On my drive during lunch each day, I tend to swap back and forth between The Radio Factor and Rush Limbaugh to see what the right has to say on things. Although I don't see eye-to-eye on many policy issues with either of them, I have a healthy dose of respect for O'Reilly. Although there are exceptions, Bill tends to shoot fairly straight when it comes to matters of a factual nature and then comments upon those facts based upon his extreme worldview. I rarely agree with him, but it is his expert analysis that allows him to make his point.
Limbaugh, on the other hand, is a fucking boob. I had never really realized it until I started flipping back and forth between them, but the difference is remarkable. Limbaugh skewers the facts to set up a straw man position purportedly taken by Kerry and "The Left," and then rips the straw man apart with a fairly pedestrian, obvious counter-argument. He sets himself up to "prevail" by arguing against phantom positions. The whole program is a sham.
I did happen to hear Rush get tripped up badly on my pet issue, tort reform, just the other day. Some guy called in and led Limbaugh down the rosy path of how lawyers are the root of all evil, how anyone who files a lawsuit is greedy, how all litigation is frivilous, etc. and then flipped him on it and began quizzing Rush on his own use of the courts. Rush began by taking the absurd position that he had no idea if he'd ever filed a lawsuit before, stuck with that for a while before admitting that he had sued people before, but that that was different because his cases had merit and he had been wronged, blah, blah, blah. The backpedalling was remarkable, and Rush finished the guy off by hanging up on him, going on a brief rant about something unrelated, and then cut to commercial. Whatapussy.
I guess he wants his fans to be "dittoheads" so they can just parrot his fluff without thinking about it.