Cutting The Mike On Critics

On Tuesday evening, the radio host Mark Levin opened his show with an angry shouted 10-minute monologue in which he called me (among other choice terms) a “putz,” an “a-hole,”a “frat boy,” “irrelevant,” and - ouch! - “this Canadian.”

I missed the tantrum at the time it was originally thrown, only catching up with it on Wednesday on Mark Levin’s website. You can listen yourself, right here. Warning: He’s loud!

I happened to be traveling Wednesday. About 6:30 eastern that night, I got an urgent text message from my wife: call home. I was in a meeting, picked up the message about an hour later, and telephoned anxiously. Had something bad happened? No – my teenage son had been so indignant at the Levin tirade that he had called into the show. He had spoken to the producer and demanded to be put on the air. The producer had refused. Angry words had been exchanged. My son had asked: “Is Levin afraid to debate a 15-year-old?” Yes, apparently. My wife insisted: They wouldn’t talk to Nat. So I had to call in.

We argued about this. “There's no point calling into these shows,” I said. “The host controls the mike. He rants and raves, you end up ranting and raving back - then you sound just as crazy as he does."

My wife (from whom Nat seems to have learned his debating tactics) insisted: “Are you afraid to do what a 15-year-old will do?” Okay, okay, I conceded: I’ll call.

So I did. You can listen to the exchange on Levin's site here.

I called in to make two points. First, contra Levin, I had not gratuitously insulted or abused Rush Limbaugh in my now notorious blogpost about Rush Limbaugh at CPAC. I wrote as I did to explain in the clearest possible terms why the Obama administration’s ploy of elevating Rush as the “voice, energy, and intellect” of the Republican party has been so devastatingly effective - for them. This blunt language was not meant to demean. For the record, I wrote as sympathetically as I could about Limbaugh’s personal struggles at the time they occurred, for example here.

Rush Limbaugh is made of the same human stuff as all the rest of us. His outsized talents do not protect him from mortal vulnerabilities. And if he has succumbed to such a vulnerability, that seems to me to be reason for sympathy, not mockery.

I was not mocking him in 2009 either. I was warning other conservatives against a political danger: acceding to the administration’s desire to anoint Rush as the leader of the opposition. I did so without euphemism – but then Rush himself is not one to use euphemism.

Here he is for example speaking about President Obama on January 22: “We are being told that we have to hope he succeeds, that we have to bend over, grab the ankles, bend over forward, backward, whichever, because his father was black, because this is the first black president.”

Not so nice.

Anyway that was the first point I made to Levin. But I also wanted to offer a second. In his March 3 monologue, Levin repeatedly complained that I and those who agreed with me (he cited Ross Douthat and Jonah Goldberg) looked down on Talk Radio in general – and him in particular – as somehow intellectually inferior. Print can only inadequately convey Levin’s sneering and resentful tone as he warmed to this theme, building up to a ringing conclusion:

“And by the way, I will compare my education, my writings, my intellect to any of these buffoons. Any of them! Any of them!”

I told Levin, it seems to me that there’s a contradiction here: If you want recognition for your intellect, you don’t use your airtime to shout into the microphone like an unhoused madman yelling at the passing cars.

Sad to say, this did not soothe Levin, who alternated between complaining about insults and hurling them himself, taking refuge in the mute button every time he lost the point.

Well it’s his show and I hope it was an entertaining half hour. And I’ll say for the record that it was gracious of Levin to allow me the time. (Although I’ll also say that Levin is nowhere near as polite nor as coherent as my last sparring partner, Rachel Maddow. Maddow can argue without screaming, and she does not feel it necessary to brag on air about how clever she is.)

As I hung up, I wondered what it would be like to be a new listener, a nonpolitical person, tuning in to Mark Levin’s show for the first time. The ferocious hatred and anger – the shouting at people not present to reply, the self-pitying complaints against a world that does not pay enough respect: it’s an ugly performance. Has Levin ever convinced any listener of anything that listener did not already believe? And of those who come to the show uncertain of what they believe - mustn't the vast majority come away from these rage-filled narcissistic tirades thinking, "If that's conservatism, I want no part of it"?