The Last Days of Rush...

[Caruthers612]

      I doubt I'm the only one who has had the feeling, over the last year or two, that this last contract Rush signed--I think it was a five year deal--is probably his last. Between his age, his acquired wealth, his pretty new wife (anyone care to take wagers on how long this one will last?), and his no longer secret trips over the last few years to purchase land and setup refuges in places from Prague to New Zealand--combined with the decline and fall of America--I just get the feeling that he's getting ready to pack it in. And why not? I would. Indeed, I'd have been long since gone, sipping umbrella drinks on my own private island in the Caribbean while barely legal native girls take turns bouncing up and down on my pogo stick. Either way, I do think he's on his way out, just as I think that the brilliant and witty Mark Steyn is clearly the heir apparent. What do y'all think?

[Camper]

Rush signed a 8 yr contract (45 million per year) in 2008. I don't listen to him much anymore and wouldn't be bothered if he left for a secret hideaway. I do agree that Mark Steyn is brilliant and witty!

[M Knight]

      I doubt I'm the only one who has had the feeling, over the last year or two, that this last contract Rush signed--I think it was a five year deal--is probably his last. Between his age, his acquired wealth, his pretty new wife (anyone care to take wagers on how long this one will last?), and his no longer secret trips over the last few years to purchase land and setup refuges in places from Prague to New Zealand--combined with the decline and fall of America--I just get the feeling that he's getting ready to pack it in. And why not? I would. Indeed, I'd have been long since gone, sipping umbrella drinks on my own private island in the Caribbean while barely legal native girls take turns bouncing up and down on my pogo stick. Either way, I do think he's on his way out, just as I think that the brilliant and witty Mark Steyn is clearly the heir apparent. What do y'all think?

I think the last days of Rush were about 7 years ago.  Yes, he still speaks into a microphone, but the political zeal, wit and creativity are only a shadow of what he once delivered.

[texaskdog]

I used to love the show...til he visited Sr in the white house and he no longer ever had an opinion that didn't agree with Republican party line.  Plus, he got rid of the updates.  Much like Howard Stern he's coasting on his past.

[texaskdog]

I used to love the show...til he visited Sr in the white house and he no longer ever had an opinion that didn't agree with Republican party line.  Plus, he got rid of the updates.  Much like Howard Stern he's coasting on his past.

...and Linda Moulton Howe too.

[M Knight]

...and Linda Moulton Howe too.

...and Linda Moldy Cow too.

[texaskdog]

...and Linda Moldy Cow too.

I love how people on here who defend her talk about how great she was with Art in the 90s. 

[M Knight]

I love how people on here who defend her talk about how great she was with Art in the 90s.

She was part of the Art Bell greatness, but the sharpness is gone.  I don't blame her at all.  Whereas Art engaged in conversation with LMH, Numb Nut uses the time she is on to sharpen pencils.  Art took mediocre guests and made them great.  With that harmonious synergy gone, guests such as LMH have to fend for themselves.  With Noory, C2C is now the "a capella" of talk radio.

[MV/Liberace!]

i have felt the same way about rush in recent years.  i often get the impression he's phoning it in and/or repeating the same things i've heard him say for twenty years. 


hard to blame him, though.  imagine talking into a microphone for 3 hours... 5 days per week... for 25 years.  it would be nearly IMPOSSIBLE to keep it fresh and exciting.  hell, many talk radio hosts are forgotten after just a few short years... if that. 


remember the "black avenger" ken hamblin, anyone? 


(crickets)


or what about bill oreilly's attempt at a radio career?  first off, that guy had to BUY his way onto radio stations across the country.  second, he was AWFUL.  a lesson was learned when oreilly went to talk radio:  success in TV and elsewhere doesn't inherently guarantee radio success.  talk radio is deceptively difficult.  you not only have to speak for hours, but you have to entertain an audience while doing so.  people sometimes fail to consider just how talented rush actually is... and when you look at flops like oreilly, it puts rush's accomplishment into perspective.


regarding rush's supposed parroting of the republican party line, i couldn't disagree with you more.  rush is a conservative first, and a republican second.  actually, i think the only reason rush still calls himself a republican is because he is a realist and understands the importance of party affiliation when attempting to implement a political objective.  we've been saddled with a 2 party system, there's nothing anyone can do about it at the moment, and rush knows we have to work within those confines for now (unless you want to split your own vote and guarantee success to your political enemy). 


i can recall multiple instances during the bush 41 administration when rush criticized the president, particularly for his big spending and his failure to govern on the conservative principles that put him into office to begin with.  also, the republican establishment today HATES rush because they are not conservative.  they haven't been for 15 years.  rush routinely attacks the RNC and the establishment republicans who have devolved into a slightly more palatable and mitigated version of the leftists who dominate the democrat party.  actually, when i tune in to hear rush these days, i'm tuning in more to hear criticism of establishment RINO republicans than the marxist democrats.

[anagrammy]

She was part of the Art Bell greatness, but the sharpness is gone.  I don't blame her at all.  Whereas Art engaged in conversation with LMH, Numb Nut uses the time she is on to sharpen pencils.  Art took mediocre guests and made them great.  With that harmonious synergy gone, guests such as LMH have to fend for themselves.  With Noory, C2C is now the "a capella" of talk radio.

Well said, MK, and it applies to callers as well.  They call, they flatter, they speak, then the Noory Random Comment generator kicks in ...

Anagramm

[onan]

(unless you want to split your own vote and guarantee success to your political enemy). 

Isn't it a shame that is the level of debate we have? I wonder why we are so polarized? I sometimes think the rhetoric has lead us to these extremes. As much as I will agree with you Rush is talented (my father-in-law worked as a dj at the same station in Mckeesport, PA when Rush was there... very long time ago.) I think his tenor helped keep us from civil debate.

they are not conservative.  they haven't been for 15 years. 

I think it is more like 30 years but that is just opinion. I do have to ask, what has happened to the conservative party? I remember a time when even when I disagreed I had to give credit for an intelligent position. Hell I thought Goldwater besides his hawkishness was a great legislator. I thought Eisenhower although not a great speaker had more insight into political machinations than ever given credit for. Today we have party leaders that are fools. And to keep this fair minded the left has its idiots too.

[TaoOfLuxLisbon]

I think it is more like 30 years but that is just opinion. I do have to ask, what has happened to the conservative party? I remember a time when even when I disagreed I had to give credit for an intelligent position. Hell I thought Goldwater besides his hawkishness was a great legislator. I thought Eisenhower although not a great speaker had more insight into political machinations than ever given credit for. Today we have party leaders that are fools. And to keep this fair minded the left has its idiots too.

Eisenhower would be considered a liberal (he wasn't, but the goalposts have moved for those who unfortunately set the narrative now) today and he was never a true conservative. Remember that the tax rates for the upper percentile of income was something like 92% back in the 50's and he was very pro Social Security and certainly favored labor more than any Republican would be allowed to today. Goldwater was a true conservative, but yes he was far more reasonable than say, Rick Santorum or Michelle Bachmann is today.

By the way, someone just played a clip of Rush today saying FOX News was "unfair" to the GOP debaters last night with some of it's questions. FOX News. Yeah. You go, Rush. Keep exposing that lamestream media for being "too tough".

[onan]

Eisenhower would be considered a liberal (he wasn't, but the goalposts have moved for those who unfortunately set the narrative now) today and he was never a true conservative. Remember that the tax rates for the upper percentile of income was something like 92% back in the 50's and he was very pro Social Security and certainly favored labor more than any Republican would be allowed to today. Goldwater was a true conservative, but yes he was far more reasonable than say, Rick Santorum or Michelle Bachmann is today.

By the way, someone just played a clip of Rush today saying FOX News was "unfair" to the GOP debaters last night with some of it's questions. FOX News. Yeah. You go, Rush. Keep exposing that lamestream media for being "too tough".

I dunno, if I have my facts straight, it Eisenhower's CIA that overthrew the the government of Iran. It was his "bay of pigs" that kennedy got strapped with. Yeah he did lead the way for the interstate system (which has a significant relationship with military, specifically the air force).

Goldwater was a true republican in so much as he believed the government had no business in any part of a person's private life.

I think all I was trying to say is the republican party has no politicians with the zeal or interest in what could be argued as good for the country. 

[Eddie Coyle]

I dunno, if I have my facts straight, it Eisenhower's CIA that overthrew the the government of Iran. It was his "bay of pigs" that kennedy got strapped with. Yeah he did lead the way for the interstate system (which has a significant relationship with military, specifically the air force).

    Ike also needlessly intervened in Lebanon in the summer of '58, and increased the number of our "advisors" in South Vietnam to nearly 1,000. And our influence in "training" Latin-Central American governments on dealing with insurgencies also increased(cough,CIA,cough)

    He did handle the Suez crisis quite bravely and somewhat brilliantly. I'll give him that.

[TaoOfLuxLisbon]

I think all I was trying to say is the republican party has no politicians with the zeal or interest in what could be argued as good for the country.

The only difference between Democrats and Republicans now is that Democrats occasionally apologize for passing and signing legislation letting corporations rape us.

[anagrammy]

The only difference between Democrats and Republicans now is that Democrats occasionally apologize for passing and signing legislation letting corporations rape us.

I hope you watch Rachel Maddow because she featured Mitt Romney with his leg on a hay bale (how contrived was that?) saying "Corporations are people, my friend."  The entire audience of Iowans laughed at him. 


She comments on how bad he is "in the wild," talking to real people.  She then shows senior citizens in massage chairs, genuinely stunned that he is going from recliner to recliner talking to them.


I thoroughly enjoyed the Republican presidential debate - it restored my faith that no matter how stupid and bumbling one party is, the other party is equally so.


Anagrammy

[Camper]

I don't know what context it was used in but corporations are people in the eyes of the law. I don't think that comment should draw laughter from a well informed audience. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood

[PhantasticSanShiSan]

I don't know what context it was used in but corporations are people in the eyes of the law. I don't think that comment should draw laughter from a well informed audience. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood

Exactly.  That is the joke.

[MV/Liberace!]

phan... i'm loving your tron phase on this forum.

[onan]

I don't know what context it was used in but corporations are people in the eyes of the law. I don't think that comment should draw laughter from a well informed audience. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood

An informed audience should ask, whose voice does the corporation use? Is the voice a consensus of all it's employees or just those of the upper management? When a corporation is responsible for the death of someone, who goes to jail?  The FBI estimates that, 19,000 Americans are murdered every year. But 56,000 Americans die on the job from black lung and asbestosis and americans who die from pollution, tainted foods, hazardous products, and hospital malpractice. Many times these events are from boards who show disregard for the victims because of a recklessness that should be considered criminal. The FBI statistics show street crime costs the country roughly 4 billion a year where as the Enrons cost us hundreds of billions.

Yeah it is complicated but if anyone thinks corporations should be treated the same as an individual they haven't considered the impossibility of assigning responsibility. I don't give a rat fuck what Thomas Jefferson wrote... I would wager he would shit his pants if he knew that kind of argument had been used in his name.

[Caruthers612]

i have felt the same way about rush in recent years.  i often get the impression he's phoning it in and/or repeating the same things i've heard him say for twenty years. 

           "Phoning it in" is the exact phrase that's been going through my head over the last couple of years with regard to Rush, Michael. I agree.
            As for what else you wrote, the political stuff, ironically that, in my opinion, is part of why Rush has become yesterday's news, to me anyway. To me, any discussion of politics is at the very least a waste of time, and actually worse, though I don't wish to go into the whole thing. Among other things, it misses the point. As to what I mean by this arcane remark, if I can get myself to do that radio show I have in mind, ye shall all be the wiser. :-0
              Uh...or something.

Randolpho the Magnificent

[anagrammy]

An informed audience should ask, whose voice does the corporation use? Is the voice a consensus of all it's employees or just those of the upper management? When a corporation is responsible for the death of someone, who goes to jail?  The FBI estimates that, 19,000 Americans are murdered every year. But 56,000 Americans die on the job from black lung and asbestosis and americans who die from pollution, tainted foods, hazardous products, and hospital malpractice. Many times these events are from boards who show disregard for the victims because of a recklessness that should be considered criminal. The FBI statistics show street crime costs the country roughly 4 billion a year where as the Enrons cost us hundreds of billions.

Yeah it is complicated but if anyone thinks corporations should be treated the same as an individual they haven't considered the impossibility of assigning responsibility. I don't give a rat fuck what Thomas Jefferson wrote... I would wager he would shit his pants if he knew that kind of argument had been used in his name.

This person "Corporation" clearly has no conscience.  He/She appears to be so deficient in lack of any interest in the common good, that one would suggest the Corporation see a psychiatrist and get some stiff meds.  There is sociopathy here, possibly even a psychosis in which the sufferer, said Corporation, cares nothing for his country, his people, his fellow corporations or anything.  Except that which would benefit Corporation.

Corporation is a narcissistic serial killer who believes in NEVER saying your sorry and that the payment of a cash settlement absolves him of any wrongdoing.  Corporation belongs in prison for life.

I also favor the death penalty in this case.  Corporation should lose it's personhood--it has been a huge disappointment to its parents.

Anagrammy

[fabucat]

She was part of the Art Bell greatness, but the sharpness is gone.  I don't blame her at all.  Whereas Art engaged in conversation with LMH, Numb Nut uses the time she is on to sharpen pencils.  Art took mediocre guests and made them great.  With that harmonious synergy gone, guests such as LMH have to fend for themselves.  With Noory, C2C is now the "a capella" of talk radio.

I really respected Linda Moulton Howe until she compared Obama to Rev. Jim Jones of the Jonestown Massacre fame. GOOD GRIEF!  I'm comfortable with Coast guests being to the right of me, but this is outrageous.  It's one thing to compare Obama to Jim Jones or Bush to Hitler on some partisan blog when you're in your early 20s but LMH was speaking to thousands on public airwaves and she's pushing 60.

[fabucat]

      I doubt I'm the only one who has had the feeling, over the last year or two, that this last contract Rush signed--I think it was a five year deal--is probably his last. Between his age, his acquired wealth, his pretty new wife (anyone care to take wagers on how long this one will last?), and his no longer secret trips over the last few years to purchase land and setup refuges in places from Prague to New Zealand--combined with the decline and fall of America--I just get the feeling that he's getting ready to pack it in. And why not? I would. Indeed, I'd have been long since gone, sipping umbrella drinks on my own private island in the Caribbean while barely legal native girls take turns bouncing up and down on my pogo stick. Either way, I do think he's on his way out, just as I think that the brilliant and witty Mark Steyn is clearly the heir apparent. What do y'all think?

Limbaugh ain't going anywhere any time soon, having invented political talk.  As far as Mark Steyn is concerned, he should go back to the UK. 

[onan]

Limbaugh ain't going anywhere any time soon, having invented political talk. 

Not quite. Read this excerpt from:

Talking Back To Talk Radio - Fairness, Democracy, and Profits
by Thom Hartmann

In that, we were following a long radio tradition. Modern talk radio as a major force in America started in 1926, when Catholic priest Father Charles E. Coughlin took to the airwaves. By the mid-1930s, as many as a full third of the entire nation - an estimated 45 million people - listened to his weekly broadcasts. His downfall, and the end of the 15-year era of talk radio he'd both created and dominated, came in the early 1940s when the nation was at war and Hitler was shipping millions of Jews to the death camps. For reasons still unknown (Alzheimer's is suspected), Coughlin launched into hard-right anti-Semitic tirades in his broadcasts, blaming an international Jewish conspiracy for communism, the Great Depression, World War II, and most of the world's other ills. His sudden shift to the radical right disgusted his listeners, and led his superiors in the Catholic Church to demand he retire from radio and return to his parish duties where he died in relative obscurity. Many say the Fairness Doctrine came about in part because of Coughlin.

A generation later, a new Father Coughlin emerged in the form of Rush Limbaugh, an articulate and talented talk-show host out of Sacramento. Joe Pyne (a conservative who almost always had a liberal with him on the air) was dead, and conservative investors and programmers were looking to unseat the fabulously popular liberal talker Alan Berg and bring "balance" to America's airwaves. (In June of 1984, the year Rush began "issues talk" on Sacramento's KFBK, Berg was machine-gunned to death by right-wingers claiming they were from the Aryan Nation.) Within four years, Rush rose to national status by offering his program free of charge to stations across the nation. Station managers, not being business dummies, laid off local talent and picked up Rush's free show, leading to a national phenomena: the Limbaugh show was one of America's greatest radio success stories, spreading from state to state faster than any modern talk show had ever done. (Such free or barter offerings are now standard in the industry.)

Published on Tuesday, December 3, 2002 by CommonDreams.org

[Scully]

Not quite. Read this excerpt from:

Talking Back To Talk Radio - Fairness, Democracy, and Profits
by Thom Hartmann

Wow!  I did not know any of that.  Thank you, Onan.  That explains a lot of what I didn't understand about what in the holy hell gave us the extreme right wing domination of the airwaves.

I live in the heart of Appalachia, and there are no choices at all on local radio. Doesn't matter whether you're fur 'em or agin 'em.

[TaoOfLuxLisbon]

This person "Corporation" clearly has no conscience.  He/She appears to be so deficient in lack of any interest in the common good, that one would suggest the Corporation see a psychiatrist and get some stiff meds.  There is sociopathy here, possibly even a psychosis in which the sufferer, said Corporation, cares nothing for his country, his people, his fellow corporations or anything.  Except that which would benefit Corporation.

Corporation is a narcissistic serial killer who believes in NEVER saying your sorry and that the payment of a cash settlement absolves him of any wrongdoing.  Corporation belongs in prison for life.

I also favor the death penalty in this case.  Corporation should lose it's personhood--it has been a huge disappointment to its parents.

Anagrammy

Well, you should have seen 60 Minutes tonight. It was all about these wonderful "people" getting big tax breaks and putting the jobs and profits elsewhere. The one "person" they had on defending their general attitude pretty much stopped just short of turning directly towards the camera and raising his middle finger to the American people viewing his smug defense.

[M Knight]

That explains a lot of what I didn't understand about what in the holy hell gave us the extreme right wing domination of the airwaves.

Free market competition. 

[Art]

Free market competition.

Well, there aren't many Big Band stations left.

[onan]

Well, there aren't many Big Band stations left.

No there aren't. But free market competition may not be the full answer. At least in respect to political talk. If right leaning talk radio is a result of those market rules. Why is television political talk not similar to radio? Shouldn't the same principles apply? Why do movies (at least imo) have a much more left leaning bias? Where is the market rule set?