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? - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake