him the best in his recovery?

Liberal writer/jokester Al Franken, noting on TV that Limbaugh had called his late friend Jerry Garcia "a dead doper," was not about to cut the man any slack.

One might have expected as much from the author of a book called "Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot," just as the NFL might have expected Limbaugh to eventually make the kind of preposterous remark -- about a black quarterback, as it happened -- that cost him his spot on the "NFL Sunday Countdown."

But in much of the other commentary I've seen so far, people are resisting the temptation to gloat in public. Instead, their statements tend to go like this: I don't like the guy but he's human like the rest of us, so here's hoping/praying he gets the help he needs, and maybe it'll make him a little more forgiving of the foibles of others -- especially others struggling with drug problems, for whom he has long preached no mercy.

I suppose that's possible. Maybe it takes a long fall from a high perch to knock some humility into someone like Limbaugh, who has had nothing but success with his bombastic broadcasting and nothing to apologize for as long as the marketplace is the arbiter of good and bad.

Maybe, when the dust settles, we'll see some kind of pay-it-forward result, with the forgiven forgiving in turn.

But what would that do to Limbaugh's radio program? His fans like him the way he is, and that has made him a very rich and powerful man. Would listeners still tune in for a kinder, gentler show?

Try to imagine the NASCAR crowd around the poker table.

"Didja hear Rush today? He said this country needs less jail cells and more drug treatment for poor people!"

"Yeah, and shorter sentences for nonviolent users!"

"I know! And crack should be treated the same as OxyContin!"

"Ditto!"

Kind of disorienting, isn't it?

Such speculation brings to mind the late Lee Atwater, whose savage brand of campaigning got George H.W. Bush elected president in 1988 and earned him the job of chairman of the Republican Party.

"A reputation as a fierce and ugly campaigner has dogged me," Atwater once conceded. "While I didn't invent 'negative politics,' I am one of its most ardent practitioners."

Then, at age 39, he developed a brain tumor that ended his career and led him to seek forgiveness from those he'd wronged.

"... in 1988, fighting [Michael] Dukakis, I said that I 'would strip the bark off the little bastard' and 'make Willie Horton his running mate,' " he wrote in a first-person article in Life magazine in 1991.

"I am sorry for both statements: the first for its naked cruelty, the second because it makes me sound racist, which I am not."

Atwater died that year at 40. But what if he had somehow survived and been able to work again? Would the Republicans have let the chastened man anywhere near its campaign apparatus?

A drug problem is not a brain tumor, of course, and there's no telling how Limbaugh's drama will play out. He could come out the other side a changed man or as mean as ever. If the latter, look for precious little forgiveness and a whole lot of public gloating.

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