OK, Who likes Rush? Let's hear why

There's no left in this country. There's middle, right, and far right. For left, you need to look at other countries.

Rush is in no way an entertainer. Read sites like freerepublic.com. They worship him. He is the literal and spiritual leader of the Republican party.

When he placed a picture of 13-year-old Chelsea Clinton on the air and asked if his audience knew there was a White House dog, or when he called veterans of the Iraq war who supported ending it "phony soldiers", or when he compared torture of Iraqi prisoners to a fraternity initiation, that wasn't entertainment.

Comments like those are designed to motivate and incite his conservative base, not to make people laugh. He is THE leader of the modern GOP. And if you don't believe that, ask all the Republican leaders who've been forced to apologize to him.

And, FYI, the so-called liberal media has been proven time and time again to be nothing but a myth.

Michael wrote: " I just don't relate to the mindset that rejects/embraces political positions based on the messenger's demeanor."

I relate to it. Political positions can be very hard to evaluate for oneself. A serious evaluation requires the ablity to predict the consequences of things that most experts are unable to predict the consequences of. Evaluating whether the person promoting a position is trustworthy or honest, however, is much easier. So much easier that one might think we had evolved special skills to do so...

This used to frustrate the heck out of me back in my science-nerd days, when I thought it was the listeners' duty to ignore all social factors and evaluate the ideas being presented as 'rationally' as if we were computers the propositions were being typed into. But in fact, the more I studied, the more I realized I was incapable of doing such analysis for any but a tiny subset of ideas in which I had specialized for years. Yet my trackrecord for deciding whether the speaker was honest was much better. So that is one method I use now, when confronted with a policy position on which I must take a stand and which I know I am not capable of rigorously evaluating. It's not perfect, but it's better than pretending I can analyze things I can't.

Complaining that it's not fair to adherents of a position for people like me to require that they make sure that position is advocated by honest, reliable persons is sort of like complaining that people like you require logical argument and data. We both demand the information we find most useful for making decisions.

I think that the larger issue with Rush is the lack of leadership in the GOP. I think that it is a time of transition and rediscovery for the GOP. Two factions that seem to be loving it right now are the Dems and Rush. Somehow the GOP needs to wrestle control from these two beneficiaries of this silliness and find a message that it wants to communicate.