Jul
30
20 Years of broadcast excellence
July 30, 2008 | 5 Comments
This week Rush Limbaugh is celebrating the 20th anniversary of his syndicated show. For 16 of those years – or a little more than half of my life – I have been one of the millions of his loyal listeners. So I’d like to take a moment to pay tribute to one of the most important figures in the American conservative movement.
I remember when I first started listening to Rush. I had come home from school one day towards the end of my freshman year of high school, and my father had the Phil Donahue show on (no doubt in order to have something to yell at), and Rush was his guest. I found out that he was broadcast on WABC in New York, and so the next day I started listening. And I haven’t stopped listening since.
Along with my father, Rush was one of the two most important influences in my early political development. I enjoyed the show not just because of the political viewpoints that Rush espoused, but also because he expressed his views in an often humorous and entertaining way. I couldn’t wait to hear a feminist update just so I could hear that bumper song featuring the “We’re fierce, we’re feminists, and we’re in you’re faa-a-a-a-a-a-ace” mix. I still love that one. And of course there were the parody songs, the bits like “Geriatric Park,” and, best of all, “America Held Hostage.” As regards the latter, I actually named my sophomore year high school English journal “America Held Hostage.” And for the record, my classmates loooooved it when I read aloud from it at the beginning of class. Mine was the most popular journal in the class 
Rush has just always been there, at least in the background. When I first took up running and lost a ton of weight in high school, it was Rush that I had on the walkmen whenever I went running. (Or Stern. Yeah, I was the guy who listened to both.) And of course it’s Rush who is on during the workday, wherever I have been – whether as an outside messenger taking important legal documents to businesses all over Manhattan, or in my college’s Bursar’s Office as I organized the student loan files as a work study student, or just sitting in my office today. For three hours every day he’s on, keeping my mind occupied and making the day go by a little faster.
Some think that he’s lost his touch, or that he’s not what he used to be. I disagree. To me he’s still as good, if not better, than he was when I first tuned into the Excellence in Broadcasting System. He is willing and ready to criticize the GOP when it needs criticizing – and it often does as of late. But he’s still at his best when he’s picking apart the latest idiocy from the left, exposing the holes in their flawed thinking.
It helps that I rarely disagree with Rush. His political philosophy is almost identical to mine. The one time I seriously disagreed with Rush was over John McCain and his campaign in 2000. I was a McCain supporter, and I thought Rush’s dislike for McCain was wrongheaded. Within a year I acknowledged that I was wrong, and Rush was right, and I learned my lesson.
I’d just like to relate one last bit, as it involves those two great influences that I mentioned above. I started listening to Rush in that summer of 1992 when the Bush-Clinton-Perot campaign was heating up. My father was the type of guy that would make me look like a progressive-leftist in comparison, but he had soured on George HW Bush, and intended on voting for Clinton – which he did. My father detested Limbaugh because he attacked Clinton and was – kind of – defending Bush. This was also at the time when Rush’s tv show was starting, and so he would watch it and yell at the man on his tv screen. Yeah, my father liked to do that sometimes. Needless to say I didn’t agree with my father’s take on Rush, and so we would have debates over Limbaugh and what he was saying.
So Clinton is elected, and it took my father a little less than one month to realize that he had made a most grievous mistake. In fact, by about April of 1993 his visceral hatred of Bill Clinton far outshone my own dislike of the president.
In time my father started listening to the radio more and more. And who was he listening to? Rush Limbaugh. Later that year Rush published See, I Told You So, and my father said that it was probably aimed solely at him. As I would learn eight years later, don’t disagree with the man, not when he’s right 98.9 percent of the time.
God bless you Rush, and I hope you stay on the air for another twenty years.
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5 Comments so far
Hear!! Hear!!
Or is that better phrased
Listen!! Listen!!
Dittos. Well put. I share many of these same memories and will always think of Rush as the leader of a movement. I sure do miss his old tv show too.
Perhaps the one thing here that I do disagree with you on is that I feel Rush failed to speak up loudly against the failures of the Bush administration and GOP Congress soon enough. As you note, and to his credit, he’s certainly come around. With Bush on the way out and the GOP back in the minority, he is a solid voice tugging both consistently back to the right.
But if we could go back in time to the 2004-2006 period, sadly this did not happen. Take Iraq for instance. Rush was not one who said, “Rummy is wrong. We need more troops. We are fighting this war wrongly.” He defended the actions and inactions of the Pentagon that led to America becoming disillusioned with a losing war prior to the recent troop surge.
Also take Congress for example. Rush flexed his muscle in 2007 rallying the troops to stop flawed immigration reform. But he did not raise such high holy hell about McCain-Feingold, No Child Left Behind, the Prescription Drug Benefit, or record budget deficits. At times he questioned them, at times he defended them. His record was spotty for those years. In fact, I can vividly recall him passionately defending the merits of Dennis Hastert back in 2006.
These were mistakes. And I wonder what role Rush’s legal and drug problems (which happened during the exact same time) played a part in his losing his edge.
Regardless, I agree he’s got it back now. Not sure if he’s better than ever, but Rush has been very good of late. And whether Obama or McCain is elected in the fall, either way I’m sure he’ll have plenty of ammo to fire between 12-3 everyday.
But he did not raise such high holy hell about McCain-Feingold, No Child Left Behind, the Prescription Drug Benefit, or record budget deficits.
Are you sure about that? He killed all those things. Perhaps he didn’t get very passionate about them, but he was clearly opposed to McCain-Feingold and Prescription Drugs, and I’m pretty sure he spoke out against NCLB as well. And though he wasn’t as outspoken as some other guys on radio, but he also criticized the Miers selection, though he was a little bit coy about it.
I’d agree with you on the war stuff, but there were few people who were ultimately right – and one of them, I hate to say it, was John McCain.
My favorite of the updates was the Homeless Update.
At the time I was most religious about listening to Rush, I was living with a couple of friends in Austin final year of undergrad, and there was a bar at the end of the street where we were living (like four houses away). It was a dumpy dive from Central Casting, but it had a jukebox that had on it the same great Frogman Henry song that was the Homeless Update theme.
Whenever I would go with Curt or Blake, we would play that song, and if we were drunk enough, sing along, or say aloud the tdla-tdla-tdla signal and “it’s time for a homeless update” just before the song began.
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