Rush Limbaugh

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Click here to listen to Rush Limbaugh blame the negative media attention toward Rex Grossman on the fact that he's white.




 
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From very early on in Limbaugh's career it always seemed to me that he didn't really care about what he was saying.  His biography always looked like kind of a slacker who got into radio through some family connections and then began casting about for ways to build an audience and be succesful.
At some point he started doing an angry white man thing and the phones lit up.  So he went with it.
The more he did it, the more people listened and the richer he got.  So he kept doing it.  But it always felt to me like he was just throwing open the mike every day and more or less guessing what the audience wanted to hear. 
He was very good at this and has changed politics, the course of our nation and the nature of discourse in this country.  (Almost entirely for the worse.)
But I don't believe for a second that he believes (or even particularly cares) about what he says.
A few decades down the road he is just still going in, flipping on the mike and guessing what his right wing nutjob audience wants to hear.  But now you can hear the weariness and laziness in the broadcast. 
His comments on Grossman were obviously insane racsit ramblings that are easily disproven by even the most casual analysis. 
But, to me, they are more.  They are the work of a man who is unhappy in his job, has lost all interest in his message and is just going through the motions.
We can laugh at how stupid this is, but this is the Rush Limbaugh formula.  Say outrageuos things only the most rabid conservative could possibly stomach, who cares what anyone else thinks, you will get millions from your core audience who tunes in to hear thier own narrow, ill-informed, backwards, racist, neo-fascists worldview confirmed.
There are @ 300 millions Americans.   If Rush can say thing that just 1% want to hear, he has an audience of 3 million.  That will pay the bills.  I just don't think he cares that 99% of the people (if they bothered to listen) can see right through his lazy, thoughtless radio efforts today that are a shadow of his former self.

by ProfRich on 02/09/2007 04:00:35 PM EST


"He was very good at this and has changed politics, the course of our nation and the nature of discourse in this country."  

You are 100% correct with this comment.

There is a reason that Congress issued a proclamation in 1995, labeling Rush Limbaugh as "The Majority Maker".
There is a reason that he has been honored at White House Galas and Dick Cheney dinners and private meetings with Karl Rove. There is a reason that George W Bush visited Limbaugh's mother Millie, and asked for her endorsement, before he announced his candidacy in 1999.

Rush Limbaugh is the heart and soul of the Republican Party.

"But I don't believe for a second that he believes (or even particularly cares) about what he says."

Then you don't know the history of Rush. It starts with a long line of GOP politicians and judges named Limbaugh. He was raised on this stuff.

by KenTX on 02/11/2007 06:24:52 AM EST

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There is a reason that Congress issued a proclamation in 1995, labeling Rush Limbaugh as "The Majority Maker".

Whoops! These days, if you accidentally omit a word or phrase in a post, you get labeled a liar, or worse. The sentence should have read:

There is a reason that Congressional Republicans issued a proclamation in 1995, labeling Rush Limbaugh as "The Majority Maker".

Without the Rush Limbaugh radio program broadcasting as a beacon of truth, my colleagues and I would never have been able to wrest control of the Congress from the Democrats, after 40 long years, in the revolution of 1994. What a thrill it was to meet him at a special dinner held at the Camden Yards stadium during our orientation prior to taking office; we made Rush an honorary member of the Republican freshman class of the 104th Congress, welcoming him as a “Majority Maker.”

by KenTX on 02/11/2007 08:44:43 PM EST

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