![]() Polls consistently found he was regarded as a voice of the party. Limbaugh often enunciated the Republican platform better and more entertainingly than any party leader, becoming a GOP kingmaker whose endorsement and friendship were sought. The lyrics, set to the tune of “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” describe Obama as someone who “makes guilty whites feel good” and is “Black, but not authentically.” He was frequently accused of bigotry and blatant racism for such antics as playing the song “Barack the Magic Negro” on his show. When a woman accused Duke University lacrosse players of rape, he derided her as a “ho,” and when a Georgetown University law student supported expanded contraceptive coverage, he dismissed her as a “slut.” When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, Limbaugh said flatly: “I hope he fails.” He suggested that the Democrats’ stand on reproductive rights would have led to the abortion of Jesus Christ. ![]() He called 12-year-old Chelsea Clinton a dog. As the AIDS epidemic raged in the 1980s, he made the dying a punchline. When a Washington advocate for the homeless killed himself, he cracked jokes. Fox, suffering from Parkinson’s disease, appeared in a Democratic campaign commercial, Limbaugh mocked his tremors. He called Democrats and others on the left communists, wackos, feminazis, liberal extremists, faggots and radicals. ![]() “Forget Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper, TODAY is the day the music died.Long before Trump’s rise in politics, Limbaugh was pinning insulting names on his enemies and raging against the mainstream media, accusing it of feeding the public lies. One of my listeners, Jay from Chelsea, texted me yesterday afternoon: Thank you for giving me, and a hundred others, brand-new careers, that I might add paid so much better than newspapers or spinning 45’s on a dying Top 40 station. In other words, Clinton was complaining that a journeyman radio guy had a bigger bully pulpit than the president of the United States. Thank you for driving President Bill Clinton so crazy that one morning on Air Force One, speaking to the morning hosts on KMOX, the blowtorch station in Rush’s home state of Missouri, he whined and said something like, “It’s so hard to compete against a guy like Limbaugh who has three hours a day.” Thanks for every once in a while reading from one of my columns, or playing a cut of me from my show - it didn’t always make my day, Rush, it made my week. Thank you for your occasionally brutal honesty, such as when you said that you hoped the new president Obama would fail - because you understood that if he succeeded in what he wanted to do, the American people would pay a terrible price. Thank you for being, as you used to say, America’s anchorman, not to mention providing show prep for the rest of the media. Thank you for reminding us every day that you don’t need a fancy academic pedigree, or even a college degree, to succeed, not to mention be the smartest guy in the room. Thanks for reminding us, every afternoon at 12:07, just how great a song “My City Was Gone” by the Pretenders is. Thanks for your unfailingly good humor, and the fact that you were “up” every afternoon at noon, no matter how you may have felt inside. Thank for those unforgettable shorthand descriptions of, say, John Kerry (“who, you may not have heard, served in Vietnam”), not to mention such memorable phrases as “the drive-by media,” “talent on loan from God,” and “random acts of journalism.” Thank you for decades of deflating the insufferably bloated egos of TV network “news” anchors and reporters. Bush presidency turned out to be, for working so hard to spare us what have been the unimaginably worse presidencies of Al Gore and John Forbes Kerry. Thank you Rush, despite how ultimately disappointing the George W. Thank you for teaching all of us other hosts how to properly utilize sound cuts, even before the digital era, when it became so easy to pull up audio clips. No wonder Don Imus hated you so much, Rush. I couldn’t believe what Rush was doing on radio – he was Jerry Williams for the next generation, Jerry Williams on steroids. Then WHDH, which was at the time AM 850, began running him on tape delays, on Saturday afternoons. I remember first hearing about Rush in the late 1980s. Thank you for all the great nicknames from old Top 40 songs, including for local Massachusetts politicians Mike Dukakis (“Nowhere Man”), Ted Kennedy (“The Philanderer”) and Barney Frank (“My Boy Lollipop”). Thanks for being the absolute best lead-in any other radio talk-show host could have ever dream of having. Thank you for never taking yourself too seriously.
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