Look, when someone dies, even if you find their politics retrograde and repulsive, even if you think that they gleefully made the world a worse place for no other reason beyond making money off of it, it’s still callous and disrespectful to use their death as an opportunity to insult them one last ti-
Okay, let’s try this again.
Yes, there are people in the world who you may well find abhorrent, but to use a man’s death to drive home some petty political vendetta is behavior that’s totally out of bounds in any civilized soci-
There is exactly one accurate thing you can say about Rush Limbaugh that is also flattering: he was good at his job. His job was to offend and incense his political opponents and he did that well; his job was to stoke hatred and radicalize his listeners and he did that well; his job was to always have the strongest possible take that would ensure his show was can’t-miss radio and he did that well. Based solely on the criterion of did-he-build-an-empire, well, yes he did, and that’s hard to do. You can’t spin that as anything other than a success.
I mean, besides morally.
Limbaugh’s empire was built on a relentless barrage of insults that were racist or sexist or homophobic. Like him saying all composite sketches in wanted posters looked like Jesse Jackson, for example, or singing Barack The Magic Negro, or calling a teenage Chelsea Clinton the White House dog, or saying feminists were Nazis, or any of the other hundreds of ugly things that you could easily come up with to describe both his radio show and his personality.
He drove a large swath of America towards him politically by teaching them to hate: hate immigrants, hate women, hate Democrats (more like Demonrats!!!), hate anyone who listens to scientists instead of Republicans, hate that guy, hate that woman, hate, hate, hate. He bred the next generation of media personalities teaching America to hate, too; Glenn Beck would be absolutely unthinkable without Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity would have been some milquetoast nothing, and Tucker Carlson would just be living off his Swanson inheritance somewhere. OANN would be unthinkable, because who would believe this absurd bullshit? No one, that’s who.
Rush Limbaugh’s legacy is one of poisoning America’s soul to make a buck. Back in the mid-’90s, he was telling his listeners, “You are morally superior to those liberal compassion fascists.” He was also saying, “Some of them [liberals] — many of them, perhaps — are just plain diabolical and dishonest to the core.” He spent decades saying this to tens of millions of people who would, not unexpectedly, come to believe it. He spent his life as an insult comic, only he didn’t bother to come up with jokes, because he could get by with just the insults.
He was a loathsome figure, who compared Hillary Clinton’s face to a Pontiac hood ornament because it was fun, who championed hurting people for the sole reason that they voted for Democrats, who had absolutely no compunction about speaking ill of the dead. In a lot of ways, he made this world, so there’s no reason not to drag him down with the rest of us. He won’t be around for it, but it feels nice to give him the public thrashing he spent his whole life deserving.
After all, if the shoe was on the other foot, we all know it’s what he would do.