Rush Limbaugh was evil

Best Rush Limbaugh obituary? Bob Moser in Rolling Stone:

....What makes sense in this parallel universe is whatever distracts and absolves white, non-liberal Americans from blame, guilt, or responsibility. It’s whatever reminds them of both their supremacy and their victimhood. It’s whatever emboldens them to strike back at the evil left-wing empire that is always busy plotting to subjugate them and destroy America As We Knew It....

This incredibly wealthy super-patriot used his life’s last energies to do his damnedest to recast a pandemic as a deadly, partisan culture war. To paint a lawless and lunatic president as a wronged and heroic savior of the republic, a symbol of all the myriad wrongs done to Team White America. To call the first woman of color nominated for vice president a “ho” and a “mattress,” to depict racial-justice protests as signs of a coming Armageddon, and to stir up hysteria about a Democratic plot to steal the election. And, ultimately, to lead the cheers and comfort the troops as Republicans turned against democracy itself....

No single person — not Reagan, not Cheney, not McConnell, not Trump, not Q — has contributed more than Limbaugh to the mass derangement of white America....

At first, Limbaugh was more of a culture warrior than a partisan spear carrier. The great enemy was the “PC police,” stifling white Americans’ right to openly express their bigotries and assert their various forms of supremacy. Limbaugh was a master self-publicist, issuing a stream of intentionally quotable blasts of crude racial stereotyping (“Have you noticed that every mug shot looks like Jesse Jackson?”), gay bashing (AIDS “updates” introduced by the song “I’ll Never Love This Way Again”), and misogyny (“I love the women’s movement, especially when walking behind it”).

He wasn’t selling political ideas — and he never has. He was selling political attitude. The swaggering certitude. The mocking dismissiveness. The freedom to offend. The right to assert your privilege without guilt or embarrassment....

You can pretty much summarize the way Limbaugh led the irrational opposition during Bill Clinton’s two terms with one quote from 1994: “Vince Foster was murdered in an apartment owned by Hillary Clinton and the body taken to Fort Marcy Park.” Conspiracy theories — once the province of fringe right-wingers — started to become the mainstream Republican fare they are today during Clinton’s two terms, and Limbaugh was the great popularizer of the genre.

Long before Fox hosts began amplifying the fringier theories about American politics, Limbaugh was busy mainstreaming Wingnut World. The conspiracy cranks, the John Birchers, the Christian Zionists, the science deniers, the Info-Warriors — their wildest fantasies, fears, and paranoias all came out to play in national prime time on The Rush Limbaugh Show, repackaged by the host into palatable fare for the Republican masses....

He’d also been outed as a serious opioid addict in 2003, when his former housekeeper was investigated for selling him thousands of pills in a span of months — and three years later, after three treatment stints, Limbaugh landed in trouble for “doctor shopping” to get his fix. Always an outspoken drug warrior, shouting to “lock ‘em up” for the most minor drug offenses, Limbaugh got off with a slap and an expunged criminal record....

During the campaign, Limbaugh mostly took the old-school route, trotting out racial-stereotype “jokes” (“If Obama weren’t black, he’d be a tour guide in Hawaii”) and "parodies" (“Barack the Magic Negro”). But something snapped in Limbaugh, just as surely as in his listeners, when the black man won.

Four days before the inauguration of the popular and historic new president, Limbaugh told his listeners that he’d been asked by The Wall Street Journal to join others in writing 400 words on their hopes for Obama’s next four years. Limbaugh said he only needed four: “I hope he fails”....

Stopping Obama was “what I was born to do,” Limbaugh boasted. And thank goodness for that, because, as he reported in the fall of 2009, “In Obama’s America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering.” Limbaugh turned Obama-hating into a kind of litmus test for white pride — a way to show that you won’t be played by the liberals and their white-guilt trips. “If any race of people should not have guilt about slavery, it’s Caucasians,” he declared. “And yet white guilt is still one of the dominating factors in American politics. It’s exploited, it’s played upon, it is promoted, it is used, and it’s unnecessary”....

Though he wasn’t a Trump confidant like his only radio-ratings rival, Sean Hannity, Limbaugh more than earned that Medal of Freedom Trump awarded him by leaping to Trump’s defense at key moments when others wavered — Access Hollywood, Charlottesville, the Ukrainian smoking-gun tape — with his full complement of disinformation tactics....

It was one thing seeing Hannity and Tucker Carlson bow and scrape; it was a whole ‘nother thing to see Rush bending the knee to another mortal, and speaking of him in the gushing, worshipful tones he once reserved for himself. “You are one of the strongest, the most unwavering, the most determined, most loyal people I’ve ever met,” Rush told Trump last October, when the president called in for an hour-and-49-minute chat. “It’s just a breathtaking thing”....

By February 24th, he was leading the parade of Covid-19 denial and deflection with a quote that would echo through the right-wing chamber for months to come: “The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.” And those conservatives who dared take it seriously would be subject to relentless mockery, he made clear two days later: “Drudge has a screaming headline: ‘Flight attendant working LAX tests positive.’” Limbaugh pitched his voice up as high as it could go, mocking the (gay) news-aggregator: “Oh, my God, 58 cases! Oh, my God. Oh, my God!”....

Afraid of a virus? Rush Limbaugh, stage 4 cancer patient, had a message: Real Americans are made of sterner stuff. More aggressively than anyone with a large audience, even the president, Limbaugh turned Covid-19 into a culture war, a partisan litmus test — and one that would have particularly deadly consequences in red-state America, of course, once summer rolled around and the “common cold” had somehow not magically disappeared. Mask wearing was a “symbol of fear,” he preached from the start; taking precautions against the virus was downright unpatriotic....

“Folks, I’m gonna tell you, these next four months are gonna be a veritable war like we have not seen,” Limbaugh said in May as he inveighed against public-health precautions. “The American left and the Democrat Party is going to do its best to keep this economy shut down, to extend and expand that shutdown — and blow up their own country’s jobs — just to ensure that Trump loses.” Death counts were being inflated, “as we know,” in “states Trump needs to win.” The supposed “pandemic” had been cooked up for one reason only: to expand mail voting and “flood the system with fake ballots, fake votes”....

Limbaugh — always with the special wisdom — knew exactly what they had in mind: a grand plot to appoint Kamala “Kommie” Harris dictator of a new socialist regime by invoking the 25th Amendment “a day or two” into the Biden administration. And then, of course, down will come the hammer of black-supremacist socialism on what used to be America — by any means necessary. This was perfectly plausible in the right-wing bubble, because stealing elections and governing by force are precisely the things that Democrats do....

Last summer, when Trump was inflaming one conspiracy theory or another, Limbaugh was moved to express some professional admiration for the president’s skill set. “When you get to Trump and his conspiracy theories, he does it in a really clever way,” Limbaugh observed.

“Trump never says that he believes these conspiracy theories that he touts; he’s simply passing them on. It’s his way of jamming them up, it’s his way of teasing them, it’s his way of getting these conspiracy theories out there. So Trump is just throwing gasoline on a fire here, and he’s having fun watching the flames.”

Maybe that’s what Limbaugh was doing all through his final year — having fun watching the flames. He certainly tossed plenty of flammable materials on the anti-democratic bonfire that started to rage across Republican America after Election Day, echoing and amplifying conspiracy theories to “prove” the election had been stolen....

He did more than anybody to create the conditions for an ever-more-radical GOP that drove straight around the bend when Trump took the wheel. What mattered most about Limbaugh was never primarily whom he helped elect, or which groups of people he offended, or why. It was the effect he had on his fans — on the millions of white conservatives he coddled, flattered, tickled, entertained, dis-informed, fear-mongered, and pulled into a counterfactual universe that became darker over time.

It was the way that universe, that bubble of disinformation, kept expanding and metastasizing after he’d shown it could draw record ratings and dollars — across the radio spectrum, onto cable news, into the digital sphere, into statehouses, into Congress, and finally into the White House with Trump. And lastly, it was the way he, more than any other single person, created the conditions for an anti-democratic Republican Party....

The debate over whether Limbaugh really meant his bullshit will no doubt be revived now that lung cancer has taken the man who once, while denying the dangers of smoking, declared, “I want a medal for smoking cigars!” 

But what matters isn’t ultimately why Limbaugh used his extraordinary talents to lead white America into the arms of Trump; it’s the reality of the smoking ruins left behind after his three decades as white America’s talker-in-chief.

The Pandora’s box of right-wing nuttery that Limbaugh brought into the mainstream will be loose on the land for the foreseeable future. There’s no putting the lid back on it now.

See also Rush Limbaugh taught Republicans to love an angry, racist bully and The banality of moral and intellectual evil.

The Governor of Florida is sad that Limbaugh is dead and of course so are the folks at Breitbart.