I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.
—Clarence Darrow
The doctrine of nil nisi bonum is not often subjected to the kind of stress test that it now will undergo with the death of Rush Limbaugh on Wednesday. I have gone all around Robin Hood’s barn trying to find anything to say about him that is simply neutral, let alone complimentary. I have given up and decided to stand with Voltaire: "to the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth."
The truth is that Limbaugh was a titan of American broadcasting who saw the potential of deregulated talk-radio as a profit center and conservative vandalism as a hyper-sellable product. That’s it. That’s all of it. Outside of those things, he was a blight, responsible more than any other non-politician for the spread of the prion disease from movement conservatism to the Republican Party, and the index patient for Trumpism before any of us even knew what it was. He ranks with Father Coughlin, Joe McCarthy, and very few others among the country’s most destructive demagogues. American politics would have been infinitely better off if he’d stuck to promoting baseball.
His passing is an interesting test of sincerity for the Never Trump faction. It would be the peak of intellectual dishonesty to deny the straight line leading from “feminazis” and the “murder” of Vince Foster and outright birtherism to everything they deplored about the previous president*—who was, after all, the president* who profaned the memories of Neil Armstrong, Maya Angelou, and Pope John XXIIII by giving Limbaugh the same Presidential Medal of Freedom that was bestowed upon them. Good luck with that, folks. Write when you get a conscience.
I suspect we are in for a few days of gilding the foul weed of his memory in the mainstream media. Remember, it was in the 1990s, when slandering the Clintons was everybody’s favorite Beltway bloodsport, that Limbaugh made his way into the nation’s power elite. He was invited to be the centerpiece when Newt Gingrich and his band of legislative graffiti artists took over the House of Representatives in 1994. Respectable media figures bent the knee to the size of his audience. Radio executives fought for his show. You could drive across the country listening to nothing but his program—assuming that you didn’t pull over in the middle of the Utah desert and feed yourself to the coyotes first.
Outside of Gingrich himself, more embarrassing pieces were written about Limbaugh than any other conservative of the era. In 1995, when President Bill Clinton gave a speech in the aftermath of Timothy McVeigh’s act of mass murder in Oklahoma City in which Clinton cited the “loud and angry voices” inflaming the national dialogue, Limbaugh took it personally and protested far too much. Limbaugh’s reaction will sound familiar to anyone who watched the Senate Republicans debate the events of January 6 last weekend.
[Liberals are trying to portray] the mainstream conservative agenda in this country as extremist and now that same word is being attached to the nuts and lunatics who blew up this building. The left in this country would love for the right to be permanently disqualified and silenced by virtue of their innuendo.
Last weekend also summoned echoes of the scalded-cat screeching from Republican politicians who lined up with Limbaugh in 1995. Then-Senator Don Nickles told the New York Times:
For some people to make this leap and say, "Well, that was attributable because some Republicans had said some things, that they don't like government," is more than a stretch of the imagination.
One thing truly leads to another.
Nothing slowed Limbaugh down until the country found newer, younger demagogues to follow. He remained a disgusting porcine vandal, however. In 2012, in his most disgusting, porcine fashion, he went after a woman named Sandra Fluke, who had been denied a chance to address a kabuki congressional hearing on contraception, and who had stepped forward to advocate for the coverage of contraception under Obamacare. This is what he said. Remember it?
“What does it say about the college co-ed Susan Fluke [sic] who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex — what does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex.”
Finally, this particularly rancid outburst actually cost him. His ratings dived. His sponsors honored a successful campaign to boycott his show. But the damage he did to the country largely was done—by Limbaugh himself, and by his hundreds of imitators on local stations all over the country, whose casual slander and ignorance continue to foul the discourse, and who are the ultimate legacy to democracy of Rush Limbaugh, who is now dead.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
