Normally, I’m not all that interested in commenting on politics. I have opinions. Steven Harper’s muzzling of science and wholesale destruction of research and evidence is absolutely heinous. Donald Trump is a repugnant human being. And anyone who supported Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court is an irredeemable moral degenerate. I’m not going to showboat it, but I’m not backing down from it. If that’s a problem for someone… it’s not my problem.
Vaccinations work. Manmade global climate change is a real thing. The people who deny it are either crazy or dishonest. That’s not politics, that’s common sense.
Which takes me to Rush Limbaugh. He’s recently announced Lung cancer.
Let me first say that I’ve lost several family members to Lung Cancer. And more to other kinds of cancer. I would not wish that on anyone, not even Limbaugh. It’s a horrible ugly slow way to die, and I wish him a recovery which is unlikely, or in lieu of that, I wish him a speedy painless death.
Unfortunately for him, it is likely that Rush Limbaugh will die. The survival rate is 5%, and Limbaugh is an older, appallingly obese man in extremely poor physical condition with a history of alcohol, drug addiction, dissolution and waste. That’s not really a good recipe for pulling through.
When he dies, it is difficult to imagine that he will leave behind loved ones, or anyone who cares very much. He has a wife, he’s actually had four. He dumped his third wife for the current one, and married her when she was half his age. Word is, she’s rumoured to have had affairs, sleeping around with younger, less physically repulsive men. So, I suspect that from her point of view, Rush will go, but the best part of him, his money, will remain, and she can enjoy it without the tedium of the man himself.
This is not a condemnation of the man, he’s lead an vapid, hollow, loveless life of selfishness and greed. But merely an acknowledgement of the choices of his life. I’d hope that his wife, or whoever, might benefit from his money, and hopefully they will put it to better purposes than he ever did.
But the truth is that he will be forgotten. Two days after he’s in the ground, no one will have ever cared or remembered that he lived. The empty life of a degenerate manchild indulging every vice, spewing hatred and bile isn’t the sort of thing that leaves a meaningful legacy.
I for one will be quite happy to see him forgotten.
But, while he is alive, I feel that we should commemorate his life and the choices he made. He never did anyone a goddam bit of good, he never had an instant’s regard for decency, civility or the truth.
So to commemorate Rush Limbaugh while he still lives, let us remember and highlight the worst things he did. It’s a long list.
For instance, everyone remember the time that he was caught with an unusual quantity of Viagra, in a prescription under someone else’s name, while visiting a Caribbean child sex tourism destination?
Or how about his Oxycontin phase, where he became an amateur drug dealer.
Related to that, there was the time he bullied and blackmailed his housekeeper into procuring drugs for him. There’s a particular low sort of lowlife when you’re pimping your own household staff to get you drugs. I can’t imagine what kind of nightmare a middle aged Hispanic woman was forced into.
Then there was his seething attacks on Chelsea Clinton, when she was a twelve year old girl. All that ‘White House Dog’ shit. He really loved to attack children. Except when vacationing in the Caribbean I suppose. But generally, he had a record of attacking children. In this case, he was a bit much for even his followers to stomach and he had to back off.
Or how about his national campaign of hatred, singling out a young woman and calling her a whore, because she had the temerity to require a prescription to regulate her bodily cycles and wanted her medical insurance to pay. That little incident said so much about the man – his visceral horror at anything to do with lady parts, his rampant hatred of women, and his gleeful joy at attacking one single vulnerable person on a national scale in the ugliest possible way.
It just goes on and on. He mocked the disabled, he claimed mass shootings were ‘false flag’ operations, he lied continuously, he gave constant vent to racism against black people, jewish people, Hispanics. He had only contempt for any notion of decency or integrity. This is all just tip of the iceberg, if we tried to be comprehensive about the worst things he did… we’d be here all week.
His professional persona was a liar, a bully, a thug, a hypocrite. His show was an unending torrent of bile and hatred, delivered with hearty enthusiasm, and a bluff hearty (but fake) manliness. Everyone who listened to him was worse for it, stained, left a little bit uglier inside, as he corroded their souls. But obviously, in his private life, he was a perfect match for that repulsive public persona. I suppose that there’s a weird sort of… I wouldn’t call it ‘integrity’… but symmetry, that the private and public man were so close. Mind you, this was a man with a practice of marrying much younger women, visiting sex tourism places, obtaining illicit drugs and forcing a blackmailing maid to get him him drugs.
What a life he lived!
I was raised a small town by, in a kind of extended family, Norman Rockwell kind of world. Back then, things like family, values, integrity, decency, compassion, hard work, honesty, that all meant something. That was how I was raised.
So a guy like Limbaugh who personifies the antithesis of any kind of human decency is kind of amazing to me. The idea that he and people like him could be so thoroughly corrupt, and could contribute to the corruption of entire generations of people on the right who now only give lip service to my values, but who continuously disparage them in word or deed at any opportunity… that’s astonishing.
But what did it all come to? What does his bile and hatred, his empty soulless existence amount to? He’s going to die, and then… nothing. He’ll be forgotten minutes after he’s in the ground. In a week or so, no one will even remember that he ever existed.
He’s going to suffer. I know what that’s going to be like, I’ve watched it enough times. I don’t want that for him, and won’t enjoy him going through it. But he’s going to suffer, because that’s how it is.
And then he’s going to die. Again, I don’t wish it, won’t enjoy it. But it’s going to happen, because that’s how it is.
Then, because of the worthless toxic life he lived… he’ll be forgotten.
And frankly, I can’t wait to forget Rush Limbaugh.
Me too.