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ELECTION GUIDE 2008: Rush Limbaugh
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Rush Limbaugh's Final Hours
by Fearless Rick, 11/3/08
I can still remember the first time I heard Rush Limbaugh on the radio. It was fall of 1987, I was tooling around Livingston County in my newly-new Pontiac Bonneville. I owned seven newspapers, four of them in the exurbia hinterlands south of Rochester, New York. Life was good.
Rush Limbaugh was refreshingly different from anything I'd ever heard on talk radio. Fact of the matter, talk radio was pretty lame, consisting mostly of local call-in shows hosted by newsmen or would-be opinion page editors. Rush was of the nationally-syndicated vein, and his message was decidedly conservative and controversial. He aborted callers. He called feminists, feminazis. He railed against welfare, entitlements, leniency in education, godlessness and other favorite agendas. But mostly, he railed against Democrats. Evil, elected representatives from the Democratic Party were especially despised. And this was well before Bill Clinton was ever even mentioned in serious discussions about possible Democratic party presidents.
It was the era of Reaganomics, of supply-side economics, of an assault on liberalism, which was morphing from tax-and-spend policy to a larger conspiracy of defiance, immorality and decadence in the mind of right-siding Americans. Rush was their voice, their prophet, their messiah.
I listened to Rush on a station called WYSL, a smallish broadcast operation run by a Rochester castaway, one Bob Savage, a jock with larger ambitions. Though I later learned that Bob had less honor than he would have you believe, he nevertheless was smart enough to comprehend the value of Rush's dittos and dictums. WYSL would soon lose their affiliation with Rush and the EIB network as the money managers at the area's most powerful station, WHAM, whose 50,000 powerful watts emanated out from the metropolis of Rochester, insisted on having the exclusive broadcast rights to Limbaugh's daily three hours of "conservative" entertainment.
Obviously, Limbaugh would gain quite an following in the Rochester market and well beyond. Over the years, Rush's three-hour weekday radio show would grow into the largest syndicated show in radio history, the immodest host never missing an opportunity to remind his audience of his bloated popularity.
As time wore on, Rush's power, prestige and personal legacy would grow to legendary proportions, and, after eight years of uninterrupted prosperity under Bill Clinton - which Rush blithely labeled "America Held Hostage" - his power seemed all-encompassing when the Supreme Court declared George Bush the winner of the presidential sweepstakes by denying a recount of the popular vote in Florida, the state which held 27 electoral votes and would swing the election.
Time marches on. After eight horrible years under the administration of George Bush and Dick Cheney, Rush is still the top-rated show, with the largest audience in the nation. But, he has spawned a phalanx of imitators, all inbred with the same right-wing agendas, the same hatred-spewing, anti-liberal commentary, hell-bent on electing and re-electing as many Republicans to office as possible, despite the increasing awareness that the current breed of Republican was neither conservative nor morally fit for office.
Add to the malaise the forced departure of administration officials: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and political aide Karl Rove. Despite evidence of massive corruption, the near-collapse of the economy, jobs being outsourced overseas, trampling on individual freedoms and a national debt growing to over $10 trillion, Rush and his cohorts still dish healthy doses of fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) to their numb, toothless, ignorant followers.
Radio and TV hosts Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Glen Beck, Bill Cunningham, Michael Savage and many other minor ones under the "conservative" banner are all about to be handed the biggest defeat and repudiation of their lives when an informed and fed-up electorate overwhelmingly elects Democrat Barack Obama as the new president and sweeps more Democrats into a larger position of power in the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Thus, at this moment, Rush has six final hours in which to sway votes away from the considerable landslide for Democrats. Two shows - Monday and Tuesday - will mark the beginning of the end of Rush's reign as king of talk radio. He and his imitators have used every underhanded method of spin, innuendo, lying and twisting of the truth to prevent the election of Obama. It hasn't worked. They've tried character assassination, guilt by association, race, religion, lack of experience, even questioning the candidate's proof of citizenship in a vain, foolhardy attempt to derail the inevitable change which must come to America.
It hasn't worked and when the ballots are all counted and the death toll of Republicanism is finally delineated, when the finger-pointing begins in earnest on November 5, the talk show hosts will point at campaign operatives, but the politicians and the people will point at Rush, and Hannity, O'Reilly, Beck, et. al., and declare their distaste for partisan pandering at its worst, and condemn the dialectic of dissatisfaction.
Without a doubt, Rush and his radio allies will carry forth with more hatred and divisiveness after the election. They will criticize every word from the mouths of Democrats in power, deride every piece of legislation proposed and passed as socialism and evidence of the destruction of the American way.
Just as in this election, however, more and more people will turn a deaf ear or turn the radio blusterers off. The right-wing nut case view of the world is in serious decline. Slowly, but surely, Rush and the right-wing talk shows will become increasingly inconsequential and be viewed with increasing levels of skepticism and doubt. Hate, fear and doubt will give way to hope and clarity.
Rush Limbaugh won't matter any more. The golden microphone at the EIB network will be exposed as base metal. The policies of the right will be repudiated. Sanity might even return to the radio airwaves after a while.
Somebody please tell Rush that it's over.
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