Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West.

In early January, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin made another scary appearance in Drudge Report, the Internet aggregator known for recasting all things ho-hum into something breathless and apocalyptic. Pictures of the two worst mass murderers ever were used above a headline: “White House Threatens ‘Executive Orders’ on Guns.”

Oh, my. And the executive orders? Well, the president called for a safe and responsible gun owner campaign, better coordination and tracking of sales, and research into the causes and prevention of firearms violence, among other small steps.

The Hitler hit was so over-the-top that it prompted the Anti-Defamation League to issue a plea to stop comparisons that are “historically inaccurate and offensive, especially to Holocaust survivors and their families.”

Rush Limbaugh, who sits atop the right-wing media food chain along with Drudge, has compared the president to Hitler for years. On Fox News, Hitler allusions are less overt, but crazy talk about Obama — dating to a 2008 suggestion that Michelle Obama’s playful knuckle bump with her husband may have been “a terrorist fist jab” — is the stock in trade.

The good news is that these people are talking mostly to themselves, from inside the much-ridiculed bubble that burst in spectacular fashion last November, while fewer and fewer voters are listening to them.



Yes, the pyramid of political dissemination is still in place: from Drudge, to Rush, to Fox, to Republican politicians in green rooms, trickling down to all the lesser Drudges and Rushes in the wacko-sphere.

They wheeze and whiff and hyperventilate. They claim there is a war on this, and a war on that (Christmas, God, golf pros). They have one mode: outrage, designed to get the pulse up, to generate a flight or fight reaction. But for all their huffing and puffing, the bloviators of the far right can no longer blow any houses down; most Americans couldn’t care less.

Thus, after a month of gun proposals, an Inaugural Address touting mainstream liberal values and yet another showdown with Republicans in Congress, President Obama just posted a 60 percent favorable rating in the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll — his highest numbers in three years. Other polls have him lower, but he’s still more popular than any of the major players active in Washington.

All of which is to say Obama should have saved his breath for stronger targets when he went after the influence that kooks with microphones have on kooks in Congress. We might be able to solve more of our problems, Obama said last week, “if a Republican member of Congress is not punished on Fox News or by Rush Limbaugh for working with a Democrat on a bill of common interest.”

There followed the predictable faux outrage on a certain news network, under accompanied by the chyron: “War on Fox?”

The lash, Mr. President, is now a straw. Witness Limbaugh this week, trying to gin up opposition to bipartisan immigration reform. “It’s up to me and Fox News” to stop it, he said. Drudge did his bit as well, posting a picture of a manacled man, brown-skinned and convict-looking, his exposed abs tattooed with an Obama image, and the headline “Let My People Go.”

Over the last year, Limbaugh has lost significant advertisers and whatever respect he still had among a handful of decent Republicans after he called the Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke “a slut” and “a prostitute.” Many in the press and on the political stage are still afraid of him, but they should remember the words of the late Molly Ivins: being attacked by Limbaugh, said the bard of Texas, “was an experience somewhat akin to being gummed by a newt. It doesn’t actually hurt, but it leaves you with slimy stuff on your ankle.”

In January, Fox suffered its worst prime-time ratings since 2001 among the coveted age 25 to 54 demographic. And Drudge, even though he’s followed hourly by Beltway obsessives, did not even crack the Top 15 most visited Web news sites in the Pew Research Center survey that came out last year. Just 2 percent of those polled by Pew listed Drudge as their main online source for political news.

In truth, Drudge, though admirable as a bootstrap story, is a tool. Limbaugh is a tool. Fox is a tool. They are used to punish dissidents, people who actually try to govern and a range of enemies. Ken Mehlman, campaign manager for George W. Bush, bragged how he used Drudge to bring down John Kerry in the 2004 election.

But it’s a different era now. In the summer of 2011, House Speaker John Boehner sought Limbaugh’s approval of his insane plan to bring the economy to a halt by holding hostage what had been a routine debt ceiling measure. He made this show of fealty to a professional gasbag before he even revealed it to his conference. You saw how well that worked out, leading to the lowest Congressional approval ratings in the history of modern polling.

And while Mitt Romney played the Drudge Report to help him slay rivals in the primary, the same alliance got him nowhere in the general election.

So yes, Fox and friends can still crush their own, as Obama noted. But that only drives the Republican Party further to the fringes. Virtually everything the broadcast bullies are against — sensible gun measures, immigration reform, raising taxes on the rich — are favored by a majority of Americans.

It makes sense, then, that the logical next step for these folks is to retreat into an actual bubble of brick and mortar — their own city. Glenn Beck has announced plans to build “Independence, U.S.A.,” a sort of new urbanism for paranoids. In that world, at least, all the fantasies of the far right are always true.