Mannheim Steamroller is crap, all crap, and nothing but crap. Do you like John Tesh? No, it’s crap. Just like Mannheim Steamroller is crap.
So Rush likes crap. It’s made him and John Tesh a lot of money.
People pay a lot of money for crap, when they’re told it’s not crap.
Being a bit of a beer snob myself, I can never understand how anybody coming to my house can prefer to drink Coors or Budweiser over the microbrews and imports that I usually have on hand. Yet they do. In fact, many of them would take a sip of my Duvel Belgian Ale or Samuel Smith's Oatmeal Stout and gag on it, before asking if I have any good old Bud in the house. So mass marketing to the lowest common denominator has the effect of convincing people that an inferior product is superior.
With regard to Mannheimer Steamroller, I both love and hate them. Some of their acoustic Baroque material (found mostly on their earlier albums) is quite good, however each of the albums is marred by obnoxious use of synthesizers on some of the tracks. The recent Christmas albums by Mannheim Steamroller are consumer rip-offs - mostly older material re-packaged as new. When they do try to do original music, they fall far short of their 1980s peak. In fact, that "Christmasville" album of a year or two ago was so horrible that it joined "Jingle Cats" and the "Bob Rivers Comedy" albums as perhaps the most unlistenable Christmas music ever put on vinyl/CD.
Some of that early Mannheim Steamroller stuff however is indispensable as so much of my Christmas memories are wrapped up in some of those tunes. I do remember Rush Limbaugh pitching them on his radio show too.
A couple years ago, I paid big money (over $100 a ticket) to see Mannheim Steamroller in concert and was extremely disappointed. Chip Davis was in back surgery and only one of the people on stage were part of the real Mannheim Steamroller. In fact they had two or three separate "Mannheim Steamrollers" playing around the country with only one or two original members as part of each group. They played competently but there was no magic there whatsoever. I could have saved a lot of money by playing the CDs in my car and taking the family out to see the Christmas lights.