Unless you are living under a rock, you have heard about Rush Limbaugh’s recent admission of drug abuse and allegations of lawbreaking…Do you think it is an example of supreme hypocrisy? Can he come back from this or is he dead politically? Are you offended that he has fought for “family values” and against “feminazis” and generally making himself sound like a paragon of virtue when this has been going on behind the american public’s back for years? Sorry if this is inarticulate…im exausted.:o
I don’t live under a rock, and I hadn’t heard (or cared) about Limbaugh’s problems.
In any case, he’s not significant enough to accomplish a “supreme” anything, let alone hypocrisy.
My main question is “What kind of grace did Rush have in the first place?” He was not what I’d call a class act, though I guess I would say that.
I think he’ll probably come back. He has a huge following, and they won’t all abandon him. Is it hypocritical? Yeah, considering I doubt he’s been pushing for treatment and leniency toward drug abusers. The one scenario that would lead me to think “he’s done” might be if the police continue to probe him, bring him up on charges, and send him to jail.
Now would be a good time for Rush to see the light and become a libertarian.
Despite whatever his personal views are, he’s an entertainer. Even though I find some of his commentary and analysis to be… fanciful, I’ve alway enjoed his show. I listen to him whenever I get a chance, (which, unfortunately, isn’t very often). I don’t find a lot of fault with Limbaugh. I do find fault with people who take him seriously. He’s an entertainer, on the radio.
But, I hope that things go well fro him. He’ll have to make siome changes in his act of course.
Saying Rush is not significant is kind of silly, Bryan Ekers. It’s also the understatement of the year that “He has a huge following, and they won’t all abandon him.” Marley23.
I heard another radio show host, Jay Severin, talking about Rush’s popularity the other day. (so, no cite) More people listen to Rush every day than have ever listened to another radio host in history. More people listen to his show every day than watch all of the big three TV networks combined.
20 million people tune in. Every day. There are only 100 million households in the US.
His listeners will not abandon him. The sheer amount of them that exist makes Rush very significant.
There is also no hypocracy in Rush speaking about he feels drugs are bad for the country and himself having a drug problem.
He started taking the pills for pain and became addicted. He has a problem. He’s tried to get clean twice and failed. He is admitting he has a problem and is checking in for a 30 day rehab to try and get clean.
His personal experience backs up his statements about how drugs are destructive.
[I don’t agree with Rush on drug issues. I say legalize them, but that’s just me. 
]
When has Rush set himself up as a paragon of virtue? He talks about enjoying cigars and liquor on his show. His image on his show is one of a good humored and fun loving regular guy who happens to have great insight into politics and public policy.
Well, he’s in the same league of significance as any celebrity, or professional athlete, or other entertainer. Were he to be afflicted by massive scandals and then turn up dead in the bed of an underage Filipino male prostitute, life would go on largely unchanged for the rest of us. He’s only as significant as people let him be.
Not being a fan or opponent of Limbaugh (the worst I can say about him is that he’s not as funny as he thinks he is), I rank him pretty low on the “significo-meter” and if 20 million Americans listen to him, that only means 280 million don’t.
here I was wondering what kind of standards this woman, Grace had…
If Jimmy Swaggart could do it…
When has Rush set himself up? When, say, he criticized Darryl Strawberry and Robert Downey, Jr. for their drug problems, maybe? When he declared that drug abusers should be sent to prison, maybe?
And hypocrisy piles upon hypocrisy. Bill O’Reilley was on the Tonight show last night defending Rush and decrying the “politics of personal attack.” (!!!) “Poor Arnold! Poor Rush!,” he wept. (Well, OK, he didn’t weep, but he might as well have.) How low have we sunk, he wondered, when sexual misconduct and drug use are fair game in politics?
Half a breath later, he was back to bashing liberals.
And Sen. Frist is a doctor. Does that mean we pretend that he’s not a politician?
Rush is an entertainer. He’s also unquestionably a partisan political figure. He’s figured out how to combine political partisanship/advocacy with entertainment. There ain’t no “if you’re X, you can’t be Y” operating here, and I’m perplexed by those who imply there is.
Let’s just keep in mind that the Greaseman has another show.
If he can come back, so can Rush.
Supreme hypocrisy is an everyday trait for many conservative pundits and politicians, IME.
He’ll be back. The majority of his fanbase will stick with him, since they like having him tell them what to think too much to abandon him (and yes, Rush has signed off his radio show along those lines – “Enjoy your weekend and relax, I’ll do the hard work of studying the issues and telling you what to think.”)
Rush’s hypocrisy regarding morals and values has been an open secret for years. This is the same “patriotic American” who didn’t even register to vote until his non-voting history was made public, and the same “family values” guy who’s twice divorced his wives for a younger woman.
Well, if Rush “comes back” in anywhere near the sense that the Greaseman has, he’ll be mighty disappointed with the results.
For those unfamiliar with the Grease, he was a shock-jock-type who was for a time syndicated in the evenings by WestwoodOne and was doing morning drive on a DC classic rock station when he made just an awful joke relating to the James Byrd-dragging. He was fired, spent 3-4 months away from it all, then started a comeback with a really humiliating appearance on John Thompson’s (former Georgetown bball coach, dean of African-American coaches association) radio show—where he announced he was “just Doug Tracht now” and the interview basically consisted of him saying, “I’m sorry, I was a terrible jerk, I apologize for the pain I’ve created.” Within a year or two, he was buying time on a Korean programming station and doing his show out of a studio in his basement. He’s since “moved up” to an English-speaking station (WGOP, heh, on the DC AM dial), but one that apparently doesn’t have any kind of signal, is often just static, and doesn’t even crack the Top 30 in DC ratings. Some comeback.
I think Rush isn’t particularly comparable, and he’ll be at least as big when he returns. He’s more like Imus, if you think about it.
And I don’t particularly care if Limbaugh’s a hypocrite, and he has my sympathy to the extent that I don’t revel in others’ problems. (I have enough of my own.) While he’s said he accepts full responsibility and whatnot, I sense a sort of developing martyrdom scenario being formulated by his fans/followers, along with to me a dubious claim that if it were a big liberal in the same straits, they’d all be praying for him/her.
The far right is notorious for overlooking flaws in its heroes; flaws are for the enemy. He’ll be back. It’ll give them a chance to feel like liberals.
By legalizing drugs, all you’re going to do is define further deviancy downward. We have a duty to pass on values to our descendants, values that will maintain the standards of behavior and ensure the survivability of the American way of life. And drugs are no different. You end up destroying more than yourself."
– Rush Limbaugh Playboy interview, December 1993
'Course, Limbaugh isn’t an immoral deviant. He just has a praaawblem.
If it hadn’t been for the media exposing his praaawwblem, he would still be on air right now. He didn’t seek drug treatment on his own. He really had no choice when the shit hit the fan. And he had better hope he got his oxy legally. Otherwise, those liberals will have a field day rubbing it in his smug little face.
Not true. Rush went into treatment twice before this story broke.
Now that it’s common knowledge he has an addiction, he might as well take 30 days off to try and get clean for good.
The fact that he is doing this now is not “he has no choice”. I doubt if his contract would allow for a 30 day unexplained absence. Now he can.
I think it’s possible that Rush might come back better than ever, to the benefit of all parties involved.
Despite the fact that the guy is a supremely public figure, he has actually worked extremely hard to isolate himself and his opinions from criticism. He doesn’t debate other political figures. He rarely corrects himself when he is wrong. When he finally did put himself in a setting where he could be publicly questioned by other people on national television–a benign sports program–he lasted all of what, three weeks?
This is gonna change him, because it’s a big, gaping chink in his armor. Rush is no longer infallible. If he himself understands that, he might actually be willing to consider some of his other views.
Imagine what might happen if he incorporates that self-awareness into his own program. Imagine if he had real compassion, rather than conservative compassion, for the drug-addicted, the jobless, the homeless, et cetera. The guy could, almost singlehandedly, re-educate twenty million frothing idiots about the character of the problems which face this country.
Personally, my bet is that he’ll be back, all right, and he’ll say something like “the problem is behind me and the topic is no longer open to discussion,” and it will be back to teaching the brownshirts their fight songs again. The guy doesn’t have the guts to look at the country the way it really is. I don’t see why he’ll have the guts to look at himself realistically, either.
'Course, most people might be able to tell the difference between getting hooked on prescription pain killers because of pain and using drugs for a high.