Instapunk has more to say along the same lines, and he is right. Limbaugh is upbeat, a moderate rather than a strong conservative, and an honest debater, using facts and logic. His program does have occasional one-liners and mockeries, but those are mere flavoring to what is essentially intellectual argument, hyperbole and wit rather than the main course. He is exceptionally clear-- so clear, in fact, that when his argument is wrong, it is relatively easy to see, because he has laid out the chain of reasoning. [permalink: 04.06.29b.htm]Limbaugh is not most of the things he is accused of being. He is not a ranter, but a talker. He takes remarkably few calls. It would be physically impossible for anyone to rant for three hours a day without relying on callers as targets of opportunity. The show's format simply doesn't allow for that. He is not particularly religious, either, as his more than occasional salty references make clear. He does not hate women. Men who keep marrying women may not have figured them out entirely, but they still seem to regard the opposite sex as worth the effort. He is not irrational. The general course of his show is a fairly spontaneously developed line of argumentation about the point at hand, interrupted by digressions but rarely derailed by them. He likes thinking. He likes hearing himself think out loud. And 20 million listeners like to hear him do it.
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