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sixties culture has tried to demonize the unique American culture,” he said pointedly at our first meeting.
    Yet, despite his suspicions, David proved to be a voluble and gracious guide. His conversational style is a mixture of candor and self-effacing (but sincere) paranoia. Driving around town one afternoon in his Cadillac Escalade he recalled how Rush, even at the age of three or four, knew every make and model of automobile on the road. “He was amazing, like he was reincarnated or something,” David said. “The family wanted to get him on The Ed Sullivan Show .” He shot me a sideways glance. “You’re probably going to try to make me sound like an idiot, aren’t you?”
    When Rush hit it big he turned to his younger brother for legal counsel. It was a display of sibling intimacy and trust—there were far more experienced show business attorneys in California and New York—and David, who calls himself “a country lawyer,” did just fine. Over the years he has helped his brother negotiate a series of ever more complex and lucrative deals and, in the process, has attracted some of Rush’s acolytes, including FOX News’ Sean Hannity and best-selling author and talk-show host Mark Levin.
    “Rush is the ideal client,” David told me. “He’s patient and he knows what he wants. And hey, he knows more about his industry than I do. That makes it easy.” David isn’t as rich as his brother but he appears to be doing very well. He lives with his wife and five kids in a splendid white-pillared mansion on a hill in horse country.
    The Limbaugh brothers don’t sound alike—David has kept the reedy Missouri twang that Rush saw as a professional impediment and worked hard to lose—but they think alike when it comes to politics. David described Barack Obama, whose inauguration was a month away, as a “Stalinist liberal,” and his supporters in the media and academia as “dictatorial Stalinist aristocrats.” The harsh words were softened by an amiable tone; David lacks his brother’s emotional velocity, primarily because, unlike Rush, he is not an entertainer. “When Rush gets behind the mike, it’s not that he’s a different person, he’s the same person, but he gets more animated,” David explained. “I’ve heard that Johnny Carson was the same way. A lot of performers are. Do you agree?”
    We drove together to pick up one of David’s kids at the Christian parochial school he attends. Such schools were not in fashion when the Limbaugh boys were young. They attended public school and confined their religious education to Sunday School instruction at Centenary United Methodist Church. As a young man, David was not what you would describe as pious, but he has lately become a fervent, born-again evangelical. One of his recent books is Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christians.
    I asked David what his brother thought of his religiosity. “I’d say Rush is a Christian,” he replied. “But he doesn’t go to church and I don’t know if I’d say he’s born-again. It’s something we really don’t discuss. I don’t try to push religion on people. You’re probably going to make me sound like a religious fanatic, aren’t you?”
    Later, when I mentioned David’s observation to his brother, Rush confirmed that he doesn’t go to church regularly. “I never enjoyed going when I was a kid. It seemed false to me somehow, just people saying words, going through the motions. On Sundays, some of the local ministers would come into the station to give sermons on the radio, and I’d tell them, ‘Hey, I know I should be in church today,’ just to see their reaction. You know what? They couldn’t have cared less. They were happy I was working.” Limbaugh says he does have “a private relationship with Jesus” and speaks to God many times a day. He didn’t say who initiates the conversations.
    It had been snowing in Cape, and the roads were slick, but David braved the elements to