A surprisingly warm chat from an otherwise pedestrian profile. Hopefully tomorrow’s segment, where he sounds off on Beck and Palin among others, will have more fireworks. It’s 12 minutes long but worth watching for his answer to what he likes about Obama and his admission, at 6:00 and 10:15, about how he jerks the media around with satire and deliberate provocation. No one who’s listened to the show for 10 minutes will find that revelatory, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard him acknowledge the degree of manipulation as candidly as he does here. (Money quote: “Would you ask anybody who writes for Saturday Night Live these questions?”) Listening to this, his approach sounds like the opposite of Jon Stewart’s. Whereas JS dons the clown nose, attacks the right, and then retreats into his “lighten up, I’m a comedian” shtick when they hit back, Limbaugh holds his clown nose behind his back where only his fans can see it and comes at the left as a serious commentator, going over the top to piss them off and then having a laugh when the inevitable liberal freakout comes. Like Althouse says, “I love the way Rush revels in that sort of thing.”

Speaking of liberal freakouts, this NFL thing’s going to end up not happening, isn’t it?