Rush Limbaugh has passed

f1onagher

Well-known member
I tended to prefer Michael Savage back when I still listened to radio, but I caught plenty of Rush when I was at my grandparents. Not a flawless man by any metric, but he was the first commentator to break the mainstream monopoly, and if the heated, fervent, vile hatred the entire Left side of the political aisle vents at him regularly is anything to go by he certainly was effective at his mission.

Rest in Peace Rush, as Winston said, it's a good sign when a lot of people hate your guts. It means you accomplished something.
 

Duke Nukem

Hail to the king baby
cnF6DcoY.png
 

Airedale260

Well-known member
I have to say, I did enjoy listening to him, though as the years went by his style wasn’t always my thing. But more often than not I found him highly enjoyable.

As he said, his talent was on loan from God, and the only thing preventing Rush from getting behind the Golden EIB Microphone* was returning it. It’s a real loss. Hopefully the next generation is able to take up the baton where he left off.

*-And yes, the microphone really is made of gold.
 

Laskar

Would you kindly?
Founder
When the local radio station first carried Rush Limbaugh, I was too young to listen in. I was busy learning words like "goo", "gah", and "bawoo". My mother was listening in, and she liked what she heard. She told my dad that he really needed to hear this new radio guy. Since my dad worked on a farm, it was some weeks before he got off early enough to tune in, and he too liked what he heard. Pretty soon the Rush Limbaugh show was playing at work, and my grandparents were listening in too, down at their farm.

Back then, there was an epidemic of middle-class Americans screaming at their television sets. There wasn't anything wrong with them. They were the smart ones who saw that their voices weren't being represented on the national news. They saw that the news had a double standard for Republican scandals and Democrat scandals, and they saw that the talking heads were utterly clueless when it came to guns and God. Again and again and again, these Americans saw that the organizations that were supposed to bring them facts about the world so that they could make informed decisions... acted like they didn't exist.

And for every one of these TV-shouters, there had to be ten people with a quiet unease at the back of their mind. They knew that the media had a bias, it was hard to see how that played out in this story or that. They were just left with the unspoken suspicion that they were being had.

Rush Limbaugh came, and he changed all of that. As much as the news media and the liberal elite hates him, he was the original fact-checker. Not like the fact-checkers we have today. Those pale imitations are tinpot tyrants. They're the pendantic asshole who enters every internet argument with "Well, acktchyually" and wastes everyone's time with autistic nit-picking, except someone has had the historically bad idea of giving these assholes some degree of social power. But that's not Rush. He read the day's news and he gave you his opinion on it, and if you disagreed with that opinion or the way it was delivered, you were free to change the channel over to your local rock station.

Rush Limbaugh was freedom. He was the embodiment of that American right to look at the intellectual elite and the political grandstanders of this nation and tell them that they're full of it. And those elites hated him for it. They smeared him, they attacked him, they attacked the radio stations that carried him, and they tried to take back the airwaves. Thank God they failed. Rush Limbaugh wasn't a racist. He wasn't a demagogue. He dealt in arguments, and if the Left couldn't meet him on that level, then their arguments sucked.

As time went by, my parents stopped listening to Rush Limbaugh. My mother cooled on him, and she decided that it was better for her health to not worry about national politics. My dad liked what Rush had to say, but he has little patience for buffoons and blowhards, so Rush's radio personality grated on him.

But that personality was the greatest thing about Rush. He was at many points humble, and at many points he put on a larger-than-life appearance. The advertisements for his show proclaimed that he was demonstrating talent on loan from God. He often introduced himself as the all-knowing, all-seeing, all-everything maja Rushie. But this was all a part of the show, just like the smooth rock intro and the fake advertisements and skits.

Before Rush Limbaugh came to AM radio, AM radio was a dying medium. It had been stifled by the Fairness Doctrine, and all that was allowed was as bland as stale toast. From what I've been told, the blandest NPR segment you'll ever hear is spicy compared to the average fare of the AM airwaves. What put Rush Limbaugh on the map was that he made AM radio fun again. There's been commentators who've come after him, some who were more insightful or funnier, but none that had nearly the success he had, and that's because none of them were as fun as Rush.

Granted, Rush wasn't always fun. He tried his damndest, even when the cultural institutions of America branded him a racist, even when small numbers of little people went after his advertisers. I think in the Obama years, , especially leading up to the 2016 election. That's when I first started tuning in in earnest, and either Rush turned acidic from the stress, or I just wasn't willing to see how bad things were. I do remember one caller, and she wasn't the kind of person you would expect. She wasn't a Trump fan, and she wasn't even a conservative. She called the program, though, because even though she thought America was overdue for a female president, she didn't want it to be Hillary. Rush Limbaugh was the only one she could talk to about this, and he listened.

At his peak, Rush was reaching an audience of twenty five million Americans. Twenty five million Americans who could be listening to country or rock'n'roll or simply doing something else were tuning in to his show to see what he had to hear. And Rush sustained those numbers for a long time. Even as other commentators came and went, even as podcast stars like Ben Shapiro or Stephen Crowder came along, Rush still reached millions of listeners. That's no small amount of power, and if Rush Limbaugh was inclined to arrogance, he would have used that power to play kingmaker in the GOP. He didn't. He was humble enough to stay connected with his listeners and realized that they were coming to him because he was saying what they were thinking. Even as he put on a boisterous air, he was still taking calls from listeners, still willing to change his mind when the facts proved contrary to his opinion.

I tuned in off and on throughout the Trump years. Rush wasn't in a good slot for me. I only listened to the radio in the car, and when his show was on, I was usually at work. But I caught bits and pieces of it, though. And at some point in time, perhaps 2019, my local station moved Rush Limbaugh to the morning slot. That meant that I could have called in to the show, but alas, that never happened.

I said my mom and dad drifted away from Rush, but in the leadup to the 2020 election, they drifted back. When I went to my parents' house in the morning, I would usually arrive to find the program playing. My dad would tune in at nine, sharp, and brew himself a pot of coffee. He would drink that pot over the next hour and a half before getting up and going outside to do some work. He would remember the highlights, and share them with my mom when she got home. When I was there, we'd listen together, and we'd talk about what Rush had to say. Usually I could give more information or context to the news articles that Rush Limbaugh mentioned (Or often Todd Herman or Mark Steyn filling in for Rush) but it was hard to add anything to Rush's commentary.

The last time I listened to Rush Limbaugh with my dad was October. before I moved out of town. I got there late and missed Rush's opening monologue, and my dad filled me in. He didn't say exactly what Rush said, but it was clear that Rush's cancer had taken a turn for the worse. He would not be with us for much longer.

Both of my parents were first attracted to Rush Limbaugh in the early days of the 1990's, because they were young parents, and Rush spoke to them. They drifted away as their lives got busy, but as 2019 and 2020 and the world was plunging into insanity, they came back. They came back because Rush told them "You're not the ones going crazy. Here's why."

Where then shall we find the man to follow Rush Limbaugh? He was one in five hundred million. He wasn't an entertainer. He wasn't a political activist. He was a man who took politics seriously, but not solemnly, Perhaps Todd Herman or Mark Steyn will take up the golden EIB microphone. They were there when Rush couldn't be, so they would be the natural choices. But if they can't sustain Rush's legacy, who will fill the void left behind? Lars Larson could do it, and he does have a national program, but the Pacific Northwest is his beat, and I will not gladly see him taken from it. Ben Shapiro could have done it, but his show has since gotten formulaic and sterile, and Ben's efforts are probably better turned toward building the anti-Hollywood. Dan Bongino has a show, and the most-trafficked Facebook page, but I'm not sure how well he'd take to Rush's format. Perhaps we'll see, as soon as the tumor is gone and the chemotherapy has ended.

But for now, the EIB microphone stands silent.

Godspeed, Rush. We'll take it from here.
 

Captain X

Well-known member
Osaul
Never much cared for him. I am no where near spiteful enough to celebrate his passing, though. Apparently a lot more people on my friends list are than I expected, though. Rather disappointing to see.
 

Battlegrinder

Someday we will win, no matter what it takes.
Moderator
Staff Member
Founder
Obozny
Speaking of speaking ill of the dead, NR had a column discussing the concept:
Why We’re Taught to Not Speak Ill of the Dead | National Review

Personal favorite highlight:
The aphorism dates back to Greece in 600 b.c., and the modern advocates for speaking ill of the dead seem oddly confident that the ancient Greeks and Shakespeare and everyone else before them could not possibly have grasped the moral nuances of this uniquely modern circumstance of a controversial figure dying.
 

Free-Stater 101

Freedom Means Freedom!!!
Nuke Mod
Moderator
Staff Member
"I'm relieved she's no longer a threat to the nation. Wish it could have been for better reasons than shuffling off the mortal coil."
This, I don't love either people, in fact I greatly despise them both. But I am not going to go change their wikipedia page or go prance around SB or AH laughing at their death's to rub it in or stir sh*t up.
 
Last edited:

Husky_Khan

The Dog Whistler... I mean Whisperer.
Founder
Sotnik
In case anyone was curious, the New York Times column Ben Shapiro penned about Rush Limbaugh was archived for posterity off of that website.


Ben Shapiro said:
The end of the fairness doctrine opened the market for ideas. And consumers would have their say.
Enter Rush Limbaugh.

In 1988, he launched his eponymous show on long-declining AM radio. The sound quality for the AM dial was terrible and would remain so. But the static-coated, tinny sound underscored the fact that conservatism was an act of resistance to the dominant and ascendant liberalism of the rest of broadcast media. And Rush captured that rebellious ethos. His show was irreverent. It was funny. It was caustic, and it was, contrary to the beliefs of his opponents, often insightful. Rush had a unique gift for boiling down political issues to understandable language. (His explanation of supply-side economics was typically lucid.) Where Mr. Buckley wrote for those with graduate degrees, Rush talked to those with high school diplomas, without talking down to them.
Conservatives found a champion in him.

My mentor, Andrew Breitbart, got his conservative education from the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies; I listened to Rush driving to and from college at U.C.L.A., turning up the sound system in my air-conditioner-free 1986 Honda Civic. His joyous willingness to engage in battle was an inspiration to a college student feeling overwhelmed by a one-sided, progressive viewpoint preached in the classroom. Rush’s fighting attitude was infectious. It infused the right.
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Top