Rush Limbaugh

What do I think of Rush Limbaugh?

I listened to Rush Limbaugh for a long time, not regularly though.

I listened to him more so in his early days.

But then I stopped listening.

I remember him best from the 1990s when he had his television show.

He would open the show by saying: America held hostage, day 43 of the Clinton Presidency.

I would eat that stuff up.

Rush was giving me exactly what I wanted to hear.

And there in lies the secret to the success of Rush Limbaugh. He told his true believers what they wanted to hear.

Now, whether you like him or hate him, you cannot deny that he was number one. He was the Elvis of talk radio commentators.

Even people on the left listened to him. In fact, I would wager to say that Rush Limbaugh had more followers from the left than listeners on the right.

Listeners on the right, of course, knew what Rush was going to say and so took him for granted.

But not listeners on the left. Listeners on the left listened to him because they knew he was going to say something outrageous, and they couldn’t wait to get mad at what he was going to say.

They wanted to get mad, and Rush knew it.

To tease the left he would ever so carefully enunciate the name Barack Hooo-Sane Obama in a musical yet comical manner.

Rush never failed to disappoint. Well, I should modify that. He never failed to disappoint the people who were ready to love or hate what he was going to say.

Alas, I got older. And as I got older, I got wiser.

I came to see that Rush was not always correct.

I also came to see that Rush was part of the establishment.

What turned the tables for me? Probably when Rush showed up on Family Guy.

So, that’s what it’s all about, I said to myself at the time.

Rush just wants to be part of the clique.

He wants to be part of the in-crowd.

If he were really a rebel, I reasoned, he wouldn’t cozy up to those people at all.

But he did cozy up to those people. He cozied up to not only the people on the left, but the RINOs on the right.

If he were a true populist conservative, he would not have broken bread with them.

He would not have accepted their dog biscuits.

As the years went by, I came to see that when push came to shove, Rush always asked us to vote for the lesser of two evils in the Presidential election.

Yet I didn’t want to vote for the lesser of two evils anymore.

I didn’t care anymore when people would say: Oh, if you vote for that third-party candidate your vote won’t make a difference.

Au contraire, I would say, it will make a difference in my life because I will be able to look at myself in the mirror in the morning for having done the right thing.

I think that Rush’s recommendation to settle for the mediocrity that the Republicans offered up every four years was what finally turned me away from him.

I listened to him less and less.

I came to see that the real battle in America was not between right and left but between big and small.

The proper battle was between we small, populists – right and left – who believe in a small America with limited government and the elitist big boys, the corporate pigs, who had taken over both the Democratic and Republican parties.

I also came to see that people like Rush Limbaugh who benefit off the national agenda are not our friends, but agents of Corporate America.

Did I really think that Corporate America was going to sit by and allow a conservative talkshow host to make $700 million while influencing millions of Americans if he was not stating their message?

Do you see what I’m talking about?

Rush Limbaugh was part of the system. He was part of the swamp. He kept the phony narrative of right versus left going.

And so it’s not surprising today that politics is so divisive between the left and the right.

It need not be.

Yet it is, and a big reason for that is Rush Limbaugh.

Sincerely,

Archer Crosley

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