Posted on 02/02/2011 5:56:20 AM PST by My hearts in London - Everett
One of the many strategic errors made by the Obama administration in the early days of 2009 was its decision to take on talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh—though it was, perhaps, hard to blame the president and his people for trying. After all, they were riding the wave of a big electoral win and feeling pretty invincible, with large majorities in both houses of Congress and a messiah in the White House, and Limbaugh had just stunned the country, days before Obama was inaugurated, by summarizing his feelings about the new president in four simple words: “I hope he fails.” Limbaugh impatiently brushed aside the happy talk about compromise and bipartisan cooperation and scoffed at the claim that Obama was a pragmatic, post-ideological, post-partisan, post-racial conciliator and healer. Instead, he saw every reason to believe that Obama would aggressively pursue a leftist dream agenda: an exponential expansion of government’s size and power, a reordering of the American economic system, and a dismantling of America’s role as a world power. Limbaugh was not alone in such views, but he was the only major figure on the right willing to stick his neck out at a time when the rest of the nation seemed dazed into acquiescence by the so-far impeccably staged Obama ascendancy.
(Excerpt) Read more at commentarymagazine.com ...
Funny thing is, I first heard Limbaugh in maybe 1994 or so, but it was on his TV show, not on the radio, the local ABC affiliate pushed him back to 1 am in the morning as he was “controversial”.
He was lampooning the House Dem Leader for yawning during a Clinton Speech to congress.
Bob Grant started in NYC in 1970. Even Rush has stated that Grant paved the way for him and the other talkers. Grant was on five days a week saying things that FReepers would agree with 99% of the time until 2006 or so. Now he still has a show once a week on NYC's WABC. I didn't listen to Grant before I was introduced to Rush's program on a business trip in 1992, but I cannot imagine that whatever Grant said before that didn't induce frequent outrage from the left, and cause them to plot to get rid of him. But apparently the "fairness doctrine" wasn't enough to do so.
ML/NJ
“For me it was August 1988, Anchorage Ak. I was listening to KENI. 650-AM...”
For me, it was a few months earlier that — also in Anchorage on KENI.
I lived outside Boston... used to listen to gene Burns and Jerry Williams on ‘RKO. My folks always listened to talk radio and I got hooked. So they had just driven back from Florida and told me they heard a guy on the drive back that was great. A day or so later I walked in the door and Rush is on. He was talking “to” Saddam Hussein and explaining to him about a Cruise Missile. He described how it can fly down a highway, hang a left and take a boulevard, turn right and down a driveway, choose a particular window on a particular floor enter it and explode. I was hooked.
You always have things that happen in your lifetime that you remember exactly where you were and what you were doing at the time, forever. Like President Kennedy’s assassination, Dr. Kings assassination, the Cuban Missile crisis, the morning after RWR was elected, the Challenger catastrophe.
I remember I was driving from Birmingham, Alabama to Tuscaloosa in 1991, trying to find a decent radio station and there Rush was. It was like listening to an old friend talk about things that had the same take on things that my friends had. I’ve been a faithful listener since that day and my opinion of Rush is still the same today as it was 20 years ago.
Great article! The best-written account of Rush I have ever read...it is obvious the author actually listens to Rush’s show.
Thanks
This is an excellent article about someone who truly is a genius conservative and genius communicator.
But I do have a problem with one of the themes of the article.
The article basically claims that efforts by the liberal media and the dems to marginalize Rush have backfired and only made him stronger. I think that claim is Pollyannish.
The fact is, there are tens of millions of people in America who are completely insulated from Rush’s message and will never hear a single word of it because of the impenetrable quarantine wall the lamestream media has placed around Rush and all conservative thinkers, writers, speakers and communicators.
Their absolute refusal to debate the points presented by Rush (or by Palin, or by a whole host of others) and instead dismiss them as “fringe lunatics or fringe hate-mongers” has worked.
The ranks of The Sheep are growing every day and I find it depressing in the extreme. Those ranks include huge majorities in the nation’s universities.
I don’t know what can be done and I don’t know who can do it but in order for America to survive we must destroy this quarantine wall and DEMAND that the media actually report the true facts of the debate, what it is that people like Rush are actually saying.
I’m not saying that liberal media people (basically 95% of the media) have to agree with anything that Rush says. They’ll never do that.
But they have to start reporting it. Fairly. And of course they’ll never do that willingly. So we have to “force” them to do it (by putting some kind of public opinion pressure on them)... but the question is: how?
To make a long story short, I started voting straight 'R' in '94.
Very well written.
Actually I know several folks who do not agree with hardly anything he says but respect and admire his ability to entertain.
“Able to draw with minuteness on more than four decades of work experience, he has achieved a comprehensive and detailed grasp of the technical, performing, and business dimensions of the industry, all of which give him an unmatched understanding of the medium and its possibilities. But it is more than a wonk’s understanding. He has a deep-in-the-bones feeling for what is magical about radio at its best—its immediacy, its simplicity, its ability to create the richness of imagined places and moments with just a few well-placed elements of sound, its incomparable advantages as a medium for storytelling with the pride of place that it gives to the spoken word and the individual human voice, abstracted from all other considerations”
His TV show was very good...funny and quick. We used to record it on video but would have to set the recorder for 3-hours because the local station would constantly change the air time and his show was continuously shoved around by the Sham-Wow-like guy or some infomercial for a new magic chopper. His show came on around 12:30 am, but it was always at a different time.
Honestly can’t remember my first hearing of Rush. I do remember I initially didn’t get his humor and was put off by some of his statements until I finally figured him out. Just a harmless little fuzzball, really, that is, unless you’re trying to put the hurt on his America. Then watch out. History will record, I believe, that God really did loan him a unique gift, one that changed the course of our history to the great benefit of the cause of freedom.
Rush is brilliant, and has proved himself to be more than an intellectual equal to any of our ruling class.
That alone shows that our institutions of higher learning allowed their quality to sink to that of Detroit - with the same results.
The fact that a high school grad can out argue the Harvard quota law school grad says much.
May Rush live long and prosper!
Shortly after Rush was picked up by our local Clear Channel affiliate in the late 80s or early 90s, their sales director told me, “these guys usually last about 18 months and then burn out.”
Not exactly a prophet, eh?
The nation’s libs still do not understand the appeal of Rush as they do not understand conservatism. They categorize all opposition to liberalism under the term hate without bothering to understand the basics of conservatism: the ideology of Rush and the majority of Americans. And that includes Americans who don’t even know they’re conservatives because it’s ingrained in the average American character. The great majority of Americans practice conservatism, but they just don’t think about it. Some might even call themselves apolitical or hate Rush. But they practice it anyway in their daily lives.
Talk radio is a place where people can go to hear opinions freely expressed that they will not hear elsewhere, and where they can come away with a sense of confirmation that they are not alone, are not crazy, and are not wrong to think and feel such things.
I have it on my profile page but this is exactly how I felt the first time I listened to Rush in what.....maybe 1990? 1991?
Perhaps we should stop referring to our ideology as “conservatism” and start referring to it as “Americanism”.
“I feel your pain,” but I am reasonable certain you’re trend analysis is incorrect. I think the relative number of people receptive to conservative principles is growing, not diminishing. How else can November 2010 be explained? The fact is, the left is genius at one of the critical arts of survival. They are like that lizard that puffs itself up to make you think it’s much bigger than it really is. That’s why they’ve labored so hard to control the media. They can actually be on the decline and yet manage to look much more powerful than they really are. Time will tell, but I think the true trend line is running in our favor. We only have to avoid buying into the left’s self-serving misrepresentations of their own grandiosity and see them for the weak, fearful little things they really are.
“reasonably certain,” that is.
Excellent excellent article. I just linked it in Facebook. It will be interesting to see the comments from the usual suspects...
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