About 3 years ago there was a NYTarticle on a weekend about how Schumer and Roger Ailes took Limbaugh to dinner, wined and dined him, and asked him to please stop using the word ‘amnesty’ in his discussions on the air about their immigration bill they were pushing. The article went on to say that in the months that followed, Rush no longer called the bill amnesty, and they were very pleased he followed through.
A lot of us were waiting for the next Monday morning to hear how Rush wold respond. I thought the Rush I thought I knew had only 2 possible responses. 1. It wasn’t true, he never went to dinner with them, this didn’t happen. 2. He would do an honest mea culpa and say that sometimes he did get wowed by the big guns and that he still talked about the pitfalls of the bill, etc. and apologize to us, his loyal loving listeners, because he understood how it looked to us. On Air he calls him Chuck You, but off Air he dines and does his bidding. I thought of Rush as honest and good.
But Rush came on the Air FURIOUS and DEFENSIVE that day. The dinner did happen, he admitted, but he said he never agreed to do their bidding. But he did. He lied to us. After the first break in his show, when he had obviously gone online to see that many of us were not buying his arrogant denials, he came back and called us HATERS. I was done with him in that exact second.
I subscribed to his site even though I never used it, for many years. I prayed for him, I supported him, l was thrilled when he stole my jokes off FR and used them as his. But in that one minute I realized he was pretty much an act, not the man I had thought him to be. It was quite disappointing to me.
Yaelle,
Thanks for relaying this truth about Rush.
I’d heard about a meeting with Ailes. Didn’t know Schumer was there too!
My break with Rush was when he kept taking Cruz’s side during the election, no doubt because the Cruz campaign and GOPe was pushing him to do so — and paying him advertising to do so.
Did you know that David Limbaugh manages Rush, Hannity, and Levin as their agent? And when you read David Limbaugh, he’s always been a Never Trumper.
I don’t like this cabal. And I think the long term answer is that social media and podcasts are going to steadily take away the monopoly.
I listen to Savage, though sometimes I have to turn him off.
Coffee with Scott Adams are perhaps the best podcasts because he’s relaxed and explains the psychology about what Trump is doing. Excellent.
I used to listen to Bill Mitchell, but they don’t make it easy and offer no free podcasts. Used to be able to find on YouTube. No more.
These days, I go to Youtube to find videos and convert them to MP3s so I can listen to them as I walk outside.
I found a new guy a couple days about: Jordan Peterson, a Canuck and best selling author. He’s a psychology professor at University of Toronto, he can’t stand how Trudeau is destroying Canada.
Very calm, but eloquent guy. He’s doing a lecture tour around the US right now.
To find a long time hero tarnish himself - it’s certainly not an uplifting experience.
He is, after all, a personality. PS: I, too, became disgusted with him during the Ted Cruz controversy Today, will not refuse to listen, but don’t find it a necessity, either.
Such a shame as he was once my ‘go to’ for information and opinion.