{"id":15349,"date":"2021-02-18T10:25:55","date_gmt":"2021-02-18T10:25:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/georgethomasclark.com\/?p=15349"},"modified":"2021-02-18T22:07:25","modified_gmt":"2021-02-18T22:07:25","slug":"young-rush-limbaugh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/georgethomasclark.com\/young-rush-limbaugh\/","title":{"rendered":"Young Rush Limbaugh"},"content":{"rendered":"
\tBack in 1987 Sacramento I had my own indoor half-court basketball gym and after shooting and exercising for about an hour in late afternoons I\u2019d often relax in the living room, drinking cold water and watching the news. I preferred national reports but sometimes turned to local news and noted this mid-thirties guy with a big voice and more than three hundred pounds on his face and frame. Twice weekly he debated the short and slender mayor of Davis. <\/p>\n
\tThe big guy was a local radio talk show host. I\u2019d never heard of Rush Limbaugh but quickly learned he was a dynamic fellow who liked to insult people. I remember one show he told the gentlemanly mayor, \u201cYou\u2019re a wimp. All my friends say you\u2019re a wimp. What am I doing debating a guy like you?\u201d <\/p>\n
\tThree years earlier Sacramento had represented a major promotion into a larger market but Rush now considered himself \u201ca whale in a bathtub\u201d and, after two decades of itinerant struggle to become a radio star, had only one more year in purgatory before being offered a syndicated show in New York where he immediately enchanted conservative listeners around the nation while building an audience that would swell to more than fifteen million and extend his social and political influence far beyond the radio waves. I bet at least ten percent of his listeners were liberals. That\u2019s how they knew they hated him. They sought his eruptions hundreds of times, if only for a few minutes. That was sufficient a sufficient dose of his charisma, a gift he wielded like no one in radio or anywhere else in the media. <\/p>\n
\tBigots thought a guy that famous must be right when he called ambitious women feminazis and a woman seeking subsidized birth control a whore and said a black quarterback was overrated because the NFL was \u201cdesirous\u201d of blacks being successful in that quintessential role. The Dittoheads smiled crookedly when, before Barack Obama even took office, Rush christened the financial catastrophe, wrought by George W. Bush and his minions, \u201cThe Obama Recession.\u201d That\u2019s not conservatism. That\u2019s bullshit. Rush Limbaugh believed much of what he said, though historians will likely determine, after hundreds of thousands of interviews, that he often knowingly passed gas simply to rouse an audience comprised by the sort who invade the nation\u2019s capital as an expression of manly virtue. <\/p>\n
\tEven after his personal difficulties with hearing loss and abuse of prescription pain medication and the associated arrest and mandatory rehabilitation and even during his final battle with lung cancer, Rush Limbaugh endured to sing the same tunes and sing them well right through the final concert, two weeks before his passing. <\/p>\n
\tNotes – However people feel about him, they\u2019ll never forget Rush Limbaugh. This evening I had to Google \u201clist of mayors of Davis\u201d in order to recall, if I ever knew, the name of his rhetorical opponent on TV in Sacramento. It\u2019s David Rosenberg, and he excelled on the city council in the university town west of the capital, twice serving as mayor, running a law practice for twenty years, working as a senior advisor to two Democratic governors, and spending most of this century as a superior court judge who\u2019s still pounding the gavel at age seventy-four. I remember an articulate and gentle man, and on YouTube I see he\u2019s still that way. But he was in the wrong tub, crushed by the whale. <\/p>\n