Quote: “Feminism was established to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream.”
Quote: “I mean, why didn’t these morons leave New Orleans before the hurricane {Katrina]? I’ll tell you why: because they wanted to rape and loot!”
Quote: “Just another dead doper. And a dirt bag.” — On the occasion of Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia’s death.
Quote: “Kurt Cobain died of a drug-induced suicide, I just — he was a worthless shred of human debris.”
Quote: “Too many whites are getting away with drug use…Too many whites are getting away with drug sales…The answer is to go out and find the ones who are getting away with it, convict them and send them up the river, too” — Delivered without apparent irony a few years before being investigated for allegedly buying thousands of addictive painkillers from a black-market drug ring.
Quote: “It is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation, and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it, and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time.” — On the Abu Ghraib Prison Torture Scandal.
Geez. Where to begin?
Rush Limbaugh was perhaps the first true media superstar to come out of the Conservative movement. In the late 1980’s he moved his radio show from Sacramento, California to the top radio market in New York City. In 1988 his radio show became syndicated nationally though Premiere Radio Networks (which is owned by the publicly-traded Clear Channel Communications). The show quickly grew in popularity
His first television exposure came with a 1990 guest host stint on Pat Sajak’s late-night program on CBS. After a confrontation with ACT UP gay activists in the studio audience, protesting what they perceived as anti-gay hate speech (such as “AIDS updates” that some perceived as celebrating the deaths of people with AIDS), the studio audience was removed so that Limbaugh could finish the show.
For a long time, Rush Limbaugh was arguably the face of the Conservative movement, only to be supplanted in later years by vitriolic pundits such as Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, next to whom Limbaugh’s rhetoric seemed almost tame. In recent years, however, he has brought his game up to speed and is more outrageous now than he has ever been.
It’s easy to hate Rush Limbaugh, but it’s dangerous to dismiss him. While there are certainly many other Conservative talking heads on radio and television these days, Limbaugh still has one of the largest audiences of any talk-radio program personality. His fans, who call themselves “ditto-heads,” largely seem to view Limbaugh as the source of all wisdom. Anyone who has ever had an argument with a ditto-head knows that their approach to discussion is to repeat Limbaugh’s points verbatim as if reciting Biblical proverbs.
Required Reading
– Wikipedia: Rush Limbaugh bio
– Right-Wing Watch: Rush Limbaugh
Reference
– The Rush Limbaugh Show
