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My Name Is Rush L.
American Spectator ^ | 10/14/03 | Lawrence Henry

Posted on 10/13/2003 9:17:12 PM PDT by Pokey78

My salvation and my honor come from God alone. He is my refuge, a rock where no enemy can reach me.
-- Psalms 62:7 (NLT)


I got sober in the summer of 1983, in Anchorage. I was playing six nights a week with a rock and roll band in the lounge of one of the town's flossiest hotels, so when I walked into my first AA meeting, everybody knew who I was. And when I stopped boozing and drugging, because I was living with the band, everybody at work knew what I had done. I was not anonymous at all.

In a way, I had hit bottom twice, separated by eight years. In 1975, my kidneys failed, probably because of drug abuse. In 1983, with a new two-year-old kidney transplant, I was getting bombed onstage every night (on beer; I had taken everything over the years but it was beer that eventually kicked my butt), so bombed that I started thinking about maybe taking a little speed to keep myself upright.

At that point, some clarity managed to poke through the dark cloud around me. "Wait a minute," I thought. "I've done this before."

So I walked into that noon meeting full of oil field roustabouts, Eskimos, barkeepers, waitresses, fisherman, and refugees from ruin in the Lower 48, and I said, "I'm Larry, and I'm an alcoholic." And it was a tremendous relief. The jig was up. I could give up. I could start over. I began to find real friends. And I started on a rocketship trajectory of life. The acceleration built slowly at first, but then increased to the point that it would take my breath away, and I would fall to my knees and thank God that I had found the program, and found friends, and left a life of sorrow and regret and lies and hurt behind.

If I understand Rush Limbaugh's story right, he has fallen twice, too. He got hooked on painkillers in the mid-nineties after a back operation. His increasing use of painkillers made him deaf, which should have been enough to make anybody hit bottom. But we addicts and drunks are strong folks. Stuff that would kill other people just challenges us to new heights (or depths) of self-will. Then came the National Enquirer exposé, and Rush's public admission that he was an addict. He has just taken the first step.

The lefties may be crowing now over Rush's "downfall," but they don't know that his story is the most valuable thing he owns. I have heard some of the best speakers ever in AA and NA meetings. Some were humble people you would never have known. Some were movie stars, federal judges, rock and rollers, and politicians.

Rush will find himself perfectly at home in twelve-step programs, especially in a celebrity-filled locale like Palm Beach. I myself came home from Anchorage and spent the major portion of my sobriety in West Los Angeles meetings -- Pacific Palisades, Beverly Hills, Brentwood, and Bel Air. One of my best pals was an aging musical comedy ingenue with a household name. I knew the 1980s movie industry couple of the year, and joked with them that I could follow the course of their recovery on the front pages of the tabloids. I interviewed a rock star who told me, "The hell with anonymity. When I got sober, I wanted to take out a billboard on the Sunset Strip." I met a man who would become Governor. I talked tennis with a movie star famous for his rants against Republicans. I won my second wife from a member of the cast of one of the 1980s' best-known serial TV dramas. I worked for a movie producer who won two Grammies. I helped another producer revise a screenplay, a producer with a dark burnished brown-gold 30-year-old Oscar on his shelf.

All these people had something in common. Their lives were getting better all the time. They were achieving more in their professions, they got better at what they did, they were happier, they connected better with people. And they were sober, and they knew that counted. With few exceptions, they spoke movingly of their relationships with God. They prayed. They told frank and often hilarious stories of their falls from glory.

Many of those who gloat today over Rush's crash have had crashes of their own, I assure you. Some have even suggested that Rush will have to "apologize" for his offenses against liberalism. It's not my business to take anybody's inventory (I would remind Rush's critics). But I suggest that Rush may find other things to apologize for than the excellence of the job he has done over the years.

Because, you see, Rush will come back and do an even better job when he's clean. Better hold your tongues, folks. One of the greatest talkers of our age is getting sober. And you ain't heard nothing yet.


Lawrence Henry is a writer in North Andover, Massachusetts.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: aa; addiction; clean; eib; limbaugh; na; recovery; rehab; rush; rushlimbaugh; sober
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To: laweeks; All
"I find it odd, truly odd, that Rush, whose voice I've listened to for many, many years never once said anything about back surgery "

I too find that odd. I could have missed dialog on the subject but I've not heard any FReepers say "I remember him talking about his back surgery".

Has anyone heard anything prior to the drug allegations?
41 posted on 10/14/2003 4:51:16 AM PDT by Rebelbase
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To: Pokey78
Excellent. Bump.
42 posted on 10/14/2003 4:52:20 AM PDT by RightOnline
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To: InvisibleChurch
STILL waiting for the liberals 'compassion' to come forth for Rush... how can they have compassion for the whole world when they don't have it for one man?

Don't hold your breath. But why is it surprising? Rush is getting as much sympathy from the libs as he would show to them if the situation was reversed.

43 posted on 10/14/2003 4:55:37 AM PDT by Non-Sequitur
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To: Rebelbase
I had a skin cancer removed from my ear last winter and I didn't mention it on this site. I didn't even get my prescription for pain pills filled. I don't get to listen to Rush much now days so I can't say I heard it before.

But I maintain that, 1. He has admitted to the PUBLIC he has a problem. 2. He is in rehab. 3. He is STILL RIGHT.
44 posted on 10/14/2003 4:58:35 AM PDT by Conspiracy Guy (Of course it doesn't rhyme. It's a tagline not a poem.)
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To: Pokey78
Rush asked us to Pray for him, and that is what I am doing.

I've been sober for 11 years now, God answers our Prayers.
45 posted on 10/14/2003 5:00:38 AM PDT by The Mayor (I asked God for a friend, He gave me all of YOU...)
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To: Non-Sequitur
What I don't understand is why does anyone care for Liberal " I feel your pain " Compassion anyway. The Conservatives vs Liberals is a cultural war with our future as a nation at stake. Rush is one of us. Right now he is wounded due to his own mistake. Do we expect the enemy to say "Oh poor Rushy, we feel his pain, give us a big hug"? Or do we plan to help our wounded comrade so that he may rejoin the fight? I see too many so called Conservatives ready to shoot the wounded comrade as if he were a lame horse. Medic !! Somebody pass me some ammo.
46 posted on 10/14/2003 5:05:08 AM PDT by Conspiracy Guy (Of course it doesn't rhyme. It's a tagline not a poem.)
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To: PurVirgo
Dude, we're everywhere.
47 posted on 10/14/2003 5:05:42 AM PDT by Crawdad (I cried because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no class.)
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To: Flurry
I agree with your three positions.

I still find it odd that no one has heard Rush mention anything along the lines of the surgery/recovery he has had to endure.


48 posted on 10/14/2003 5:13:41 AM PDT by Rebelbase
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To: Rebelbase
I could only offer hearsay.
49 posted on 10/14/2003 5:24:32 AM PDT by Conspiracy Guy (Of course it doesn't rhyme. It's a tagline not a poem.)
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To: Pokey78
It is certainly amazing to see and hear of stories like this. People who have abused their bodies with drugs and alcohol for years, and to come out of that destructive pattern as a more whole and better person than they were before the chemical abuse even started.

I'm with Rush 100%!!!!!!
50 posted on 10/14/2003 5:26:30 AM PDT by Arpege92
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To: PurVirgo
and friends of Lois too.
51 posted on 10/14/2003 5:32:29 AM PDT by Sally'sConcerns (It's painless to be a monthly donor!)
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To: Arpege92
I second that.
52 posted on 10/14/2003 5:37:00 AM PDT by Conspiracy Guy (Of course it doesn't rhyme. It's a tagline not a poem.)
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To: Pokey78
AA is for quitters...
53 posted on 10/14/2003 5:39:38 AM PDT by Hatteras (Some mornings, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps...)
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To: Flurry; WhyisaTexasgirlinPA
Flurry I emailed your poem to Rush, great job!
54 posted on 10/14/2003 5:51:26 AM PDT by SeeRushToldU_So (Whacha think?)
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To: SeeRushToldU_So
Morning Rush - that was nice of you....
55 posted on 10/14/2003 5:53:54 AM PDT by WhyisaTexasgirlinPA
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To: PurVirgo
There evidentily are tons of us judging from the Rush threads. It must piss off the moralists big time. I mean I have heard here that AA is a cult full of immoral weaklings. Since a lot of freepers are evidentily in recovery from the "code" words in their posts, FR must be full of immoral, weaklings. (If the moralists are right.)
56 posted on 10/14/2003 5:54:38 AM PDT by Nov3 (one day at a time since 10/12/1984)
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To: Hatteras
AA is for quitters...

LOL

57 posted on 10/14/2003 5:56:25 AM PDT by Nov3 (one day at a time since 10/12/1984)
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To: SeeRushToldU_So
Thanks. I've had a lot of people ask how to get a note or card to him. If you know how post a vanity. I'm sure there is something on his website but save us lazy folks some surfing.
58 posted on 10/14/2003 5:58:46 AM PDT by Conspiracy Guy (Of course it doesn't rhyme. It's a tagline not a poem.)
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To: WhyisaTexasgirlinPA
Morning Rush - that was nice of you....

Well thank you Tex, I am nice like that.

59 posted on 10/14/2003 6:00:54 AM PDT by SeeRushToldU_So (Whacha think?)
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To: Pokey78
My Name Is Rush L.

This entirely misses the point. The difference between someone who becomes addicted to painkillers through medical treatment for physical pain and someone who relies on drugs or alcohol as a means to blunt psychic pain is significant. In the first case, given enough enough of the drug and great enough pain, it's virtually certain that a physiological dependence will begin. This is simply a matter of pharmacology. If you can eliminate the physical pain, you can wean someone from the drug with no long-lasting consequences, with no need for any variety of _______ Anonymous. In the second case, a psychological condition preceeds the drug use. This condition may itself be caused by constitutive deficiencies or excesses of neural transmitters and the drug use serves to counter them or at least to blunt some of their more serious effects. In this latter case, rather than the former one, absent a successful treatment of the underlying cause, which, being psychic or an idiosyncratic biochemistry, is less likely than the physical to be remedied, the individual is more likely to be subject to relapse.

It's the superficiality of the liberal that thinks, "pain is pain and drugs are drugs, so any instance of one accompanying the other is the same as other instances."
60 posted on 10/14/2003 6:08:53 AM PDT by aruanan
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