I never listened to Rush that much, mostly because I had a job, and he was on air in the middle of the day.
When I did get a chance to listen, I was always impressed by a few things.
- He was, of course, nothing like the caricature of him you hear from his detractors.
- He almost always had an interesting, insightful take on an issue. Something you didn’t hear from anybody else.
- He was extraordinarily smart, and pulled his insights from a very deep well of knowledge.
- He was simultaneously pompous / arrogant and very humble. It was an odd and likeable quirk.
- He was enormously talented. Not only did he create the talk radio industry single-handedly, he was able to keep a huge audience engaged while he talked for three hours — almost always with no guests. That is simply incredible.
Rush had an enormous impact on conservatism, and on America.
I haven’t listened yet, but I understand Ben Shapiro’s show yesterday was dedicated to all the ghoulish delight from the left over Rush’s parting. (Evil cretins.)
Rest in peace, Rush. It will be a long time before we see your equal.
I only heard him a few times when I was visiting Redneckville, where he is extremely popular. Perhaps I missed his more refined moments, but he seemed to me that he was appealing the baser elements in people’s judgment, like when he was calling that young woman a slut and a whore. He compared Covid-19 to the common cold and compared the murderous mob of 1/6 with patriots of the American Revolution. I can understand why civil and rational people, whatever their politics may be, would be glad that his raging voice of hatred will no longer be heard, but I don’t find it appropriate to take delight in someone’s death.
By whatever standard you believe justifies saying Rush had a “raving voice of hatred,” you would condemn the vast majority of politicians and commentators as well.
Also, trying to make someone sound bad because they “compared” this thing with that is, in my opinion, lazy and dishonest rhetoric. The question is how and why they compared the two things, not that they did. For example, Covid-19 is like the common cold in that they are both caused by viruses, and the common cold is sometimes caused by a coronavirus.
*The lazy and dishonest rhetoric here seems to lie in contriving ways of slithering out the hard data.
Remember when Ward Churchill compared the victims of the 9/11 attack with Eichmann? Well, maybe he just meant that a lot of them had names consisting of two syllables.
I am no fan of many, many politicians. That’s for sure. But I think that RL (from what I know of him) was way down there on the level of Trump, which involves a much greater degree of unbridled assholishness than what you get in the average case. I did listen to some clips of RL and he was comparing Covid-19 with the common cold in the sense that he was trying to persuade people that they were not to be concerned with the former disease (while Trump was saying privately that was a grave matter of concern, to be “played down”!). The lazy and dishonest rhetoric here seems to lie contriving ways of slithering out the hard data.
Listened to him quite a bit in the 90s and up to maybe end of POTUS43.
I don’t listen to talk radio besides NPR anymore. The best traffic station in town is a talk radio station that carried his program. Heard his wife’s statement. Thought it odd she was convinced he was in heaven now.
My opinion was that he was more of a deist and that America was his religion/god. For so many of his fans, I think America is their religion/god.
Shamefully, I remember listening to him and I was 28/29 and he talked about Chelsea Clinton being the White House dog and I remember laughing at it. I don’t recall the press saying anything approaching that about Voldemorange’s son.
I got tired of the lies and distortions. Trump is the natural culmination of what Limbaugh sowed.
He was for family values so much he married 5 times. I remembered when he’d disparage marijuana smokers…and then send his maid out to score Oxy for him. What kind of person sends out a woman to buy drugs for him?
That he was incredibly talented and basically created a whole industry, who can deny? But, I guess the same can be said of Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt.
I’m sad Rush said nasty things about Chelsea.
I think Chelsea Clinton was a turning point. A lot of awful things were said about her, but I think most people realized that was wrong and presidential kids were (more or less) left alone after that. There were negative things said about the Bush kids, the Obama kids, the Trump kids, but it was not as bad as it was for Chelsea.
I remember a couple people I knew in Redneckville thought it was really funny that he called feminists “Feminazis.” It was an embarrassment to me that they freely threw around that term in front of my wife (now ex) from the Netherlands. It is hard for me to conceive of how anyone could enjoy stuff like that, but apparently there was an audience ready to absorb his belligerent message. Trump naturally picked up on the same vibe and now we have all this nastiness.