How to Understand Rush Limbaugh

Commentary Magazine ^ | February 2011 | Wilfred M. McClay

[LurkedLongEnough]

ping bttt

[samtheman]

You make a good point. I’m going to think about what you just wrote.

[driftless2]

When I was growing up in the fifties and sixties, what is now called conservative was practiced by virtually everybody. The Dem party was not so nearly controlled by the far left as it is now. My parents were staunch Dems but believed in every conservative maxim you can think of. Nobody championed all the nutty liberal ideas that have surfaced in the past fifty years.

I'm talking about being responsible for your own life and not letting government get too much control. By those terms, virtually all Americans were conservatives. Liberalism and leftism (not identical) unfortunately have made great (and disastrous) inroads in the past fifty years, but the majority of Americans are still conservatives.

[MrB]

Watch this documentary and show it to your parents to show them what has happened to their Democratic party:

http://agendadocumentary.com

[GOPJ]

How to understand Rush Limbaugh—shut up, listen—and learn.

Short, sweet, and to the point...

[Ax]

I first heard Rush’s show down in Cuba in about 1996. I was driving from downtown Havana out to Jose Marti Airport. I got an AM station from south Florida, and I remember thinking he was a pompous ass. I retired to Cape Cod the next summer and found him on FM Radio. I was hooked from day one, and haven’t missed a whole lot of El Rushbo since.

[Mama Shawna]

I was working in the accounting department of UnionBay Sportswear just before the ‘92 elections. We all had ‘cubicles’. The girl across from me had her headphones on, and all of a sudden grabbed them off her head and threw them down on her desk, saying: ‘OH! I can’t stand that man!’ I said who? She said Rush Limbaugh! And told me what station he was on so I could get a listen to his ‘hate’ talk. Been hooked ever since! haha!

[MrB]

There are people who just can’t get past that “he’s a pompous ass” stage to see that it’s a schtick.

Libs, especially, are turned off by him being “so sure that he’s right”. For some reason, this offends their sense of relativism to the core, and it probably exactly the reason he does it.

[shiva]

Seems like centuries ago.....I was searching around in my car radio for a station and accidently heard Rush. I was shocked and said to myself, “Finally! Here is someone that thinks like me!” I was hooked from that day foward.

[saminfl]

In 1991 I bought a 1974 AMC something that had only 34000 miles on it. It only had AM radio and one day I was scanning through the stations and heard this guy making up a cast for a movie about Desert Storm. I remember almost wrecking the car because I was laughing so hard at the thought of Molly Yard as Jabba the Hut.

[WhatNot]

Thanks for the great memories! Love hearing how others started listening to Ma-Ha Rushy :)

[rwa265]

I probably first heard Rush when he was Rusty Sharpe at KGMO (not KMGO) in 1967. I was a freshman at Southeast Missouri State and the guys in my house listened to KGMO all the time. We used to all gather around the radio to hear “Chicken Man.” Of course, we didn’t know at the time that Rusty Sharpe was El Rushbo.

I do not remember the moment I started listening to the Rush Limbaugh Show, it was sometime during the first Clinton Administration. I do know that it was through his show that I learned about Free Republic.

[donna]

Me, too. And one thing I remember was Rush provided the first look at funny/ugly Democrat photos. Until then, Time and Newsweek, etc only posted ugly photos of Republicans.

[Ax]

I have relatives and friends who write The Maharushi off as a bomb-thrower. When asked if they ever listen to him, they tell me that they don’t listen to dope addicts. My brother, one of his most severe critics, has never listened to the program. It’s their loss.

[lonevoice]

[My hearts in London - Everett]

Actually, FB is where I found it linked to Rush’s page this morning! :~D I have Rush on my news feed there.

[upsdriver]

Two people share the credit for their willingness to lead the effort to take on the Obama regime, Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin.

[My hearts in London - Everett]

Levin’s all offended. lol He just posted this to Facebook ~

“This professor gets an A+ for his insight about Rush’s enormous impact on our society. But his gratuitous attack on other hosts, who work very hard to advance the cause in their own way, is cheap and uninformed. His backhanded dismissal plays into the usual platitudes of the Left.”

[Colinsky]

I bought into the mainstream media presentation of Rush as a race-baiting hater who shouted venom and treated callers like dirt. He was like the Hindenberg, they told me—a Nazi gas-bag.

I never listened to find out for myself, but then the radio station that carried the SF Giants games started carrying the show, and in the mornings when I turned the radio on at work it would still be on the baseball station, but it was Rush. At first I just snapped it away instantly, but one morning Rush was playing a parody song, “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iraq,” to the tune of “Barbara Ann” by the Beach Boys, and I started actually listening, and I’ve been hooked ever since.

Except for the final few years of the Dubya administration when I felt Rush was simply a Bush apologist.

[rlmorel]

A remarkable piece. It captured what Rush Limbaugh is and how he operates.