Limbaugh's Lies about Bowdoin College

Yesterday on his radio show, Rush Limbaugh read a Wall Street Journal article summarizing the National Association of Scholars (NAS) study about Bowdoin, and quoted the finding that Bowdoin doesn’t require history majors to take an American history class.

Limbaugh declared:

So a history major at Bowdoin College is taught about the intrinsic discrimination against blacks, women, gays, lesbians, transgender, bisexuals. That’s all they are taught. A history major coming out of Bowdoin College is not taught for one minute about the American founding. There is not one moment of traditional American history taught, and this is just the history department. What’s taught is how immoral and unjust America has been since its founding and how its founding featured institutional racism, segregation, sexism, homophobia, and all that.

The NAS Report doesn’t say a single word about what is actually taught in Bowdoin’s history classes, so Limbaugh’s claim that history majors are “not taught for one minute about the American founding” is simply a lie.

NAS president Peter Wood wrote to me in response to my questions about Limbaugh’s comments that Limbaugh “blurred a couple of points. A history major at Bowdoin CAN graduate without taking ‘one minute’ of formal coursework on the American founding. History majors are not required to take any American history.”

But, Wood added, “American history courses are, of course, offered. Whether it is accurate to say ‘traditional American history’ is not taught depends, of course, on what weight to give the word ‘traditional.’ I’d say that the generalization is fairly accurate in the sense that the Bowdoin History Department is thoroughly imbued with the spirit and the practice of teaching social history, which is conceived of as a repudiation of the methods and aims of traditional history.”

I think Wood is wrong, because even in history courses taught with an emphasis on social history, some traditional history is still taught. Limbaugh’s assertion of “not one moment” is simply unsupported by the facts.

Limbaugh made a very common intellectual error: the assumption that students don’t learn something unless it’s required. Unfortunately, it’s the same error made by the NAS itself, in calling its report, “What Does Bowdoin Teach?” But nothing in the report actually analyzes what goes on in Bowdoin’s classes, because the NAS didn’t study any of that. Instead, they looked at the titles of classes taught, and then imagined, like Limbaugh, that they could use their psychic powers to assume what was taught and how it was taught.

Alex Williams, a recent Bowdoin graduate, wrote a critique of the accuracy of the NAS study (pdf) in which he noted that while he was a student at Bowdoin, the history classes taught included HIST 233c (American Society in the New Nation, 1763–1840) and HIST 274c (The Shot Heard ‘Round the World: The History of the American Revolution). Even without the class devoted solely to the American Revolution, Limbaugh’s “not taught for one minute about the American founding” would be a lie. And the NAS makes no such claim.

Because Bowdoin tends not to require classes, it’s easy to smear the college by denouncing them for failing to require a certain course. But in reality, Bowdoin’s approach is a wise one. As an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I avoided the survey courses beloved by the NAS like the plague, and sought out the kind of small specialized seminars taught at Bowdoin. The survey classes were taught in large lecture halls with uninterested students and frustrated professors, they were dumbed down and largely repeated the same failed survey classes everyone took in high school and elementary school. Bowdoin shouldn’t be condemned for being one of the rare colleges to liberate its students from the stupidity of survey courses; they should be imitated as a model for what higher education could be.

Limbaugh also attacked Bowdoin’s first-year seminars (which were mistakenly referred to as year-long by the Wall Street Journal):

Now, the students at Bowdoin College are required to take a year-long seminar as freshmen. They get to choose from 37 different offerings, such as “Affirmative Action in US Society,” or “the Fictions of Freedom,” or “Racism,” or “Queer Gardens,” or “the Sexual Life of Colonialism,” or “the Modern Western Prostitutes.” They have to take one of those courses, as a seminar, but they’re not taught anything about the American founding other than it was racist and immoral.

Actually, among the first-year seminars at Bowdoin were classes with titles such as “Political Leadership,” “Human Being and Citizen,” and “Power and Participation in American Politics.” Attacking the first-year seminars at Bowdoin, the NAS admits, “Some of these courses are solid,” but it condemns some of them for being too specialized, based strictly on the title and a vague description. However, even the NAS would never make the absurd that Bowdoin students are “not taught anything about the American founding…” Peter Wood told me, “I think he is wrong that none of them teach anything about the American founding.”

Limbaugh also tried to claim that his misleading attacks on Bowdoin College reflect all of higher education: “People are going to say, ‘Whoa, that’s unbelievable!’ It’s not the only place. You think it’s the only college?”

Limbaugh blames this kind of education for Obama’s election and the destruction of America as we know it: “It has been happening every day for tens of years. Slowly creeping toward the left’s utopia.” This is the great conspiracy imagined by the far right, and it explains their anti-intellectual hatred of education.

Crossposted at Academe Blog.

Did Rush Limbaugh Breaks NYC Gun Laws?

On his show today, Rush Limbaugh told a story about attending a dinner party in New York City in the 1990s where Republican guests debated gun control. Limbaugh recounted telling a Nixon Administration official who favored gun control, “I'll give you my gun if you can promise me that when I leave this apartment tonight nobody else out there will have one either.” Limbaugh said he repeated the point: “Now, if you can promise me that nobody in Central Park is gonna have a gun tonight when I walk out of your apartment, then maybe we can talk."

But at that time (as it does now), New York City required a license to carry a concealed weapon, and it's virtually impossible to believe that a private citizen like Limbaugh would have qualified for the license. If he didn't have a license, then Limbaugh was breaking the law when he claims to have carried around a gun for self-protection on Fifth Avenue. So did Limbaugh just confess to being a law breaker?

Of course, it's entirely possible that Rush's gun story, like many of the things he says, was simply invented out of thin air. As I note in my book about Limbaugh, he often makes up stories (in addition to making up facts) to feed his enormous appetite for self-aggrandizement. Back in 2006 when Rush confessed to breaking the law by doctor-shopping for his massive pill addiction, he was banned from owning a firearm for 18 months. At the time, Rush indicated that this restriction on guns didn't bother him because he didn't own any.

Limbaugh loves to depict himself as a heroic gun-toting right-winger standing up against the “establishment Republicans.” The reality is that Limbaugh doesn't really care about guns. He cares only about attacking the liberals who want gun control in the face of yet another tragedy. So we may never know if Rush is a criminal who illegally carried a gun, or just a liar.

Crossposted at DailyKos.

Limbaugh's Landslide

On Monday, Rush Limbaugh proclaimed that “Everything—except the polls—points to a Romney landslide.” Yes, everything—except the election results and every indicator of them—points to a Romney landslide.

But this is not just a story about Limbaugh's incredible stupidity, irrational conspiracy theories, and inability to grasp reality. It's also the story of how Limbaugh created Obama's landslide last night.

On Monday, Limbaugh declared his deep analysis of the race: “my thoughts, my intellectual analysis of this -- factoring everything I see plus the polling data -- it's not even close. Three hundred-plus electoral votes for Romney.”

Limbaugh declared that an Obama landslide was impossible:  “there's no way he's winning in a landslide. Halperin had it right. There are three outcomes here and two of them are bad for Obama: You're gonna have a narrow Romney win or a landslide Romney win or a narrow Obama win. But you're not gonna have an Obama landslide.”
Limbaugh has been using the word “landslide” a lot to describe what would happen to Obama: “I'm on record I don't know how many days in the past three months saying, quote, 'If the election were today, Romney would win in a landslide,' and I haven't wavered from that."

Limbaugh repeatedly said this even when the polls showed much larger leads for Obama than they did right before the election. He claimed that a liberal conspiracy of pollsterscontrolled by the media and universities was trying to fix the election: “Gallup. Rasmussen and Gallup, all they do is poll. The other outfits, they're attached to universities. What's the bias there? They're attached to news networks. What's the bias there? And we know that objectivity is not possible, especially these people.”

Living in a bubble of his own bubble-headed thoughts, Limbaugh and his Dittoheads convinced themselves that the rest of the country was just as crazy as they were, and that an Obama landslide in the Electoral College could never happen. But it did. And we really have Limbaugh to thank for Obama's re-election and the Democratic gains in the US Senate and House.

In the midst of an economic downturn that too many people forgot was caused by conservative policies and Republican politicians, we should have seen the party in power removed in the election. President Obama and the Democrats, in a normal political year, would have experienced the same unfair fate that Jimmy Carter did in 1980, and that so many Democrats in office faced in 2010. But Rush Limbaugh helped make the Republican Party abnormal.

Limbaugh helped create a far right-wing media and Tea Party movement that pushed the Republican Party far to the right. Mitt Romney lurched to the extreme right in order to win the Republican nomination, and moderate Republicans who didn't follow his pandering path lost in the primaries to Tea Party favorites like Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock. Limbaugh helped establish a Republican Party that was far to the right of America.

And Limbaugh himself intervened to create the Obama landslide. In 2009, Limbaugh declared “I hope he fails” and pushed the Republicans to become the do-nothing party of pure obstructionism. And earlier this year, Limbaugh started a dominant theme of Obama's success, the Republican war on women, by declaring that Sandra Fluke was a slut and a whore.

So when Limbaugh gazes upon the Obama landslide today, he can truly say, “I built that.”

Of course, he won't say that because he lives in a world of self-delusion. Limbaugh declared that if Obama wins, “There will be some who are targeted for the gulags shortly after the election. The regime has plans, I'm sure.”

So if Rush Limbaugh finds himself imprisoned in a gulag later this month, he can take pride in knowing that he made it all possible.

Crossposted at DailyKos.

Proof: Ann Romney Treats Americans Like 6th Graders

Listening to Ann Romney speak last night, I was amazed at how vapid and idiotic her talk was. Even by the low standards of today's politicians (and the even lower standards for their wives), her speech seemed particularly dumb. But, I thought, maybe I'm being politically biased here. So I decided to try a quasi-objective measure. I ran the full text of Ann Romney's speech through an online readability test.
Here was the result:

Approximate representation of the U.S. grade level needed to comprehend the text: 
Flesch Kincaid Grade level: 6.22

Yes, Ann Romney's speech was aimed at the comprehension level of a sixth grader. But maybe this is something common to the spouses of presidential candidates, who are forced to dumb down what they have to say and how they say it. So I decided to check Michelle Obama's 2008 speech to the Democratic National Convention:

Approximate representation of the U.S. grade level needed to comprehend the text:
Flesch Kincaid Grade level: 10.60

So, Michelle Obama's speech was more than four grade levels more complex than Ann Romney's speech. Michelle Obama spoke to America at the level of advanced high school students; Ann Romney spoke to us like we were elementary school students. This is a huge disparity, unless you think the English language has a liberal bias.

But let's not blame Ann Romney for this. Her speech is thoroughly vetted by Republican handlers who understand their audience. And the low intellectual level of her speech was only slightly worse than the speech by Cindy McCain at the RNC in 2008:

Approximate representation of the U.S. grade level needed to comprehend the text:
Flesch Kincaid Grade level: 6.58

But let's not blame Republican women for a problem that really afflicts the entire party and is driven by the men who run it. Here's the rating on John McCain's 2008 speech to the RNC:

Approximate representation of the U.S. grade level needed to comprehend the text:
Flesch Kincaid Grade level: 7.13

By contrast, this was the rating for Barack Obama's 2008 DNC speech:

Approximate representation of the U.S. grade level needed to comprehend the text:
Flesch Kincaid Grade level: 9.65

Although not as dramatic as the differences between their wives, there is still a two and a half grade level difference favoring the Democrat over the Republican.

Last year, a study by the Sunlight Foundation found that speeches in Congress had dropped by a grade level since 2005, mostly due to the influence of new Republicans in Congress.

Now, some caveats. I'm using the transcripts of prepared remarks, not what is actually said. (Ann Romney's painfully stupid pandering, “I love you, women,” wasn't in the prepared remarks, and so it doesn't get counted, although it certainly would have lowered the comprehension level further.) Readability tests aren't a complete measure of intellectual heft. It's certainly possible to express complex ideas with simple sentences, and sometimes complex words and sentences are used for obfuscation.

But these results reflect a trend I write about in my book, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Rush Limbaugh's Assault on Reason. Limbaugh and his ilk have led the dumbing-down of the Republican Party, pushing an anti-intellectual, anti-science agenda and sneering at educated, rational analysis. Limbaugh has not only made the conservative movement more dishonest, he's helped make it dumber.

And Ann Romney's speech last night (which Limbaugh, not surprisingly, praised strongly) reflects a Republican Party in a serious intellectual decline. When your goal is to treat American voters like they're sixth graders, it shows how the Republicans have given up on making rational, intellectual arguments for their policies.

Crossposted at DailyKos.

Rush Limbaugh Confesses to Republican Vote Fraud

Today on his radio show, Rush Limbaugh openly admitted that Republicans engage in electoral fraud by trying to give voters false information:

when Republicans put ads out in Democrat neighborhoods saying they should vote on the wrong day, you know what kind of hell that unleashes. "What, do you think our voters are stupid?" Yes! That's why we try to trick 'em. It doesn't take much.

Media Matters has the audio.


In Limbaugh's home state of Florida, what Limbaugh just talked about is explicitly illegal and a form of voter fraud. Here's what Section 104.0615 of the Florida statutes says about “Voter intimidation or suppression prohibited; criminal penalties”:

(3) A person may not knowingly use false information to:
(a) Challenge an individual's right to vote;
(b) Induce or attempt to induce an individual to refrain from voting or registering to vote;

This is a felony of the third degree, subject to a penalty of up to five years in prison.

Limbaugh is obviously alarmed that Republicans are going to lose this election, and embracing voter fraud is the way to defeat the other side: “the Democrats have calculated that there are a majority of morons that are gonna vote, and they can win 'em.” Stopping those “morons” from voting for Obama is obviously one of the key Republican tactics for victory.

Just a few months ago, Limbaugh claimed that “voter fraud occurs on the Democrat side. There's no question about it.” Of course, the false accusations of imaginary voter fraud by Democrats are not just a kind of hypocrisy; it's also a justification in Limbaugh's mind for advocating the kind of voter fraud he advocated today. As a man who paid vast amounts of money for illicit drugs to fuel his addiction, Limbaugh obviously doesn't have a lot of respect for obeying the law. But his willingness to openly confess to a Republican agenda for voter fraud suggests just how ugly this election will be. In their obedience to Limbaugh, Republicans are likely to engage in an unprecedented levels of voter fraud in a desperate attempt to steal the election away.

Crossposted at DailyKos.

Rush Limbaugh's False Smears about Obama's Harvard Record

Today on his radio show, Rush Limbaugh claimed that he got a phone call during a break that revealed Barack Obama had the “lowest grades ever in Harvard, never went to class.” This, of course, is a complete lie.

Here's what Rush said:

I got on the phone with somebody who said they went to school with Barack Obama at Harvard. And the guy told me that Obama got the lowest grades that any Harvard graduate ever got and that a bunch of professors gave him B's and C's when he didn't even show up to class. And then he hung up. Now, this guy from Harvard said that Obama had the lowest grades anybody ever got at Harvard, had professors that covered for him and he wasn't even there.

Rush repeated the charge:

He said, "Rush, this guy got the lowest grades that anybody ever got at Harvard. And he didn't even go to class a lot of times, and he got B's and C's.”

It's quite well known that Obama graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard Law School in 1991, a designation based solely upon grades which proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that not only is it impossible for Obama to have had the “lowest grades that any Harvard graduate ever got,” but also that Obama was one of the top students at Harvard Law School.

I'm sure that some Limbaugh defenders will claim that this is all a joke Limbaugh is making in response to Harry Reid saying he got a call about Mitt Romney's taxes. And it's certainly quite possible that Limbaugh is fabricating this claim of getting a phone call about Obama, just as he regularly fabricates a 99.8% accuracy rating and many other parts of his show. Did Limbaugh lie to his listeners and fake a call, or did he merely report an obviously false rumor?

But Limbaugh's charge is not satire. Limbaugh has made this same false claim about Obama's Harvard Law School grades at least twice before, completely seriously.

In 2008, Limbaugh declared that Obama "probably didn’t get out of Harvard without affirmative action."

In 2010, Limbaugh claimed:

I think this is the first time in his life that there's not a professor around to turn his C into an A, or to write the law review article for him he can't write. He is totally exposed. There is nobody to make it better. I think he's been covered for, all his life.

At the time, I asked Harvard professors to respond to these charges.

Laurence Tribe wrote to me, "The allegation is absurd. Obama earned every one of his enormously high grades. ‘Affirmative action’ had nothing to do with his success there. He was the most impressive student and research assistant I have taught in my 40 years at Harvard."

Charles Fried, a Harvard Law Professor who served as Solicitor General during the Reagan Administration, wrote, "It’s paranoid nonsense. Grading is anonymous by a randomly generated exam number and it takes a vote of the faculty to change a grade."

Limbaugh, the man who flunked out of Southeast Missouri State due to his laziness and intellectual failings, obviously doesn't understand what “magna cum laude” means or anything about academia.

But Limbaugh's attacks on Obama are more than just intellectual jealousy and ignorance about higher education. It's hard not to see racism when a white dropout accuses a black man with academic honors of receiving preferential treatment based on race, despite clear proof of the contrary. And as I document in my book, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Rush Limbaugh's Assault on Reason, Limbaugh has repeatedly made racist comments about Obama. When Limbaugh declares that Obama got fake grades at Harvard and dismisses him as a beneficiary of affirmative action, he's not just lying; Limbaugh is also trying to provoke racist feelings among his audience.

Crossposted at Academe Blog and DailyKos.

Why Rush Limbaugh Won't Be Stopped

As the author of a book attacking Rush Limbaugh, I know how vile and stupid his ideas are. But I also believe that the effort of many on the left to silence Rush Limbaugh is deeply misguided, contrary to progressive principles, and doomed to failure.

In reposting the latest essay of StopRush's Richard Myers, Kos writes on the front page: “It's amazing that Rush may be undone by the very same vulture capitalistic system that he's been defending.” That would be amazing. So amazing that it's not going to happen. Here's what Myers is claiming: Bain Capital is sucking money out of Clear Channel, which will go bankrupt. Myers concludes, “what irony that the very cutthroat capitalism Rush Limbaugh so strenuously champions may pound the last few nails into the coffin of conservative talk radio.”

This is all complete nonsense, and fails to understand how capitalism works. Even if Bain Capital did suck the life out of Clear Channel and cause it to go bankrupt, the effect on conservative talk radio would be negligible. Radio stations don't disappear or shift format just because a parent corporation goes backrupt. Rush Limbaugh doesn't depend on Clear Channel stations for most of his listeners; Clear Channel owns his syndicator, but that doesn't mean much at all. Rush Limbaugh succeeds because he has massive numbers of loyal listeners, not because some evil corporation allegedly on the verge of bankruptcy is forcing his voice upon an unsuspecting public.

Myers argues, “Rush Limbaugh is extremely useful to the conservative cause, and is likely to survive (even while bleeding advertisers) through the next election, and possibly for many months beyond.” Months? Try, for as long as he wants to stay on the air and make boatloads of money.

There's certainly an argument to be made for organizing a boycott of Limbaugh and his advertisers. No  one on the left who said such offensive things could ever hope to get prominent advertisers on a radio show. And there's no doubt that the boycott against Limbaugh has hurt him and cost his syndicator and stations millions of dollars. When Limbaugh's contract is renewed, the boycott will probably cost him millions, too. But for a man who makes $55 million a year (with the corporations making even more), losing a few million dollars isn't going to drive him off the air.

But is the boycott against Limbaugh a good thing? First, it violates progressive ideas about freedom of speech. Yes, boycotts are perfectly legal and nobody is violating Rush's First Amendment rights with a boycott. But using economic threats to drive an offensive person off the airwaves is wrong. And, no, calling them the “public airwaves” doesn't make censorship any more palatable. When conservatives use boycotts to silence progressives, it's wrong on principle, not just because the other side is winning.

Second, Rush Limbaugh is the perfect anchor to wrap around the neck of the conservative movement and the Republican Party. If radio stations replace Rush with some less prominent right-winger (as is almost certain to happen if the boycotts succeed), the result will not be a more enlightened, educated world. Instead, progressives will simply lose an easy target for criticism. When Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute,” it did more to undermine the Republican Party and draw attention to the war on women than anything progressives have ever organized. If we didn't have Limbaugh around to say incredibly stupid things, how would we expose the real conservative agenda?

So what should progressives do in response to Rush Limbaugh? Criticize his ideas, and push his supporters to debate those beliefs. And ask questions of Republican officials who are scared to offend Limbaugh and his fans. Ask them if they agree with Limbaugh when he hoped for President Obama to fail and dreamed of economic disaster in America. Ask them if they agree with Limbaugh's conspiracy theories and bigoted remarks.

The problem with today's conservative movement is not that Rush Limbaugh has the freedom to speak out to a wide audience. The problem is that his ideas are taken seriously and rarely criticized. We need Rush to be critiqued, not silenced.

None of this is easy. It's far easier to imagine that Limbaugh doesn't really have a lot of listeners, to imagine that the loss of a few advertisers will bring him down, to imagine that his vast presence on radio is just the evil plot of right-wing corporations who will soon be destroyed by enormous greed. None of that is true, and wishing it were so won't make this fantasy come true.

Rush Limbaugh is not on a “downward spiral” to obscurity. He's not going to disappear because of any boycott, no matter how well organized. And when the Stop Rush movement inevitably falls short of its fantasy, and Rush continues spewing his hatred and misinformation on a daily basis, what will we have accomplished?

We need to use Rush Limbaugh as a symbol of the American conservative movement's destructive embrace of bigotry, anti-intellectualism, and irrationality.

Crossposted at DailyKos.