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UTUSN

(70,494 posts)
Tue Feb 4, 2020, 04:28 PM Feb 2020

It ain't about lung cancer. It's about the hate and damage to the country LIMBAUGH has done. Updated

Last edited Tue Feb 4, 2020, 09:48 PM - Edit history (5)

When I came back to my home stomping grounds after the Navy and university, totaling 11 years, I had been used to morning talk shows in a couple of sophisticated urban areas, with their suave and Liberal talk hosts. So here, I latched on to what was available, which happened to be K***. The syndicated line-up was fairly compatible to the hosts elsewhere. Here, it was a couple of psychologists (Dr Joy BROWNE, Dr David VISCOTT), a regular MD (Dr Dean EDELL). But it took getting used to to hear the local yokel who at that time was breaking in the RAGEFUL WINGNUT persona, with unhinged, self-righteous RANTS, *very* rough around the edges. At my workplace radio was permitted at the desk, so most of the day the stress relieving doctors murmured away pleasantly.

I would type write two page letters attacking the local winger (on my own time) and he would actually answer with typed letters on K*** letterhead. Finally, this must have been before the days of his now medications, he blew up and said, “I’m tired of being your Right Wing whipping boy.” Fine. But for whatever reason of his temperament, he continued to engage.

Then one day, yes, 31 years ago, at my desk, I was *SHOCKED* to hear bizarre (Rock?) music, RAUCOUS stuff, pouring out of my radio, and this LIMBAUGH a-hole burst on the air, precisely spelling his weird name and telling everybody that it would take about six weeks for the audience to get used to him. He enunciated his surname and spelled it and did the warning routinely.

I was *SHOCKED* and embarked on studying (not for his wingnut “school” ) but to catch all of his distortions, lies, ridicule of Dems, of women, of minorities. It was my form of Opposition Research, to be able to answer any wingnuts I encountered, to know what the wingnut world was saying, because to KNOW is better than NOT knowing, because knowledge is POWER, and as the Mafia says, “Keep your friends close, but your enemies CLOSER.”

So all through my final main employment until retirement, I had LIMBAUGH on and took note how K*** soon ditched its precious (to them) local programs like the hokey Farm and Ranch noon thing in order for them to run LIMBAUGH live for the 3 hours, then in a few years, they ditched the civilized doctors to go Full Wingnut with HANNITY, O’REILLY, Laura SCHLESSINGER – all the most DESPICABLE, HATEFUL people possible. Hence, where K*** has been for the past 20 years or more.

Now that LIMBAUGH has come to his latest crisis (previously, drug addiction and deafness) not counting the things we don’t know about (what goes on in the Dominican Republic? Something EPSTEIN-like?), he and his fellow wingnuts are going through their typical victimhood (ironic since they always mock others for victimhood). They claim that his lung cancer is something terrible for such a great man to be struck with. In other words, that he is such a GREAT MAN, that their basis for his greatness is that he rescued and rehabilitated AM radio.

His accomplishment was truly monumental. This is not to say it was GOOD. And it had nothing to do with reinventing AM radio. What he did was to single-handedly resuscitate and rehabilitate the Conservative movement. This was after the Joe McCARTHY UnAmerican movement had been discredited, taking with it later the John BIRCH Society. Then GOLDWATER went down hard, and it was when the biggest media names perhaps WERE skewed to the Left. So then came LIMBAUGH, and while I dispute that he made Conservatism RESPECTABLE, what he did was to WEAPONIZE it. He introduced SCORCHED EARTH, absolutely NO compromise with the Left, NO moderation, NO bipartisanship, leading to the GINGRICH takeover of the House, which later became the TeaBaggers and the Freedom Caucus, et al.

And his tactics were always vicious personal attacks, pre-SHITLER, mocking physical characteristics, always walking the line with IMPLICATIONS against race and gender without using the explicit racist and -phobic epithets, although everybody knew what he was really saying, always claiming to be satirical.

One of his first techniques in rehabilitating the moribund BIRCHers and other overt racists and conspiracists was to shuffle them off the phone as soon as they were being too obvious: He would gently dismiss them, thereby ridding the new Conservatism of the bad image of kooks, conspiracists, nuts.

Continued, PART 2: So LIMBOsevic is nothing if not all about him, so he came before the Faux Propaganda network, and I don't know what role he might have had with AISLES, but the Faux machine coupled with him to horrendous effect from the '90s on. The so-called "mainstream media" and other establishment were unaware and oblivious of him and his massing (now we call: ) Deplorables for several years, but the tide was turning. Since big change is always of fighting previous wars until it's too late, the first sign was when the erstwhile "Democrat" Tim RUSSERT began putting forward his original line that Liberals had been cruel, dismissive, arrogant, and elitist about ignoring poor, lower class, Whites. And he began citing LIMBOsevic as the leader of this group, and then gave him a big spotlight by hosting him on the whole of Thanksgiving weekend, re-running the interview on successive days. That was the beginning of the wingnut meme in the media about Libs needing to reach out and "understand" the wingnuts instead of regarding them as racist whackjobs. This was evident widely by Coup 2000, when George W. Shrub benefited when his F**k-Up persona was portrayed as Good-Ole-Boyism, and GORE was skewered as the personification of the Elitist looking down on him.

LIMBOsevic's Themes, Propaganda Techniques. The veiling of racist, degrading of gender and minorities as satire has been noted. His mastery of propaganda is at the level of the practitioners of the Third Reich, at one end of the spectrum with immature name calling, onward through serious ridicule and personally hurtful degradation, favorite targets being Feminists, Gays, and Black Speech. But at the sophisticated end, turning concepts around to mean the opposite of what they originally connoted. That is, he clearly had simmered with resentment against the accolades given to Liberal heroes like FDR. So he took the Liberal honorifics and recast them onto his wingnut heroes, such as calling RAYGUN "Ronaldus Magnus". The phrase, "low information voter," started off as a Liberal descriptive of the audience of the Faux Propaganda Network, but LIMBOsevic turned it around with relentless repetition to characterize Liberals. The attention span of the country at large is short, and soon the altered versions of things are the accepted ones, and in the blink of an eye new generations don't know there was ever something other than the altered meaning. For example, during the GINGRICH years, the Repuke pollster Frank LUNTZ was introducing his focus group testing of words and phrases and how positive or negative they were, and one of his "innovations" was to tell the GINGRICH Repukes to starts saying "DemoCRAT" (noun) in place of "DemocratIC" (adjective), because this sounded negative. Part of the reason it sounds negative is that the "wrong grammar" triggers an irritation on the ear. If LIMBOsevic didn't originate some of these things, he used them.



********ON EDIT: My purpose was not to rehash the diagnosis v. when-bad-things-happen-to-bad-people or about having or not having empathy for bad people. It was to counter the wingnut talking point about how "great" LIMBOsevic is and that his greatness is based on his having reinvented AM radio. I see his impact as resusitating what had been the moribund Wingnuttism, weaponizing it, instituting SCORCHED EARTH that has brought the country to where we have been since the '90s - viz., completely polarized. HE singlehandedly did it. This EDIT is not the Continuation, just an attempt to stay off the previous topics and onto another tangent.









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It ain't about lung cancer. It's about the hate and damage to the country LIMBAUGH has done. Updated (Original Post) UTUSN Feb 2020 OP
We all die texasfiddler Feb 2020 #1
He is a cruel person. May God have mercy on his soul. n/t Peregrine Took Feb 2020 #2
I'm exactly as sympathetic whether he should pass away from this, the megashits or fire ants. (nt) FreepFryer Feb 2020 #3
Any hopes, well-wishes, good thoughts, positive vibes, or any other LanternWaste Feb 2020 #4
Limbaugh put trump in the White House. It's really that simple. Paladin Feb 2020 #5
Great post malaise Feb 2020 #6
Thanks, you "get" me, you really get me!1 UTUSN Feb 2020 #8
I opted for silence yesterday malaise Feb 2020 #10
I appreciate Delphinus Feb 2020 #7
There are only about two people like this I've studied: Him and Tweety. UTUSN Feb 2020 #9

texasfiddler

(1,986 posts)
1. We all die
Tue Feb 4, 2020, 04:31 PM
Feb 2020

It is how we live and the way treated others and future generations. Too bad he sucked at that. I’m just glad his voice will soon be silenced.

 

LanternWaste

(37,748 posts)
4. Any hopes, well-wishes, good thoughts, positive vibes, or any other
Tue Feb 4, 2020, 04:48 PM
Feb 2020

Any hopes, well-wishes, good thoughts, positive vibes, or any other new-age, feel-good, self-serving sentiments we may or may not hold will do absolutely nothing to hinder or assist his treatment, his diagnosis and his eventual death.

Whatever poisons he spread to his dim-witted fan-base, whatever cash he spent on underage girls, and whatever pills he took to self-medicate will do absolutely nothing to hinder or assist his treatment, his diagnosis and his eventual death.

Point being, death doesn't give a crap what we think. Death doesn't care if we're horrible people or righteous saints. Death doesn't care about ratings, righteous-rage or revolutions.

Paladin

(28,202 posts)
5. Limbaugh put trump in the White House. It's really that simple.
Tue Feb 4, 2020, 05:09 PM
Feb 2020

My only regret about his lung cancer is that he wasn't stricken with it 30 years ago. The amount of sick, evil damage this man has caused is beyond calculation. To hell with him---ASAP.

malaise

(267,784 posts)
10. I opted for silence yesterday
Tue Feb 4, 2020, 06:08 PM
Feb 2020

because in reality life is a death sentence for every living thing.
On the other hand, how many unnecessary deaths did he cause as he spread hate for 30 years.
Fuck him - let him lie down and think about his contribution to humanity = fucking hate and contempt for all but elite white men.

Delphinus

(11,808 posts)
7. I appreciate
Tue Feb 4, 2020, 05:51 PM
Feb 2020

you telling us your story. Thank you - you have a stronger stomach than I, as five seconds of his mouth was about all I could take.

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