I first caught Rush on his television show as a teenager. I loved it and thought Rush was great on TV (the clip of Bill Clinton at the Ron Brown funeral faking a tear was gold), which disappointed me when he discontinued the show not long after. I kept listening to his radio show from the mid 90s onward.
I remember when just about every week Rush would have an SUV update and play “In a Yugo.” I also loved the parody songs like “Al Gore Paradise.” It seemed like the parodies and the theme song updates largely faded out by the last few years of his show.
For the longest time, Rush was the only source of reliable news (at least on radio/tv). Because most of us, save for a small number, did not have the internet prior to the mid/late ‘90s, and so 90% of the “news” tended to come from leftist sources. We also didn’t have newsgroups to debunk the leftist lies or ways to mass-communicate with others who could confirm or debunk what was true or false. That was a dark time in and of itself.
I also started listening to Rush when I was in High School. It was in 1991 that I first heard of him, and discovered which radio station in town carried his show. I listened to his show all through undergrad, grad school, and beyond. It was great when I would discover other folks in college who were dittoheads, and we would discuss the news of the day.
Yes, his song parodies were always a hoot, and I loved the music related to his various topical updates. His enthusiastic “Da da lup da da lup” to intro an update was a sign that good humour was on the way.
Fare thee well, Rush.
Like you, I loved Rush’s TV show and was disappointed when he discontinued it. And I certainly busted a gut laughing when Rush kept replaying Clinton yukking it up with his Secret Service detail while walking towards Ron Brown’s funeral but then, catching the TV camera out of the corner of his eye, commencing to pretend to weep. Rush kept going back and forth on the video so that we could see when Clinton’s eye caught the camera and when he started to pretend to weep. And his play-by-play commentary, of course, was perfect.
The other hilarious bit that I recall was when Ted Kennedy introduced Clinton at a rally in Boston back in the spring of 1994 (during the second semester of my senior year in college, when polls showed Mitt Romney within striking distance of Kennedy), and Kennedy said (IIRC) “And after you reelect ol’ Kennedy, you’re going to do the same for Bill Clinton, as rrghgh rrgfhhgh rehrhjgfh” while Clinton nodded and smiled smugly in the background. Rush kept playing the video and audio over and over, to see if he could discern what Kennedy had said, and even played it backwards to see if, Stairway to Heaven-style, its true meaning could be ascertained. After fooling around with that for several hilarious minutes, Rush announced what he understood, to the best of his abilities, that Kennedy had said: “And after you reelect ol’ Kennedy, you’re going to do the same for Bill Clinton, as *unelectable as the rest of us*.” It was absolutely hilarious, particularly with Clinton nodding smugly in the background, and I remember thinking that Rush had nailed it. (Alas, while the 1994 midterms were glorious for the GOP and for conservatism, Kennedy was reelected that year, as was Clinton two years later, so that old drunk murderer’s specific prediction turned out to be correct.)
Rush was the best, and there will never be another one like him. May he rest in peace.