FOR LIBERAL MEDIA, ANYTHING SEEMS TO GO

Rush Limbaugh hardly needs me to defend him against his critics. But I'm going to do it anyway. It seems he has become the target of the moment for the running dogs of the media left.

When pugilists square off in the ring, they are expected to observe the Marquess of Queensberry rules. When nations meet on the battlefield they are expected to follow certain rules of engagement. But when liberals attack conservative figures, like Limbaugh, the rules of civilized confrontation are suspended. Anything goes.

Consider the spectacle that attended the recent induction ceremonies of the Radio Hall of Fame in Chicago. TV talk show gabster Sally Jessy Raphael, an acknowledged liberal feminist, could not bear to graciously present an award to Limbaugh. So she tried to pull a Lorena Bobbitt on him.

The Hall of Fame chose to recognize Limbaugh for his significant contribution to the (radio) industry. But Raphael chose to sandbag the honoree. Please note, she hissed, it (the award) does not express my opinion. Sure, Raphael bore animosity toward Limbaugh. But if she could not bring herself to honor the conservative even in the presence of his family, friends and admirers then she simply should have stayed home. Her declasse behavior was fairly typical of the ilk to whom Limbaugh refers as femi-nazis. There is an unspoken conspiracy on the part of the media left to emasculate strong conservative figures. As Raphael demonstrated all too clearly, they will resort to almost any incivility to cut down to size perceived enemies on the right.

Recent years have seen one media attack after another on prominent conservatives. Among the more noteworthy victims was Robert Bork, who by all rights should be sitting on the Supreme Court.

In the days leading up to his stormy confirmation hearings, Bork could barely get out of his front door without stumbling over reporters rummaging through his trash, looking for damaging material. Since they could find nothing incriminating in his refuse, they decided that the next best thing was to distort his legal writings and decisions. The strategy worked.

Emboldened by their successful hit job on Bork, the next target of the media left was former Vice President Dan Quayle. When he was a littleknown senator from Indiana, Quayle was regarded by National Journal, the respected political magazine, as one of Congress' rising stars. But when he suddenly became the heir apparent to the Reagan-Bush legacy, the media went out of its way to politically neuter him.

Anyone who ever met Quayle and engaged him in serious conversation, knew he was conversant on the range of issues. Not just defense and foreign policy, his specialties in the Senate, but also domestic matters.

Of course, this never came across in the national press. They insisted on portraying the vice president as some kind of cartoonish figure. They dissected everything he said and did to reinforce their dishonest caricature of him as a man unequal to his high office.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was victim of one of the nastiest smears in history. Because his foes on the left could not sufficiently distort his writings and judicial opinions to derail his elevation to the high court, they went after the black conservative personally.

They got one of Thomas' former proteges, Anita Hill, to bear false witness against him to the FBI. Although her testimony was supposed to be confidential, it somehow was leaked to reporters on the eve of Thomas' confirmation vote. Thus, a man who had led an exemplary public life and blameless personal life was cast in the national press as some sort of tawdry sex offender.

Now its Limbaugh's turn. His critics on the left can't stand the fact that he has the highest-rated talk show on radio. That he's carried on more than 600 stations and reaches more than 19 million people each week. Or that his new late night television show reaches a wider audience than either "The Arsenio Hall Show" or "Late Night with Conan O'Brien." They don't want to believe that so many Americans are receptive to Limbaugh's conservative views.

But they are. In the marketplace of ideas, conservatives almost always prevail over liberals. This has not been apparent until fairly recently because the folks who control the media have purposely kept conservatives off the airwaves and the editorial pages.

Now that conservatives have broken through in both broadcast and print, liberals no longer enjoy an ideological monopoly over the media. That is why the shrewish Sally Jessy Raphael and her like-minded peers on the media left have the long knives out for popular conservatives like Limbaugh.