"Rush Limbaugh? What's one more dead junkie?"
- my friend, who said he's been saving that to use since Limbaugh said that about Jerry Garcia.
Erik Loomis' obituary for Limbaugh (over at LGM) has plenty on Limbaugh's views about drug use, et cetera.
Don't judge me by my worst customers.
Dan Savage's comment worked for me: "Not the obituary I wanted to read today...but we're getting warmer."
Rush, too, is getting warmer if there is any truth to the lessons I learned as a kid.
I've been reading the obits at the rightwing sites -- The Blaze, Breitbart, The Daily Caller, The National Review -- and while they all laud him as brilliant and a great conservative, they are almost entirely silent on his actual insights -- on the content of his broadcasts. The National Review comes closest to praising him for actual things he said. Here's their description of Limbaugh's insistence -- on an actual ESPN broadcast -- that the Eagles' Donovan McNabb wasn't a very good quarterback. NR described the response as:
a bizarre Monday Night Football uproar that served as an early indication of the approaching cancel culture
But why was Rush canceled? NR doesn't report the actual Limbaugh comment about McNabb, who had at the time been to three straight Pro Bowls and two straight NFC championship games:
"Sorry to say this, I don't think he's been that good from the get-go. I think what we've had here is a little social concern in the NFL. The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well. There is a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he didn't deserve. The defense carried this team."
That Limbaugh was on ESPN at all is the lede on that one. Brings home the point that what's different now isn't how horrible conservatives are, but that they're getting resistance.
7. I take your point: The initial response by ESPN was to defend the fucker -- though they did ultimately have to fire him and the firing would certainly be more instantaneous today. (And they'd never put him on the air in the first place now, although even then the move was pretty shocking.)
Here is the initial defense from ESPN:
"This is not a politically motivated comment. This is a sports and media argument," said ESPN executive vice president Mark Shapiro.
So as the NR eulogist said, it really was a proto-cancel culture situation.
But it's hard to make the case that the resistance to the Limbaughs of the world has increased since 2003. It was only a year ago that Limbaugh himself was awarded the Fucking Presidential Medal of Freedom (the FPMF).
My takeaway from reading the wingnut obits is how special guys like Limbaugh and Trump are -- and how difficult they are to replace. Their accomplishments are almost entirely attributable to their complete lack of shame -- a quality that even far-right-nut sites struggle to replicate.
I mean, if, say, Breitbart took shamelessness to the level that Limbaugh did, the obit would start something like this:
"Rush Limbaugh, who gained international renown for his denunciations of 'feminazis' and the preferential treatment of African Americans, died today at age 70."
I can't find "feminazis" in any of the rightwing obits.
I think that's because positions on Nazism are shifting on the right.
Anyway, you don't want people to confused. They might not know whether to masturbate or be disgusted.
Ordinarily, I believe in observing the decencies, and in not saying anything bad about the deceased until at least his corpse has been buried six feet under ...
But this is someone who once called a 12-year old girl "a dog" on his radio show; and who used to celebrate the death of gay men from AIDS on that same radio show ... A very bad person indeed: churlish, malicious, and spiteful, and full to the brim with all manner of rages and resentments. He seemed determined to leave the world a worse place than he had found it; and in this sick and twisted aspiration, he was no doubt successful.
Will St. Peter call his name? Well, I dunno, of course, but I rather doubt it...
May you rot in hell, you bastard.
Hey Rush, first time caller, long time listener- go to hell.
The thing that stands out to me about Rush is how influential he was when I was in high school and college. Friends listened to him, because they were dirtbags and he spoke to their worst impulses. I listened sometimes to know what my friends were hearing. He was played in a bunch of blue collar work settings. A friend had to listen to his show every day during his summer job because that was what his boss and coworker liked. I left long ago and have a very nice bubble, but I have this shoulders-at-ears reaction to the sound of his voice. I suspect he found new generations to poison and retained a lot of influence even in the age of streaming music. He spawned so many imitators, but even when terminally ill, doesn't seem to have anointed a successor (luckily). That's interesting to me. I don't think he was a rare talent, but, like Trump, had some kind of asshole charisma that right-wingers couldn't get enough of.
At any rate, I'm glad he's no longer spewing poison.
I remember that Eagles things being the finest hour for fans at whatever NFL discussion site I was reading then. They were pissed. It is your God given right to say any player in the NFL, from the backup long-snapper for the Lions to Tom Brady, sucks and is overrated. In particular, if you are a fan of another NFC East time, it is your God given right to say about the QB for the Eagles can't successfully throw a beach ball at a mountain, let alone complete a pass in the NFL. And Limbaugh ruined it. We had just reached the point where there had been enough successful black QBs in the NFL that we never had to talk about the race of a quarterback every again, and there was Limbaugh, bringing it up again. People were livid. There were people who were ranting the day before that McNabb was a bum who wrote angry defenses of him and his record. Like I said, it was that site's finest hour.
His death means that he personally isn't continuing to poison the minds of the susceptible white middle-class boomers in our lives. The damage is done, and he taught a younger generation of performers how to be shitty in the way he is, but at least that's one fewer source. For the damage he did to my family personally, I just hope that if he is remembered at all, it is as pathetic, hypocritical scum.
I met Donovan McNabb once, by which I mean I worked concessions at the movie theater by the Eagles training camp and took his popcorn order. He seemed pretty chill.
An acquaintance posted (and I reposted) at the other place:
Jews say, "yimakh shemo," "may his name be erased." We say it of a terrible enemy; it's a serious curse. I said it today. May you live your lives so that nobody ever says it of you.
I just looked up Rush Limbaugh's book The Way Things Ought to Be, because I remember reading it at my grandmother's house but I couldn't remember when. 1992. That's interesting, because it likely means my dad had been listening to him daily for his entire career.
So many horrible moments but I think for me personally the Chelsea thing takes the cake because I was also an awkward red haired girl and my family was completely okay with her being called a dog, and it wasn't hard to draw the inference about what they thought about me, especially when they made the direct comparison about our hair.
It's kind of weird that only because of Jewish people does anyone remember the name "Haman".
Maybe Haman's not really his name, like how "bear" is supposedly a substitute for the horrible True Name (recent xkcd used this as a joke.)
My 90s exposure to Rush was a dittohead friend who had a car so if I wanted a ride home I had to endure listening to it. He was also the driver the only time I was ever a passenger in an accident. We had an early release due to snow and he drove me home and went off the road on a curve. Fortunately there was a large hill next to the road so we just kind of bounced off it and back onto the road, but if a car had been coming the other way he would have hit it head on. He was a shitty driver in general, but anything beat taking the bus in high school.
My parents were National Review reading fans of William F Buckley who adored Florence King, and they *hated* Rush Limbaugh. I don't know if that's all down to snobbery or what.
My dad listened to him all the time in the car, I'd always insist on turning it off and putting on music instead. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
So, is it too soon, or too late, to start the rumor that Rush was assassinated, on orders from a recently unemployed individual who was banned form most platforms and is known to be thinking about starting a a new media business, and would find it very convenient for a few hundred radio stations to need a replacement right-wing talk guy?
22: Is it irresponsible to speculate? It would be irresponsible not to. But to be humorless about it for a sec I doubt speculation would remain focused on that suspect.
He tazed himself in the balls and died.
18: Greeks have damnatio memoriae (well, whatever it's called in Greek) but we still know the name of Herostratus. I think he's the only arson whose name I can remember, unlike, say, the guy who started the Reichstag fire. And your neighbor.
I just looked up Rush Limbaugh's book The Way Things Ought to Be,
It reads better in the original German.
20: My parents were National Review reading fans of William F Buckley ... and they *hated* Rush Limbaugh.
Interesting as I saw someone chastising Limbaugh yesterday as someone who would make otherwise socially unacceptable views more palatable (generally though "humor" and kidding/not kidding*).
That comports with one of my favorite quotes** about Buckley (from Lars Erik-Nelson):
Bill Buckley exists to wrap up peoples' base, greedy, low-life, mean and nasty views into high-faluting language so that they don't have to go around thinking they are just mean, stupid and nasty, but instead have a philosophy like Buckley's.
Different sanitizers for different audiences.
*One of the characteristic Limbaugh shares most strongly with Trump (and millions of RW trolls online as well as meatspace--rancid fuckers everyone of them).
**See also John Kenneth Galbraith on Buckley:
It's great to be with William Buckley, because you don't have to think. He takes a position and you automatically take the opposite one and you know you're right.
Here's something I never thought about. Did Buckley ever make a good point about anything? I guess the line about trusting the first 200 people in the Boston phone directory was mildly witty, but I can't think of anything else.
Didn't he identify a bunch of people, John Birch society and similar, as too insane or too antisemitic to be part of the respectable conservative movement? It was self serving and hypocritical, but he wasn't wrong about the people he pointed to.
That's all exactly why I said that maybe it was just class snobbery. I did really enjoy his son Chris Buckley's satire Thank You for Smoking about a tobacco lobbyist.
Thank you for Smoking (the movie) is pretty evil. It presents a loathsome protagonist as a charming rogue. In an earlier era, James Garner would have played the Aaron Eckhart role. But yeah, I liked the movie a lot.
I think some of Buckley's spy novels were fun. Sometimes, though, you have to accept Buckley's political views to think Blackford has a difficult dilemma.
By the way, Limbaugh cites Gramsci at the start of, I believe, his first book.
32: I never saw the movie. I only read the book.
I was scarred by one of Buckley's spy novels as a teenager.
Between Rush kicking the bucket and this Ted Cruz scandal I'm definitely ODing on schadenfreude
Returning to 8 and the subject of shame, note this Associated Press report about Ted Cruz:
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said Thursday that his family vacation to Mexico was "obviously a mistake" as he returned stateside following an uproar over his disappearance during a deadly winter storm.
The Republican senator said he began second-guessing the trip since the moment he first got on the plane Wednesday. "In hindsight, I wouldn't have done it," he told reporters.
Shamelessness is much, much harder than people realize. Even Ted Cruz -- Ted Cruz! -- can't quite manage it. Would Donald Trump or Rush Limbaugh ever fall prey to the idea that one must attempt in public to appear minimally decent?