Rush Limbaugh
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21 February 2021
This past week saw the death of one the great radio performers of my lifetime, Rush Limbaugh. A polarizing figure to be certain, no doubt plenty of people are just as glad he's dead as miss him. He began on Sacramento's KFBK AM radio where I used to listen to him on the drive up to SLAC. The 280 was high enough up in the Santa Cruz Mountains that I could pick up the signal and he was on at nine rather than noon on the Left Coast - one of the many useful political terms Limbaugh coined over the years. He had an ability to shape the discussion on the right in way like no other and his rise is rightly credited with the surprising success of the Republicans in Congress in the mid 90's. Many times his opponents tried to destroy him with scandals as they so successfully did to others - the politics of personal destruction - but somehow never succeed. Working in a medium of sound, Limbaugh went deaf and had cochlear implants to keep going. As with many he Americans, after being overprescribed opiates for pain he became addicted to them and struggled very publicly learning to live with that addiction. Elton John performed at his wedding. Rush, so often called by his first name that it seems weird to refer to him as Limbaugh, never became the bigot that so many people tried to paint him as. He was a Republican through and through though. The best description of this aspect I ever heard was that if a severed head had been found in George Bush's bedroom in the White House Rush Limbaugh would have come up with a good explanation why it should be there. Eventually the man on the cover of Cigar Aficionado lost his life to lung cancer. For his gifts entertaining and expressing the opinions of so many so eloquently he will be missed.
