Don's Tuesday Column

     THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson   Red Bluff Daily News   2/23/2021

Big voice, big heart, big impact

Any conservative and/or Republican has probably been inspired, influenced or gained insights by/from talk radio “bigfoot,” Rush Limbaugh. His was a multi-generational ideological impact, as the term “Rush babies” suggests. Many millions became listeners, fans, and informed devotees by contact, shall we say, via parents’ radios, mechanics that re-tuned customers’ radios, and radio searches by countless drivers and truckers crossing sparsely inhabited and otherwise radio-free lands.

It was from a restaurant chain handyman’s radio that I first heard the deep resonant voice of Rush Limbaugh in 1988—1530 on the AM dial out of Sacramento. He asked me what I thought and I replied, “Well, he comes across a kind of a fanatic, a little too exercised for my tastes.” This was, mind you, so soon after moving to Red Bluff that I kept a subscription to the L.A. Times, Sunday edition; its 3-inch-thick round, wrapped tome arrived and occupied the reading shelf in our bathroom. Its “Opinion” pages delivered the wisdom I was used to.

After a few months, a search for a replacement daily paper saw the Sacramento Bee win out due to having the biggest cartoon section (yuk-yuk). Editorials resembled the Times and reassured us as we voted for Bill Clinton in 1992. However, the Rush Limbaugh radio show still played whenever driving between noon and 3 PM.

His opinions diverged immensely from that of the Bee’s editorials, PBS, the nightly news, the McLaughlin Group (Pat Buchanan excepted) and other Sunday talk shows. The ensuing years found me comparing what Rush said to what we now call the “mainstream news”; a nearly inexorable sense—that Rush was right—took over while the Bee morphed into the “Sacra-left-o Bee.”

Rush’s political common sense and traditional cultural affirmation combined with his way of finding humor—even gut-busting laughs—made otherwise dry, boring topics sources of levity. The objects of his ridicule couldn’t help being outraged beyond all reason: Women who routinely regarded all men as “chauvinist pigs” went berserk at being called “femi-nazis” (Rush famously expressed his admiration for the “women’s movement” anytime he walked behind them); Environmentalists and the animal rights crowd, accustomed to occupying respected (and self-righteous) ideological pedestals, recoiled in horror at Rush’s “environmental wacko” reports with chain-saw and gunfire noise backgrounds. Redwoods, after all, are for decks.

Many callers described initial doubts that withered away after actually listening to Rush; contrarily, most who were obsessed with and castigated Rush as a lying propagandist—never actually listened to his show for perspective and context. Those now indulging in anathema-soaked, truly sick joy at the passing of Rush Limbaugh, reveal nothing new about Rush; rather they only show their own inner ugliness—ugliness that I hope not to read on this page.

Nothing new—only repeated episodes and evidence—of the unhinged hatred that has been the modus operandi of hard left, progressive Democrats for decades. Previous objects of scorn—Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Bushes 41 and 43, the Tea Party ad infinitum—only became less odious with the next rising conservative leader.

While the Soros/leftist-funded Media Matters crowd devote a residual watcher or two to Rush, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and Hugh Hewitt, they reserve their worst ad hominem, character-assassination attacks for the current threats to their ideological supremacy: Tucker Carlson and Donald J. Trump. Rush Limbaugh became their despised “bete noire,” an antagonist the solution to which was—long before the current ideological “cancel culture”—to get him removed from the airways. They thought if they could just revive the Fairness Doctrine, stations would abandon conservative talk radio.

It galls them to no end that it all coalesced in the Trump presidency; there is a direct line from Rush to Trump. Rush was a massive tree whose fruit has sprouted and blessed America with radio talkers, Fox, Patriots, Make America Great Again and America First. There was certainly a direct line from the Rush Limbaugh Show to my conversion into a conservative-advocating writer of letters to editors from Sacramento to Redding to Red Bluff and, finally, this column.

Adoring, fawning headlines greeted the demise of terrorist leaders, bloodthirsty dictators (al-Baghdadi and Castro, for instance) and Justice Ginsburg, while our leaders, like Rush and Justice Scalia, are treated, and despised, as conniving ne’er-do-wells. Who among the Democrat political class gave, and helped raise, tens of millions of dollars for charities: The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation, Tunnels to Towers Foundation and St. Jude Children’s Hospital?

“Conservatives found a champion in him…His joyous willingness to engage in battle was an inspiration to a college student feeling overwhelmed by a one-sided, progressive viewpoint preached in the classroom. Rush’s fighting attitude was infectious; it infused the right.

“Rush’s gleeful, oppositional defiance is what so angered the left. Before Rush, the left’s quasi-monopoly in media had granted it victory in political debate by default, and with it, a feeling of smug unearned superiority. But Rush broke this monopoly.

“Unlike the ‘objective’ elitists in liberal newsrooms, Rush never hid his politics, and his competition created conflict. He didn’t appeal just to dyed-in-the-wool conservatives, either. He made fans of people who had never before been exposed to conservatism. So, from the point of view of the left, Rush’s opposition was creating polarization where there had once been consensus.

“But conservatives recognized that Rush hadn’t started the fight. To the contrary: Rush was finally fighting back in an undeclared media war against half of the country.” (Ben Shapiro, nytimes.com, Feb 20).

“If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” — Obi-Wan Kenobi.