As an eyewitness to the final days of the Bush administration, speechwriter Matt Latimer can report with assurance that “the absolutely last people the powers that be listened to were conservative activists on radio and TV.” Latimer’s message to Democrats: “The Limbaughs and Becks don’t dictate what Republicans do in Washington.” Latimer says Dubya’s team ignored the talk titans – and that was a mistake.

“I really think it is important to help those who haven’t had much experience with conservatives try to understand some of their tribal rituals and enthusiasms,” Latimer said on The Daily Beast web site. “This time, the pressing issue among Those Who Want to Know,” he says, “is the mystifying appeal of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and others like them who are now ‘running” the Republican Party.”

To Latimer, the shock jocks” hateful hold “on the GOP is greatly exaggerated.” Moreover, he believes “that’s not necessarily a good thing.”

No word yet from Latimer, however, on whether hate-spewing over the public airwaves is “a good thing” for the rest of us — or the country itself…

CNN reporter Carol Costello ran a segment recently analyzing talk radio and its listeners. Rush Limbaugh was not pleased with the conclusions drawn by either Costello or a psychiatrist she consulted who called Limbaugh “bully.” El Rushbo responded with characteristic grace — suggesting Costello “go sit on a fire hydrant and improve your day.”

No wonder MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann named gave Limbaugh the silver medal in his “Worst Persons in the World” segment and concluded, “You do not need a psychiatrist to figure out that piece of emotional fantasy. Emotionally Rush Limbaugh is a 14-year-old boy.”

Predictably, Rush Limbaugh’s bid to buy part of the NFL’s St. Louis Rams never got to first base, to mix sports metaphors!

Equally predictably, Rush’s many defenders leapt to claim it was because of his political — rather than racial — views and statements.

No surprise on either front. What is surprising is the revelation that NFL executives hold themselves and their league to higher standards than much of the rest of the country!

Charles M. Madigan, a self-described centrist writing in the Chicago Tribune, describes a thought he had while watching Glenn Beck the other day: “the thought came to me that we are in a very dangerous space where ideology, expression and rights are headed for a collision.”

To Madigan — as to many others — “The problem with Beck… is the size of the audience in the United States that actually knows nothing about nothing. This mass (my guess, about 12 percent of the electorate) is easily moved, the past summer and its continuing silly rhetoric on all kinds of issues indicate. They wear know-nothingness like a badge.”

Curiously, however, Madigan goes on to suggest that we “should not overreact” and instead “should actually turn up the volume so everyone can hear them better,” then concludes, “I know that makes me sound old-fashioned and silly, but there you are.”

Yes it does, Mr. Madigan — and there YOU are!

Is the star of the Excellence in Broadcasting Network teaming with St. Louis Blues owner Dave Checketts in an attempt to buy the St. Louis Rams? Yes, says the Associated Press — and El Rushbo himself, who told the AP that
he is teaming up with Checketts in a bid to buy his hometown team, which currently boasts the NFL’s longest current losing streak. Limbaugh also said he and Checketts would operate the team. “Dave Checketts and I have made a bid to buy the Rams and we are continuing the process,” Limbaugh said.

Limbaugh, who hails from nearby Cape Girardeau but now lives and works in Palm Beach, Fla., once worked for the Kansas City Royals and is an avid sports fan. He also worked briefly in 2003 on ESPN’s NFL pregame show, but resigned after saying Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb was overrated because the media wanted to see a black quarterback succeed.

Forbes magazine has estimated the Rams franchise has a value of $929 million — only twice the amount of Limbaugh’s latest multi-year shock jock contract.

Veteran media gadfly Michael Wolff finally gets around to asking, “Should I be worried about Glenn Beck?”

Wolff, who columnizes in Vanity Fair and also runs and blogs at newser.com, has what he calls “long experience,” but still somehow “can’t actually remember in the history of modern media a boycott of something because it’s too conservative.”

Hello, Michael? Don Imus? Michael Savage?? Did you miss the shock jock boycott memos?

Now, as Wolff writes, “that’s what’s happening to Beck. Nice-guy-oriented consumer brands are ganging up and pulling their ads from his show.”

Well, it couldn’t happen to a ‘nicer” guy!

“This is happening in spite of the one thing that usually protects even dubious media – big ratings,” observes Wolff. “It’s not hard to appreciate why these companies have dropped him. If you can advertise in myriad other places to similar effect, why get involved with someone so volatile as Beck?”

Why indeed?

Ari Melber has a smart piece in The Nation concerning NYT conservative OpEd columnist David Brooks and his contention that conservative
radio hosts “are, paradoxically, a lot like well-behaved children. They are
seen “splashed across magazine covers and endlessly profiled “but not
heard, politically, since they do not swing elections.”

“The talk jocks can’t even deliver the conservative voters who show up at Republican primaries,” Brooks observed. Melber disagrees: “After the summer of townhalls and what’s shaping up as the autumn of GlennBeck… it is hard to see things through Brooks” bifocals,” he notes. Melber also mentions something obvious that no one else did — “As the top conservative at the Times and an alumnus of Rupert Murdoch’s Weekly Standard, Brooks… is, unavoidably, in direct competition for opinion leadership with the “talk jocks” he knocks.