Decades ago, when America was a much simpler place, The Railer’s best friend said “you gotta listen to this guy, Rush.” It was love at first word. Rush produced a magical mix of news and entertainment, with a novel conservative/libertarian spin. The media landscape back then was a homogenous left-of-center drivel, whether radio, television, or print. Like today, the swamp hated Reagan/Bush and loved/excused all things Democrat. When Reagan abolished the Fairness Doctrine it opened the door to the commercial broadcast of a conservative message outside of the then customary 2AM to 5AM timeslots. That was considered “fair” under the Fairness Doctrine. Broadcasters were required to offer “opposing viewpoints,” so they balanced left with far left.
At the same time, AM was rapidly dying. Listeners ditched the Top 40 AM stations that played the same five songs in favor of FM Album Oriented Rock. Rush came on the scene just as AM station owners were about to pull-the-plug. He singlehandedly saved and repurposed the AM broadcast industry.
For The Railer though, there was one big problem with AM. Unlike many Democrats who vote for a living, The Railer worked for a living. The Railer’s lab and hamster-sized office cube were in the middle of a large steel building. The interior was full of computers and military electronics, and impenetrable to low frequency AM broadcast signals. Being radio engineers, The Railer’s posse assembled spare lab equipment into an ad-hoc rebroadcasting system, a low power repeater. Audio from a window mounted AM receiver modulated a low power FM signal generator that reached every corner of the interior. Problem solved, decades before streaming made it unnecessary.
So, what did we hear? Truth like never before. A long-awaited voice that validated our common-sense views. You anger a conservative by telling them lies, you anger a liberal by telling them the truth. That is just one of innumerable truths that The Railer and tens of millions of other listeners learned at The Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies. Rush eschewed guests, it was three hours of monologue, five days a week, fifty weeks a year, mixed with an occasional caller, screened to add a compelling point. Fridays were reserved for callers who disagreed, aka “Open Line Friday.” Only Rush could pull this off as most broadcast hosts hang up on contrary callers. Rush welcomed them, respectfully. He let them speak, fully make their point, and often he won both a friend and the topic at hand.
Liberals love to say “speak truth to power.” Rush did that daily. He liked to brag how he lived “rent-free” in the heads of powerful libs. We know that he did as the Clintons, Obamas, Chuckie Schumer, and others would publicly complain that Rush would judge their actions. Rush “shined the light of truth” on their corruption, hypocrisy, and idiocy daily, often with an entertaining garnish of sarcasm and ridicule.
In 2007, Rush launched Operation Chaos. Then Senator Barack Obama had a thin but growing lead over Hillary Clinton in the Democrat primaries. Instead of letting the Democrats coalesce around the no-show junior senator from the crooked state of Illinois, Rush commanded his “Rush Army” to vote for Hillary in the remaining open state primaries. There’s no doubt that this reanimated the corpse of her moribund campaign, burned D donor dollars, and delayed the inevitable. Hillary enjoyed some success as a result but as intended it only heightened and extended the pain of her humiliation. It was her turn, and she was defeated by vacuous promises of “hope and change,” made by an unknown, unaccomplished, community organizer. All the while, the drive-by media refused to acknowledge the obvious, that when directed, Rush’s Army was a powerful political force.
Then there is the humor. It came in many forms but The Railer’s favorites were the parodies. Rush teamed with comedian and impersonator Paul Shanklin to produce skits and songs, often set to familiar melodies. The “Justice Brothers” series were pant-wettingly funny. They featured imitations of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson spewing their usual incoherencies and rhymes through a distorted megaphone as here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWJ-ovHorjo. He often roasted Al Gore with this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OD0jeBhCjz0, where Al sings “the Earth is a ball of fire” to Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire. Another classic, “I’m a Kennedy, yes I’m Ted Kennedy, I sleep around, around, around, around, around,” set to I’m a Wanderer by Dion. Then there was the tragic story of a virtue signaling young couple, “a liberal gal and a liberal guy buy a Yugo,” set to Elvis’ In the Ghetto. I often wonder how many auto accidents these riffs caused as listeners laughed themselves senseless, The Railer included. If you have not heard these, they are well worth finding.
The apex parody that ignited a media firestorm was “Barack the Magic Negro,” set to Puff the Magic Dragon and sung by Al Sharpton. It was solid gold on so many levels. It ridiculed privileged, virtue signaling, white liberals who believed that their support for the half-white Obama absolved them of past racial sins. It was voiced by Al Sharpton who believed that he should have been America’s first black president. Best of all, it brought reflexive and immediate screams of “racist!” from the lamestream media herd. But as usual, Rush was several steps ahead of them. The song was based entirely upon a widely published and thoughtful column by a half-black, gay, lefty, LA Times critic, David Ehrenstein. Check… and mate.
Given his command of history, politics, and current events, it is hard to reconcile that Rush was largely self-educated. He grew up in the center of our nation, Cape Girardeau, Missouri, a place that coastal elites derisively term “flyover country.” His first love was football, and his early broadcast years were spent paying dues in that arena. But later, in Sacramento, he started commenting on politics and his show spread through syndication like a wildfire to a nation hungry to hear a conservative viewpoint.
But what, at his core, did he believe? Rush believed that the United States is unique. That our embrace of individual liberty gives every person, regardless of who they are, whether they grew up rich or poor, the opportunity to succeed. That with hard work, passion, and integrity every American can achieve great things. No other place in the world, or history, offers a wider vista to success and happiness. He talked to his audience as equals, as adults. He vowed “to make the complex understandable,” and he did. He loved and respected Americans from every walk of life, and especially our military.
He was without doubt the hardest working man in broadcast. Most of us cannot extemporaneously fill ten minutes of dead air. Rush delivered three hours of compelling dialog, day after day after day. Karl Rove, a man seldom at a loss for words, shared the story about his guest hosting experience. He spent two weeks preparing material, walked into the studio with a foot-high stack of notes and topics, and exhausted it all well before the show was over. He said it was superhuman that Rush was able to read, watch, digest, inject humor and irony, and connect-the-dots past and present, on so much material… daily.
In February of 2020, when a cancer diagnosis made his life definitively finite, Rush showed us how to die with grace. He was not expected to see October, instead he lived to February, doing his last live radio show just two weeks before passing. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom because no one has done more for that cause in contemporary America. He talked about greeting every morning with gratitude, seeing every new day as a gift. He told the story on-air of Lou Gehrig’s farewell address to his fans in Yankee Stadium. Lou bravely and perhaps surprisingly said:
“Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth. I have been in ballparks for seventeen years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans.
Rush said that he finally understood these words, that he too had enjoyed a blessed life. His diagnosis offered the time and opportunity to receive the love of his fans and say thank-you for their decades of support. Rush faced his fate with determination. He gave medicine every chance to alter the path. But when that did not happen, he faced his grim reality openly and honestly, without a hint of self-pity.
Rush often began a broadcast hour with “welcome to the Rush Limbaugh Show, with talent, on loan [pregnant pause…], from God.” His talent was indeed otherworldly, a one-of-a-kind, once-in-a-lifetime gift. The Railer, along with tens of millions of other “ditto-heads,” misses him profoundly. RIP dear teacher, ‘til we meet again.