Opinion
Rush Limbaugh Gets No Condolences
RIP radio airwaves
The first time I met you — heard you, I should say — I was getting healthy by walking my neighborhood. I carried along a small radio and listened to you rattle on about “femi-Nazis.”
I thought you were kidding — that’s how naïve I was back then in the 1990s. Slowly but surely I realized you were broadcasting an interesting, informative show that reverberated in an entertaining way, but you weren’t joking about your arch conservatism. That was for real!
As controversial as your opinions were, you never swayed from your positions on, for instance, environmentalists, whom you referred to as “tree huggers.” I admit laughing at that, but when I realized that your beliefs about racial and ethnic minorities and feminism defamed millions of people, I quit listening to you. I also quit walking for exercise.
But occasionally I’d check in on a show airing on my car radio. By then you along with Fox Network were spreading disinformation about Obama’s birthplace. You and your Fox cohorts convinced many people that Obama had no right to be president, that he wasn’t born in Hawaii but somewhere in Africa. The “birther” lie lured many racists and white supremacists to the conservative party. They called themselves Republicans, but they had no right to that moniker. Not when they disrespected a duly elected President of the United States.
Yet the worst sin was yet to come: the propagandizing of The Big Lie and the false claims of voter fraud. Limbaugh was Trump’s biggest proponent, spewing filthy lies that the 2020 election would be won from fake ballots. Limbaugh’s brainwashing diatribes enabled Trump to win around 80 million votes in the 2020 election.
No surprise that on February 4, 2020, Melania Trump presented Limbaugh with the Presidential Medal of Freedom as he listened to Trump’s State of the Union address.
Months later, knowing full well he was dying of lung cancer from puffing too many cigars along with his ego, he said on the radio airwaves that the country was “trending toward secession.” He thought the words of a dying man would be respected, but he was wrong. His sponsors and station asked him to dial back his tone.
He said he wasn’t advocating civil war, only repeating what he’d heard. His final test came on Jan. 6 during the insurrection that took place at the Capitol. He dismissed the mob as mere protesters.
On one of his last programs he said,
“There’s a lot of people out there calling for the end of violence…lot of conservatives, social media, who say that any violence or aggression at all is unacceptable regardless of the circumstances. I am glad Sam Adams, Thomas Paine, the actual tea party guys, the men at Lexington and Concord, didn’t feel that way.”
Those were some of the last dying words of a man with fully realized political beliefs and the knowledge of the importance of words.
His legacy was one of fervent Trumpism, and if he had lived longer he would still be voicing The Big Lie and helping Trump spread his Gospel of Undermining Democracy.
I believe in the sanctity of life and the freedoms provided by our First Amendment. If I didn’t, I might be tempted to hail Limbaugh’s death as a positive omen of better things to come.
I do not mourn his passing since he was the purveyor of many lies that are still alive and well and circulating in many domestic terrorist groups in the 50 states.
Rush, when your political alter-egos yelled “Stop the steal,” you stole any sympathy I might have on the occasion of your death. So no condolences for you, Rush. No condolences at all.