Pubdate: Fri, 19 Dec 2003
Source: Times Daily (Florence, AL)
Copyright: 2003 Times Daily
Contact:  http://www.timesdaily.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1641
Author: Rheta Grimsley Johnson
Note: Rheta Grimsley Johnson is a columnist for King Features Syndicate.
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Rush+Limbaugh

LIMBAUGH'S JUDGMENTAL RUSH STINKS

I listened to a long few minutes of the new, improved, color-safe,
rehabilitated Rush the other day, only to discover he's the same
insufferable, boring, cruel braggart he always was, on or off drugs.

Rush was - at that random moment I chose to tune in - making fun of
now-dead former U.S. Sen. Paul Simon's heart ailment and impending
surgery, an operation that a few days later proved fatally
complicated.

It came as news to him, Limbaugh snickered, that liberals even have
hearts.

This brutal callousness after the liberal mainstream media he so loves
to attack had given Rush a complete bye while he took the rich man's
cure. Nobody dared kick the Big Man while he was down and out in
Beverly Hills - or, in his case, Arizona. I guess columnists and
commentators were worried about being accused of ridiculing the ill,
something that evidently doesn't concern our Rush.

Oh, the timid way in which the subject of Rush and his habit was
broached, whenever it was mentioned at all. Prescription-pill
addiction became, in the media, the latest widespread epidemic,
something common and noncriminal, a pitfall every Boy Next Door had to
fear. We were bending over backward to give Limbaugh something he
never gives anyone: the benefit of the doubt.

Limbaugh, on the other hand, has never felt the constraints of
compassion or fairness or decency. He certainly never applied
journalistic objectivity to any subject he tackled. Rush came out of
rehab swinging, not even mildly repentant or contemplative, simply his
same old arrogant self.

I guess when you have made a fortune off of low blows and partisan
jokes, you don't change your style just as the legal bills are about
to start mounting. You keep on keeping on, as Rush might say. If
something works, work it to death.

It boggles the mind to think with what delight Limbaugh would have
attacked a Democrat, any Democrat, who was caught with his hand in the
painkiller jar. You can almost hear his sarcastic monologue about
liberal excesses and hippie legacies. You can almost hear his little
sermonette about lying and doping.

It is, in fact, open season on all Democrats and feminists and
moderates-to-liberals, all day every day, during the Rush rant that
has revolutionized AM radio. He ridicules everything from Hillary's
thighs to Jesse Jackson's intonations, putting equally caustic
emphasis on major scandal and physical defect. There is no such thing
as fair play, much less turnabout.

And yet that biased mainstream media Rush rues rarely raises an
eyebrow, much less a hand, to defend itself.

The press simply has far too many subscriber woes to risk alienating
conservative readers. Many newspapers today are cowardly lions, afraid
of their own shadows, bowing to every irate letter-writer and
phone-caller and dittohead.

As a result, pill-popping, hypocritical chicken hawks are free to go
about their wicked ways without a bark, much less a bite, from a
perceived public watchdog.

It took an "irresponsible" tabloid to pursue the Rush story in the
first place. And that fact can't help but remind you of just who it
was who stopped the absurdly one-sided sexual witch hunt during the
Clinton administration.

If it hadn't been for that old reprobate Larry Flynt, it seems
doubtful anybody ever would have made the salient point that
Republicans have messy sex lives, too.

It's a sorry pass in the world of journalism when The National
Inquirer and the Hustler mogul are the ones doing the digging and
breaking the big stories. Lately, the supermarket tabs and the porno
mags are looking downright diligent and responsible in comparison with
more respectable establishment rags.

Is the mainstream press too concerned about the Bottom Line these days
to risk riling the right? Hmmmmm?
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake