King attacked the radio star for supposedly not being sympathetic enough to the plight of Lindsay Lohan's drug problem. Yet, he provided no quotes or real examples, just a vague summary. The liberal writer complained of Limbaugh, "There's a hollowness there, and a patronizing undertone when he interacts with callers (who are called Dittoheads for a reason)."
Again, offering no transcript, King opined:
Rush just couldn't understand why people were talking about [Lindsay Lohan] instead of the Gulf oil spill, and how Barack Obama caused the spill by donning a wet suit, swimming a few miles down, and planting a plastic-explosive satchel charge at the wellhead (he didn't actually say that, only sorta implied it).
[Emphasis added] King deemed Limbaugh "marginally" saner than Beck. Turning his attention to the Fox News host, he condescended "[Beck's] crazy, but- like those urban nutcases- he actually seems to believe what he's saying. I can get behind that."
The novelist previously ran into trouble in 2008 when he gave a speech at the Library of Congress and asserted of the military:
I don't want to sound like an ad, a public service ad on TV, but the fact is if you can read, you can walk into a job later on. If you don't, then you've got, the Army, Iraq, I don't know, something like that. It's, it's not as bright. So, that's my little commercial for that.
In the December 11, 2008 Entertainment Weekly, King praised the AMC series Breaking Bad for "examining the American dream: shiny and addictive on top, hollow at the core. And dark. Very dark."
