The Bum's Rush: The Selling of Environmental Backlash.

Surely no American in recent times has labored more diligently and heroically against reason and rational thinking than Rush Limbaugh has. Now, in The Bum's Rush: The Selling of Environmental Backlash, Don Trent Jacobs takes Limbaugh to task for his devious and dishonest use of persuasive words and logical fallacies.

Part one, entitled "Practical Persuasion 101," provides an overview of Limbaugh's strategies. Some of them are legitimate means of capturing an audience's attention, while others allow Limbaugh to irresponsibly distort the facts and demonize opponents in the service of his corporate-sponsored arguments. These strategies include circular reasoning, double binds, generalizations, and name-calling, among a host of other rhetorical tricks.

It is in part two of his book that Jacobs supplies his case studies. Here are three examples of "Misleading Statements from Rush Limbaugh":

1. Limbaugh: There are more Native Americans today than in 1492; therefore, there was no genocide committed by white settlers. In fact, Native Americans murdered each other at a far greater rate than they were killed by whites.

Jacobs: While there are more Native Americans today than in 1492 (800,000 more, according to the 1990 U.S. Statistical Abstract), U.S. census records show only 25,734 Native Americans in 1870, a stunning drop from the estimated 1.1 million in 1492.

2. Limbaugh: The health threat from pesticides is exaggerated and overblown. Although Rush exhorts his audience to listen to scientists and experts, he cites Investors Business Daily (a sponsor of his show, but hardly an impartial scientific journal) to conclude that "the anti-pesticide, pro-organic campaign may be actually hazardous to the health of the nation."

Jacobs: A sudden withdrawal of pesticides would hurt the economy, but a gradual approach, combined with more research into pesticide alternatives, is feasible. (In fact, according to PBS's "Frontline," pesticide use has resulted in an increase of crops destroyed by pests: from 7 percent in the 1950s to 13 percent today.) Limbaugh chooses to ignore the health problems caused by pesticides and also the leeching of soil nutrients by chemical fertilizers. This is because integrated pest management (using natural predators) would endanger the profits of chemical producers. Limbaugh's choice is either-or: either learn to live with these chemicals or go hungry.

3. Limbaugh: Erupting volcanoes haven't destroyed the ozone layer in four billion years; therefore, we cannot destroy it with chlorofluorocarbons. On his radio broadcast for August 14, 1991, Rush read this quote from a Wall Street Journal editorial by Dr. Joe Waters, a NASA scientist: "There will not be a large ozone hole this year." Limbaugh's emphatic conclusion: "There is NO OZONE DEPLETION."

Jacobs: When Jacobs contacted Dr. Waters to ask if he really meant that ozone depletion was not a problem, Waters replied to the contrary, saying, "There are reasons for extreme concern for the human population." And in April 1994, the American Association for Cancer Research reported that it now believes the depletion of the ozone layer is an even more serious threat to human health than it had previously believed. Furthermore, volcanic eruptions don't produce CFCs, according to Dr. James R. Podolski, a NASA researcher.

One of Limbaugh's favorite loaded questions is "Hasn't unfettered capitalism furnished us with the cleanest environment on earth?" Where has he been for the past 30 years, while industries kicked, screamed, and lobbied against environmental laws and left the country in droves to pollute elsewhere? Perhaps he should ask this question of the Mexican women in the maquiladore region, whose babies were born without brains or developed spinal cords due to the astonishing levels of toxic waste produced by American-owned industries in the area.

Unfortunately, Jacobs himself falls into an inaccurate generalization when he attempts to disprove Limbaugh's argument that animal-rights activists are also secular humanists (somehow a bad thing). Jacobs reasons that secular humanists cannot have a concern for preserving wildlife as it is not a "distinctly human interest." But humanists recognize that our lives and our interests are intimately bound up with the welfare of the rest of the planet. Furthermore, humanists don't set themselves apart from other animals by claiming possession of an immortal soul.

The Bum's Rush is available from the Legendary Publishing Company of Boise, Idaho, for $12; phone [phone] with your order. One word of warning, however: as Jacobs is a linguist by profession, it was disappointing to find such sloppy proofreading in his book, with language spelled langauge, profits for prophets, and (worst of all) Carl Sagan spelled Sagen. The second edition will undoubtedly do better.