Liberals misunderstood Rush Limbaugh, but Missouri can’t honor him with a special day
It isn’t even remotely a question: Rush Limbaugh is the most influential Missourian on American politics since Harry Truman. The Cape Girardeau native, who died at 70 last week, hosted one of the most popular talk radio shows in history, reaching millions of listeners — often while they worked — three hours a day, five days a week, for more than 30 years.
So it’s hardly surprising that Missouri lawmakers would want to recognize his groundbreaking career by naming a day for him. And on Friday, state Rep. Hardy Billington, a Poplar Bluff Republican, did just that, introducing a bill to designate Jan. 12 “Rush Limbaugh Day” in the state. Dan Stacy of Blue Springs is one of five GOP co-sponsors in the Missouri House.
It wouldn’t be hard to find Republicans who would vote to honor the conservative radio icon in every state of the union. A lot of them, in fact. Because it’s Rush Limbaugh — not Edmund Burke, not Russell Kirk, not Milton Friedman, Arthur Laffer, Phyllis Schlafly, William F. Buckley nor George Will — who most shaped the id of the modern American conservative mind.
Limbaugh leveraged his effortless skills as a broadcaster, honed in the early ‘70s as jovial drive time DJ “Bachelor Jeff Christie,” to create a new mashup of right-wing politics and a flamboyantly irreverent shock jock sensibility. His show was entertainment and news commentary all at once. And since so many people with conservative social values look askance at Hollywood’s libertine ways, they were eager to find a broadcast that helped them snicker at the lefties they disdained.
El Rushbo could push things pretty far. When you tuned into “Firing Line,” Bill Buckley wasn’t going to perform a “caller abortion” when he thought a conversation was going nowhere. But that’s what Limbaugh did — ending interactions with the sound effect of a vacuum cleaner overlaid with a woman’s terrified screams. It’s no coincidence that his rise roughly tracked that of daytime trash TV, perfected in “The Morton Downey Jr. Show,” its host denouncing “pablum puking liberals” and shouting down nemeses with a puff of cigarette smoke in their faces.
And this is the part of Limbaugh’s appeal that too many of his finger-wagging critics on the left don’t grok. His touch was far more deft than Sean Hannity’s ham fists or Bill Maher’s sneering condescension. When he cued up Millie Small’s “My Boy Lollipop” to introduce a bit on gay U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, or “Men” by the Forester Sisters for one of his “Feminist Updates,” he and his fans were elbowing each other: Yes, we know we’re not supposed to be laughing at the double entendre. Of course it isn’t politically correct. But we’re in charge here. We dare you to stop us.
Because the larger-than-life Rush Limbaugh persona was kind of a big in-joke. When he bragged he’d take on adversaries with “half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair,” it was with a wink at the absurdity of it all. Those of us who listened to Howard Stern on the radio before his image got a prime-time-TV scrub-down know the drill well. When Stern said he hoped a Federal Communications Commission official would die of cancer, he didn’t really mean it, like, for real. Don’t be so serious. Can’t you take a joke? It’s not unlike one Donald J. Trump — a frequent Stern guest — extolling “truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration, and a very effective form of promotion.”
Maybe we can agree to disagree on that whole “innocent” part, but we can’t let the impish naughtiness of Limbaugh’s radio character mask his most lasting achievement: He taught conservatism to drop the genteel veneer. Embrace mockery as you punch down.
Because when he delivered his “Homeless Updates” about the “urban outdoorsmen” on the streets, or his “AIDS Updates” (which he eventually abandoned, only to replace them with “Gay Updates”), Limbaugh was giving his audience explicit permission to laugh at powerless human beings. It wasn’t enough for the fabulously wealthy white entrepreneur to denounce public policy he thought was harmful. He had to demean his fellow Americans to make it funny, too.
His vision was the polar opposite of George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism.” And it’s not hard to draw a straight line from Limbaugh to the insult comic-cum-populist who made his way to the White House while loudly deriding women’s looks and lampooning the disabled.
Limbaugh “gave you hope,” Rep. Billington told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, explaining why the famous Missourian deserves to be officially commemorated. If “Rush Limbaugh Day” becomes a reality, every time Jan. 12 rolls around, thousands of people on the fringes in every corner of the state will have a hope of their own: that their lives won’t forever be someone else’s punchline.
This story was originally published February 22, 2021 at 5:00 AM.