Rush Limbaugh’s death from lung cancer was surely sad and painful, and one I wouldn’t wish on anyone, but I had thought to let it go without comment. Why waste a pixel on a guy who was, until Donald Trump came along, the greatest Know-Nothing in American politics? Sure, it was “funny” watching “conscience conservatives”—anti-Trumpers whose current views I very often agree with—wrestle with not, you know, offending the base while at the same time speaking something that bore a noticeable resemblance to, you know, the truth, but, well, I wrote that column already, when Rush’s illness was first diagnosed.
Still, I will update it, a little, by sneering, a little, at an evasive, and thoroughly disappointing, tribute to El Rushbo filed by David French, a frequent favorite of mine, taking the classic aesthetic tack/evasion—“Rush used to be funny, but then he got to be all Trump all the time.” Yeah, whatever happened to all those wonderful, funny jokes about women’s asses, and slutty Chelsea and slutty Hillary and slutty Sandra Fluke and mysterious murders, and why slamming someone’s head against the wall wasn’t torture? Funny stuff! Funny! Funny! Those were the days, amirite!
Yeah, so I went out and did what I said I wasn’t going to do. That’s what happens when you do “research” while writing. But, anyway, I wasn’t going to write this post until I read Ross Douthat’s take on the Big Guy’s demise, Rush Limbaugh and the Petrification of Conservatism: An extraordinary career for the man, a long defeat for his ideology. Ross pathetically pays tribute to Rush’s “extraordinary career”, somehow not quite noticing that this “extraordinary career” was the moral equivalent of a 30-year soak in a cesspool.
Ross picks up on a post by Dan McLaughlin at the National Review, which bears the bullshitty head Rush Limbaugh and the End of the 1990s Right: R.I.P. to a vital voice, a monumental talent, and a comfort to millions for decades.. After assuring us that Ole’ Rush was just an overgrown, fun-loving little boy at heart, rather like, you know, Tony Soprano, Dan goes on to list his “five towering figures” who led conservatives towards the light in 1990s: Rush Limbaugh, Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, Antonine Scalia, and Roger Ailes.1 Picking up on this, Ross understandably gives Nino a bye, but notes that the other did seem to shrink a little as time went by:
Limbaugh and Ailes and Newt and Rudy all seemed to cede their individuality and converge into a single character, a single noisy voice. Which were the media impresarios and which were the political leaders? Which one was married four times, which ones only three, which was the office predator? Which one was most likely to say something indefensible in defense of Donald Trump?
. . .
For the rest [that is to say, other than Scalia], for Limbaugh especially, we can say that their gifts were ample, their ascent remarkable, their influence enduring — and yet their most important legacy has been ashes and defeat.
Which is more than a little like saying that that Mussolini fellow could really work a crowd, couldn’t he? Rush, Newt, and Rudy all enthusiastically endorsed Donald Trump’s fascist claim that he was robbed of his rightful reelection as president, “the greatest crime in history”. This isn’t “defeat”, Mr. Douthat. This is self-inflicted disgrace and dishonor. And these are conservatism’s “heroes”, their prominence so unquestioned that Mr. Douthat can do no more, or less, than acknowledge it. And what does this say about contemporary “conservatism” other than it is beneath contempt, a moral and intellectual fraud unequaled since the days of unvarnished southern racism prior to World War II? And what does it say about Mr. Douthat that he cannot say this?
Afterwords
Making a “Top Five Liberals” list might give us Barak Obama, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Jon Stewart, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. I wouldn’t want to marry any of them, but if I had to marry one of them, well, it wouldn’t be the end of the world.
1. It’s “probably” fair to say that 1) Ailes was always a sexual predator and 2) that he was probably just going with the flow with regard to what Fox, and particularly Fox News, became. “Early Ailes” was the casual raunch of Married with Children and the explicitly pro-gay Tracy Ullmann Show, which begat The Simpsons, which cleverly made fun of everyone—in particular, everyone who didn’t go to Harvard—but, clearly, did not miss the Fifties.
