“I’m your host, Rush Limbaugh, with half my brain tied behind my back – just to make it fair.”
Rush Limbaugh passed away this week. It’s a credit to him that Microsoft® knows that I spelled his name right, and didn’t put a squiggly line underneath it. He was big enough of a public figure that autocorrect programmers had to reckon with his fame. Word®.
His fame came with money – a lot of it. If the math of those who do such math is correct, he died with half a billion dollars in his bank account. It doesn’t look like he spent all that much of what he made. Sure, he had private planes and a mansion, but his main vocation was talking.
And, oh, how well he talked.
I first recall hearing him talking on a tinny AM radio station one lunchtime and saying . . . “Who is this guy?”
Was he always right? Certainly not. No one whose job is to talk to the American public for fifteen hours each week is always right.
But Rush Limbaugh was unique. He fought back against Leftism with new weapons: razor sharp wit, and razor shop logic. Did he ever hesitate or was he ever at a loss for words when confronting Leftists?
Never.
His regular segments were (especially in the early days) examples of irreverence. He didn’t make fun of the homeless in his Homeless Update. He made fun of those who would infantilize humans through assuming that people who were homeless were the mental equivalent of children.
Rush did make fun of feminists, probably because he knew they were so sensitive that they’d react like a polar bear with a sunburn. And the feminists did react – Limbaugh was the first one to trigger every feminist in the United States in the same week.
For me, he was proof of another thing: that people on the Right can be funny as heck, and there’s a huge amount of humor potential when you punch Left.
When I grew up, there were exactly three stations that we got over our antenna up on Wilder Mountain: ABC®, NBC™, and CBS©. We got PBS® too, but nobody over Sesame Street™ age counted PBS®. On the major networks when I grew up, the writers and actors and producers and executives of the major networks were Leftists, just like today. The sitcoms and dramas featured Leftist values (mainly). Most shows spewed proto Social Justice Warrior DNA into every episode.
The worst were the Very Special Episodes where people who were supposed to be funny spent 30 minutes (including commercials) learning Very Special Lessons. Comedy was written by Leftists. And that comedy was, itself, a demoralization operation.
It was so prevalent I recall thinking in eighth grade, “Is all humor inherently Leftist?”
I later discovered P.J. O’Rourke and was happy to note that the answer was, “no,” at least when it came to the written word. Funny is funny. And funny was not the exclusive domain of the Left. In fact, funny is now the enemy of the Left, because funny exposes uncomfortable Truths. In a world where Leftists praise boys running in track meets with girls and insist that there is no physical difference?
The humor writes itself.
Rush Limbaugh proved that what P.J. O’Rourke did for the written word could be done with the spoken word for fifteen hours a week of (generally) excellent broadcasting. Until Limbaugh discovered golf.
Because he was Rush Limbaugh, he could spend an hour talking about golf to 20,000,000 Americans, 19,000,000 of whom had never picked up a mashie or a gimlet or whatever the clubs are called and still not lose the audience.
The man had the gift of making a continuous stream of engaging radio – which is hard to do. With radio, you have to work to keep the attention of the audience. Rush was a natural at mixing hilarity and ideas, but without ever getting to the point where he thought he had followers who would do his bidding rather than an audience that was there to be entertained.
I went through phases of listening to Rush. When he started on golf, I listened less. When my job took me away from his regular broadcast times, I didn’t listen at all.
When we moved to Alaska was perhaps the longest time I never listened to him. In Alaska, the politics of the Lower 48 seemed absurd. Sure Limbaugh was on the radio there. And, yeah, I could have listened to him. But for the most part in Alaska, the Lower 48 was what we called “Outside” – it was a world that was of only passing relevance. Heck, the Chinese were there measuring Alaska to see if their furniture fit (it does), so we were more worried about having to learn to eat medium-rare bat and teach the Chinese how to play hockey than we were about petty squabbles in a land so far away.
But when we moved back to the Lower 48, national politics became significant again. And Rush re-entered our lives. In one way I miss the freedom of not caring about the Lower 48. In another, I always knew that there would be a battle for freedom of thought, expression, ideas, and Western values, so coming back put us back in this space. I probably wouldn’t be writing this if I were still in Alaska.
I just wouldn’t care.
But enough about me. Rush was big enough that, in 1992, I think he was a major factor in making sure that George H. W. Bush wasn’t re-elected. His honest criticism of H. W.’s “conservatism” was enough to make his listeners understand George was a Leftist who would conserve nothing.
He was the single biggest nemesis of Bill and Hillary Clinton. He bothered them at a personal level. Bill Clinton sat in Air Force One and blamed Rush Limbaugh for division in America on a radio interview.
No, Rush didn’t divide America, he gave the Right hope. Would Bill Clinton have been impeached without Rush Limbaugh? I don’t think so. Rush was the leading edge of the wave of a new media – a media that wasn’t controlled, wasn’t a bought and paid-for version of the combined DemoPublican establishment.
In the last decade, I probably listened to him once or twice a month, at most. Even so, his voice and ideas reached millions.
He talked about speaking into the golden Excellence in Broadcasting microphone. No one of his talent will pass this way again, at least not in my lifetime.
In passing at 70, he gave me one final gift: a reminder of our mortality. Despite the money, despite the fame, despite the influence, we will all return to our Maker.
What you do with that time? It’s up to you.
Dittos, Rush.
