Rush Limbaugh (originally posted 12/18/08)

(One desperate attempt by right-wing hacks to discredit the 2008 Obama-Biden ticket was to poke fun at the following Joe Biden quote: "When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened.'" Of course, as the rabble noted, FDR was not yet president in 1929 and television was not yet invented that year and, as a result of this gaffe, I guess we were to conclude that destructive Republican policies were really not that bad for the country. However, I got to thinking, wouldn't it have been great if, say, Rush Limbaugh was alive and on the radio during various key moments in American history? Then, I fell asleep and started dreaming..........................)


The time: 1860
"I, uh, Rush Limbaugh, America's anchorman here manning the golden microphone of the EIB Network at the, uh, Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies, having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have, and, uh, fighting the left with one brain tied behind my back. On the uh-jen-da today, my fellow dittoheads, is the bogus issue of the abolition of slavery, a liberal cause, um, espoused, by a small fringe group of left-wing radicals with help from members of the drive-by media. Again, to make this clear for those of you out there in Rio Linda, the call is for the ABSOULTE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY, not mere modifications to current policy, but the absolute abolition of an institution upon which this great country was founded, and these slave-hugging liberals insist on subverting the very foundation established by the Protestant principles that guided our Founding Fathers in drafting our Constitution. The Holy Bible has many examples condoning slavery and, do you want to be on the side of God, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, or do you want to be on the side of abolition extremist kooks like William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Thaddeus Stevens, and Frederick Douglass? Slavery fuels our economy and is American as gooseberry pie and you have this goof Abraham Lincoln, the, uh, Messiah, pandering to these kooks."

Of course, we can play this game with other time periods. If Rush and radio were alive during Theodore Roosevelt's presidency, what would Rush say about TR's conservation efforts? Would efforts to protect land from development be cited by Rush as slowing economic growth? Or, how about the first hundred days of Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency? Would FDR's New Deal programs, which put millions to work and restored national pride, be dismissed by Rush as undermining the virtues of Free Enterprise and positively Marxist? I shudder to think what Rush would have said at the time about the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, the McCarthy Era, or the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950's and 1960's.

Rush is nothing more than a talented huckster who knows how to appeal to his audience through an exclusionary, divisive we're-smarter-and-better-than-them mentality. That said, Rush Limbaugh makes $38 million per year and, if I am to be truthful to the end, he is worth every penny.