Ende: Slipping Anchor
"First and foremost, I’m a businessman. My first goal is to attract the largest audience possible so I can charge confiscatory ad rates. I happen to have great entertainment skills, but that enables me to sell airtime.” Then he added -- as if he had to after a rare moment of honesty -- "But in my heart and soul, I know I have become the intellectual engine of the conservative movement."John McManus, "The Flap Over Limbaugh", New American, April 2009
Lard Boy, 70, racist homophobic misogynistic junkie and self-described shill "intellectual engine" for America's Rightist movement, is dead. He was famous for publicly stoking political and racial hatred, spreading lies, and behaving like a high school bully for nearly thirty years.
He was the most successful hate-monger on radio, after the end of the Fairness Doctrine under Reagan in 1984. Limbaugh used his huge soapbox -- not to build positive connections between people in service of a public good, but to pour permeating, corrosive dialogue into the culture.
Beginning in 1988, Limbaugh helped to shape the audience for Rupert Murdoch's Fox, which debuted in 1996. Lil' Rupert could not have been as successful, quickly, without Limbaugh creating a ready-made market for the hatred and lies the Murdochs push daily.
“You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray [assassin of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.]. We miss you, James. Godspeed.”
He mocked people, insulted them, belittled them on air. And from that soapbox, he lied, or passed along lies pushed by others. He used his position to attack public figures whose politics he disliked (even other conservatives who weren't Toeing the Limbaugh line), which would guarantee they received more hate mail and threats to their personal safety.
He reveled and took pleasure in being able to affect others in a negative way from the safe remove of a broadcast studio, like the bully he was.
To an African American female caller: "Take that bone out of your nose and call me back”. To an immigrant: “You’re a foreigner. You shut your mouth or you get out.”
Limbaugh was vain, morally and ethically crippled. He was a coward. His legacy is utterly negative, without a shred of redeeming behavior. And he was no stranger to flirting with sedition, even secession.
This government is governing against its own citizens. This president and his party are governing against us. We are at war with our own President, we are at war with our own government. Limbaugh; January 9, 2010
Blimp's End: 'Tucked In With A Spade' ; the obituary in Little Rupert's papers
("Giant Of The Age Passes - And The World Mourns").
He's dead. He was who and what he was. He was responsible for what he did. I am not unhappy he's gone. If that's upsetting to you, so be it.
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