![]() ![]() I’ve tried a couple times myself and it doesn’t work. ![]() ![]() He boasted of “talent on loan from God,” and once stated, “I can’t even destroy myself. “If Thomas Jefferson thought taxation without representations was bad, he should see how it is with representation,” he once said.Īs he got older and richer, he was fond of half-jokingly talking about his wealth and success. (Trump’s ability to command the microphone for an astonishing amount of time is the only comparable example I can think of, but Limbaugh, unlike the former President, could stay remarkably focussed.) He would often start a show by informing his listeners about his “stack” of clippings-usually news articles and alerts-and find ways to connect them to some overarching point he wanted to make, which often had to do with the magical effects of tax cuts on the economy, and the wastefulness of the federal government. (It remained his flagship station for most of his career, although Limbaugh eventually moved to Florida.) Averse to taking callers-that was often reserved for Fridays-Limbaugh had a remarkable ability to sustain a monologue, with only the commercials as breaks, for virtually the full three hours that his show aired each day. Four years later, “The Rush Limbaugh Show” went national, beaming from New York’s WABC. Limbaugh, who was born to a prominent Missouri Republican family, began his broadcast career in his teens, and landed a spot on Sacramento radio, in 1984. He finished his career less as a leader of the Republican Party than as simply another Trump follower. But his embrace of Trump in his final years, and his willingness to subsume his conservatism into the cult of one man, offered a different view of Limbaugh. For decades, this was Limbaugh’s mantra, with an emphasis on tax cuts. That vision consisted of lower taxes and less regulation, opposition to abortion, and an aggressive posture abroad-the so-called “three-legged stool” of the Ronald Reagan coalition. Before Donald Trump’s entry into Republican politics, and even before Fox began dominating the cable airwaves, in the late nineties, Limbaugh had an unparalleled ability to rile up the Republican base and move the Party closer to his vision of pure Reaganism. Rush Limbaugh’s death this week, at seventy, of lung cancer, closes the book on more than a quarter century of conservative media defined by Limbaugh and his friend Roger Ailes, the Fox News chairman and C.E.O., who died in 2017. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |