Tag: Rush Limbaugh

Categories
At Large Opinion

Rush’s Leftovers

Rush Limbaugh (Photo: Gage Skidmore | Creativecommons. org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

I’m guessing you may have missed it: the second anniversary of Rush Limbaugh’s death on February 17th. There were no parades or anything. At least, none that I heard about. His death was little noted or remembered, except for a couple shots fired on Twitter. “Try to live your life so that ‘rot in hell’ isn’t trending at the mention of your death,” posted one. Good advice, says I.

Limbaugh was widely seen as the godfather of today’s vitriolic, hyperbolic, right-wing media subculture, the life force that spawned Fox News and its host of creepy hosts, plus OAN, the Daily Caller, Breitbart, and dozens of other “news” turdlets on the web and elsewhere.

Limbaugh spewed lies by the thousands over the course of his career, taking delight in coming up with terms such as “feminazi,” and was a clear inspiration for a certain former president. The homeless were “compassion fascists,” environmentalists were “tree-huggers.” He made fun of Michael J. Fox, imitating the tremors that were a symptom of the actor’s Parkinson’s disease (Sound familiar?). Limbaugh ran a segment called “AIDS updates,” mocking the deaths of gay men by playing Dionne Warwick’s recording of the song “I’ll Never Love This Way Again.” A lifelong smoker, he told his listeners that tobacco doesn’t kill people. He died of lung cancer two years ago as karma tap-danced on his grave.

Current parallel to El Rushbo? Maybe Tucker Carlson, the guy on Fox who thinks Russia is the victim in Ukraine, and says the January 6th riots were just a bunch of peaceful tourists visiting the Capitol? This guy looked through 40,000 hours of videotape and didn’t see any real violence, or at least chose not to put any on the air in his “documentary.” That’s like showing only the starry sky in a film about man landing on the moon, and saying the film proves it never happened.

When it comes to smoking, TC actually ramps it up a notch from Rushbo, declaring not only that smoking won’t kill you, but it’s actually good for you, it’s “all-American.” And he’s a ceaseless promoter of Putin and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, so much so that clips of his shows are featured nightly on Russian television. Most troubling, perhaps, is that he is a promoter of the “great replacement theory,” warning his viewers that “If we continue on this trajectory, eventually there’ll be no more native-born Americans,” i.e. white people. Cue immigrant-bashing from the next guest. It’s hardly worth mentioning that Tucker continues to push Donald Trump’s Big Lie on the 2020 election.

The question with these kinds of propagandists is always this: Do they believe their own lies or do they just expect the idiots who make them rich to do so? The money’s good either way, but maybe the slight moral edge, if there is one, goes to the propagandist who actually believes his own drivel. We’ll never know if Limbaugh bought the garbage he spewed into America’s airways every day. But given the revelations in the ongoing Dominion lawsuit against Fox News, it is quite provable that Carlson and his employer are lying all the way to the bank.

And it’s all because ol’ Rushbo discovered America’s dirty little secret: There is a dark, racist, proudly know-nothing subset of our citizenry that only wants to have its bigotry and anger reinforced. They are like addicts who want to hear sobriety is for losers, smokers who want to believe smoking makes them healthy, ignorant mouth-breathers who want to believe their skin tone makes them superior.

The whole ecosystem needs to perish, beginning with those organizations who reap millions of dollars knowingly spreading the venal lies that are ripping this country in half. The public airways, including cable TV, need to be brought back to the pre-Limbaugh days of the Fairness Doctrine, when some semblance of truth was required of news organizations, when “equal time” on an issue was mandatory. The current Wild West of “news,” with its blend of anger-tainment, disinformation, propaganda, and profit over truth, needs to die. Karma is waiting.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Ditto.

Rush Limbaugh and I had a lot in common.

We’re both Baby Boomers, both from a small town in Missouri, and both of us grew up in a Republican family. Rush dropped out of college and then moved to Pittsburgh to try to become a radio DJ. I dropped out of college to smoke pot and protest the Vietnam War. Then I moved to San Francisco and became a night watchman and a busker for tourists in Ghirardelli Square. 

Both of our career paths were a bit murky there for a while.

Rush bounced from station to station for a few years, eventually ending up in Kansas City. I bounced from job to job out West and in Columbia, Missouri, where I eventually finished my journalism degree and found semi-honest work in the business where I still ply my trade.

Rush began his climb to glory in the wake of the overturning of the FCC Fairness Doctrine in 1987, when broadcasters were no longer constrained by having to provide equal time for opposing views, or for anyone who was attacked on air.

After getting some attention in Kansas City for his “public affairs” show, Rushbo got hired by WABC in New York and he quickly gained national notoriety for such actions as celebrating the deaths of gay men from AIDS with show tunes, coining the phrase “Femi-Nazis” for women’s rights activists, calling Chelsea Clinton the “White House dog,” and regularly saying revoltingly racist things about African Americans (too many to list here), all under the guise of “conservatism.” It was a truly deplorable schtick before deplorable became a thing, and one that resonated, appallingly, with much of white America. Rush got very rich with it.

In 1996, the Telecommunications Act allowed broadcasting companies to own stations in many markets and spawned radio syndication. Rush quickly got even bigger (literally) and richer and became a major player in the Republican Party. A slew of conservative Rush-clones emerged: Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Mark Levin, to name a few. Stirring up anger and outrage at liberals, Democrats, Blacks, Muslims, and immigrants was, and is, their stock-in-trade. And it’s made them rich.

Then came Fox News, the ultimate benefactor of the abolishment of the Fairness Doctrine. (“Fair and Balanced” being the lie from which all others were spun.) Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes built a television empire on right-wing outrage, angry white male hosts, short-skirted blondes, and lies.

Now, with the internet, the genie is out of the bottle. If you want “fair and balanced,” it’s strictly DIY. Pick your news to suit your views. If you believe climate change and COVID-19 are hoaxes, that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, that Texas lost power because of a Green New Deal that hasn’t been passed, that QAnon is onto something, that Antifa spawned the January 6th insurrection, that President Biden’s dog isn’t “presidential,” that the Bidens’ marriage is a “charade” … there’s a whole news ecosystem built just for you. Likewise, if you take the opposing point of view on any or all of those issues.

But it all started with Rush Limbaugh. And now he’s dead of lung cancer, at 70, leaving three ex-wives and a widow and millions of fans to mourn his passing. Lots of Republicans want to honor what they perceive as Limbaugh’s glorious legacy. He’s being called a great American, a true patriot — lauded by GOP politicians all over America. In Florida, the governor wants to fly the flag at half-mast in Limbaugh’s honor. In Rush’s home state of Missouri, legislators are talking about establishing a state holiday in his name. A state holiday! His bust already resides in the state capitol building — kind of like Nathan Bedford Forrest’s up in Nashville.

But let’s speak the truth here: Rush Limbaugh was not a great American by any fair and balanced measure. In his radio persona, he was a divisive, hateful, homophobic, racist, misogynistic asshole. What he was like in private, I can’t say, but I doubt that he and I had much in common when Limbaugh departed this earthly vale — far from his Missouri roots. I do hope he found peace at the end. It’s more than he wished for others.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Come Into My Parler

CREDIT: Bryan C. Parker

Frank Murtaugh is managing editor of Memphis magazine, but he’s also been the primary sports columnist for the Flyer since 2001 or so. He writes a lot about University of Memphis sports and he does a terrific job. And it hasn’t always been easy. Frank’s seen some mighty lean years, especially in football, including the woeful Coach Larry Porter era.

Each week during the season, Frank writes a column called “Three Thoughts on Tiger Football.” Back in the Porter days, I used to tweet about Frank’s “Three Thoughts” column by saying “Frank Murtaugh thinks about Tiger football so you don’t have to.”

I write all this by way of saying we owe a similar debt to sfgate.com writer Bryan C. Parker, who did us all a solid by signing up for parler.com — so we don’t have to.

Bryan C. Parker

Parler, as you probably know by now, is a social media platform aimed at “conservatives” who are disenchanted with Facebook and Twitter. Here’s what Parker wrote: “Beneath the thin guise of the app’s self-proclaimed emphasis on ‘free speech’ lies the ability to say not just a hypothetical ‘anything,’ but specifically to share racist slurs and violent threats toward political opponents. On Parler, Nazi imagery flourishes, death threats abound, and conspiracy theories reign.”

To sign up for Parler, you must provide a phone number and email address. The platform claims it will not “sell” your information, but it will doubtless be used for something. Parler is funded largely by the Robert Mercer family, which has made millions on data mining. The app also has ties to Cambridge Analytica, which provided extensive voter micro-data to the 2016 Trump campaign.

Once you’re in, Parker reports, you are given a suggested follow list of right-leaning media and political figures: Sean Hannity, Ted Cruz, Dinesh D’Souza, Ann Coulter, Devin Nunes, etc. Beyond that, you’re on your own. You can post, follow people, start conversation threads, the usual social media protocol.

It quickly becomes apparent, writes Parker, that hardly anybody on Parler thinks Joe Biden won the election. Profane diatribes, wild election conspiracy theories, QAnon revelations, and racial and homophobic slurs abound.

Free speech in the United States has famously been ruled not to extend to the right to yell “FIRE” in a crowded theater. Does it extend to the right to call for executions of political enemies, to promote anti-Semitism and racism, to proudly post the Nazi swastika? On Parler, yes, it does. This is the free speech that Parler says is being suppressed and banned on Twitter and Facebook.

Parler is the newest addition to the right-wing media silo. Fox is on the decline with the true Trumper/white supremacist/racist/AngryKaren tribe. OANN, NewsMax, The Right Scoop, and others are the primary “news” sources cited on Parler. If you haven’t checked out OANN, let me just say, it makes Fox News look like NPR.

I remember when the FCC had a “fairness doctrine” that required TV and radio stations holding broadcast licenses to devote some of their programming to controversial issues of public importance and to allow the airing of opposing views on those issues. This meant that programs on politics were required to include opposing opinions on the topic under discussion. The rule also mandated that broadcasters alert anyone subject to a personal attack in their programming and give them a chance to respond. The doctrine was revoked in 1987, and its elimination was widely credited with sparking the rise of conservative talk radio, including Rush Limbaugh.

Giving equal time to both sides seems like such a quaint concept now. You don’t need a license from the federal government to start a website, and so here we are, with an online world where anything goes: from cute kittens to porn to racism to the most depraved corners of the human psyche, where the entire longitude and latitude of humanity can find a home — and validation for just about anything.

What to do? Few of us, liberal or conservative, want the federal government to regulate online content. Imagine what Trump could have done with such a power! But surely there are ways we can monitor and clamp down on violent threats, terrorism, and human depravity. Violent words can lead to violent deeds, as we’ve so often discovered.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Support Trump and Be Mocked by History

The other day I spied a high Republican official walking on the street and called out his name. He stopped, hit his smile app, and exclaimed how glad he was to see me.

“What are you going to do about Trump?” I asked. He paused and then uttered the dreaded word: unity. “We have to have unity,” he said.

I got his message. He’s selling out. In the coming weeks, Republicans everywhere will be seeking unity by embracing their presumptive nominee, Donald Trump. They will be ignoring his utter lack of qualifications for the presidency, his harebrained schemes for controlling migration, his knack for insulting billions people at a time (Muslims, women, the disabled), his gaudy womanizing past, his lying, his exaggerating, his enthusiasm for torture, and his ingenious view of the Constitution as a lease that can be broken.

That paragraph, politically lethal if I were writing about someone else, encapsulates precisely why Trump is so hard to stop. He is, among other things, scandal-proof. At the moment, an army of journalists is scouring the land looking for whatever Trump has done that we might not yet know about. Trouble is, there is little that can be revealed. Call him a womanizer, and he shrugs. Say he lies, and he lies by saying he doesn’t. Confront him with the truth, as when he insisted on having seen nonexistant Muslim revelry in New Jersey following the September 11th attacks, and he just perseveres, creating his own “truth.” He cannot be shamed.

It’s trite to liken Trump to a Kardashian, but I shall do so anyway. What they have in common is the determination to outlast our moral or political revulsion. Kim Kardashian hit the big time with a sex tape. Revolting? Yes. But forgotten? Mostly. What lingers is the name.

It is similar with Trump. The shock of his statements — calling Mexican immigrants “rapists,” for instance — has worn off. The same with his insult to Megyn Kelly or his mocking of a disabled New York Times reporter. All that is now “old news,” blanched of its repellent ugliness by time: Oh, that’s just Trump. He’ll say anything. He doesn’t mean it.

Bit by bit, Trump will accumulate more endorsements. The motley crew that now surrounds him will be supplemented and upgraded by establishment names. They will use the same reasoning that Senator Lindsey Graham did last month when he endorsed Ted Cruz, whom he hates — a higher purpose. In Graham’s case, it was to stop Trump. With others, it will be this thing called party unity or, its functional equivalent, stopping Hillary Clinton.

But what is the point of a party that attempts to unify around a candidate such as Trump? What then does the party stand for? Does the GOP endorse anti-Muslim bigotry? Shall the party have a plank about Mexican rapists or the physical attributes of women? If Trump is its nominee, will the party endorse what are certain to be misogynist and personal attacks on Clinton? (Trump’s campaign boasts he has the endorsement of Paula Jones and Juanita Broaddrick, both associated with Bill Clinton’s sexual rap sheet. This could get ugly.)

Trump’s message, we are incessantly told, is that the GOP has double-crossed its constituency with trade, immigration, and just about anything else you can name. But it will do the Republican Party no good to win back the aggrieved at the cost of everyone else — not to mention what is good for the country. A glance at Trump’s endorsees — check his web page — is an effective appetite suppressant.

Imagine a Republican National Convention’s dais stocked with some of the people who have already endorsed Trump — not just the feckless Chris Christie or the bizarre Sarah Palin, but such figures as the disgraced football player Richie Incognito, Hulk Hogan, and Teresa Giudice from The Real Housewives of New Jersey, a fresh alumna of the federal prison system. A meeting of Trump supporters might have to be sanctioned by a pro wrestling promoter.

When I spotted that Republican official, I did not say what I initially wanted to. I wanted to say that we are taking names — “we” being the American people. We will remember who endorsed a man who took American politics lower than it has ever been, no doubt extracting promises of good behavior that later will be broken. Party unity will not wash. The GOP is going to lose, the only question is how — with some honor, or being deservedly mocked by history?

Richard Cohen writes for The Washington Post Writers Group.

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

Letter to the Editor

Sid Selvidge

Thanks for Bruce VanWyngarden’s Editor’s Note about Sid Selvidge (May 9th issue). I had just moved to Memphis in 1993, as well, and I suppose I had a chip on my shoulder, having spent the previous six years in Nashville hoping to become a rich and famous songwriter.

Fortunately, for me, most everyone here in Memphis was pretty forgiving and did their best to make me feel welcome. Rod Norcross, my partner at Rod & Hank’s, was already a local celebrity, as was our part-time helper, Steve Selvidge. Ward Archer came in regularly, and before long, I was playing violin with Ward and Brenda Patterson in Cooley’s House. And being at Rod & Hank’s allowed me to meet a boatload of celebrities and musical luminaries — local, national, and international.

Bruce’s letter reminded me of those days when I had the pleasure of playing music with Sid Selvidge and just hanging out and looking forward to lunchtime on Tuesdays. What a pleasure to hear Sid sing and enjoy his humor and to share some of that “Memphis vibe.”

Life was simpler then, or so it seems 20 years later. I was blessed to call Sid my friend and to have been a part of his music. I’ve also had the honor of playing with Di Anne Price (another Memphis icon gone and sorely missed) and have been part of the Boscos brunch with Joyce Cobb for the past seven years.

Who would have thought a transplanted Philly boy would have had such a wonderful life here in Memphis music? Sid taught me what Memphis music was all about, and I will always be grateful.

Hank Sable

Memphis

Rush is Right

It’s pretty sad that the Flyer doesn’t care about the lies of cartoonist Jeff Danzinger when he gutter snipes at Rush Limbaugh. Rush is one really smart guy and speaks the truth 99.9 percent of the time, which makes the Danzinger cartoon offensive to heavy people and to the high-attention folks that know the truth. Sadly, low-attention folks seem to be your readers.

Obama has his foot on this economy and he isn’t pulling away, so we won’t see a return to 1980-2000 good times, with everybody having a job. If the private sector is not unleashed by this administration, at some point it’s going to be real grief. Most of the media is scared to challenge this administration.

J.C. Mitchell

Memphis

Teaching to the Test

Data, according to Tennessee’s commissioner of education, Kevin Huffman, is the only thing we should consider in determining how and what our students are taught and how our children’s teachers are paid, hired, and fired. If he and other school reformers, like his ex-wife, Michelle Rhee, who heads up StudentsFirst, would quit trying to feather their own nest and be honest about the mounds of data from research through the years, they wouldn’t continue to promote paying teachers for test scores. 

If pay-for-performance were actually considered for its efficacy, like a drug study, it would have been halted long ago for the detrimental effects it has on the subjects involved in the study. Instead, Commissioner Huffman is trying to force a system that has repeatedly been shown since the 1950s by various major research studies not to work and can cause more harm than good. One of the largest and most recent was conducted by Vanderbilt University, and the data clearly demonstrated that, even if teachers are given large bonuses for raising student test scores, it just doesn’t work. Teachers are already working as hard as they can to help students succeed on testing.

Huffman and the state board of education (which contains no educators) are totally ignoring an overwhelming abundance of scientific research data that shows merit pay, aka incentive pay, pay for performance, differentiated pay for teachers, pay for test scores, etc. are ineffective and can actually cause harm. We’ve seen the curriculum narrowed to only those things tested and teaching to the test. We’ve seen cheating among some educators in order to gain monetary bonuses and avoid losing their jobs, and we’ve seen our teaching staffs demoralized and no great improvement in test scores. Isn’t it time that Huffman and company were held accountable for ignoring the data?

Lorrie Butler

Henderson, Tennessee

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter from the Editor: Entrails

While Flyer editor Bruce VanWyngarden is taking a much-deserved vacation in Peru, I skipped town myself last weekend and headed for the less exotic Hot Springs, Arkansas. As I was making my way west late Friday morning, a news report came on the radio announcing that a truck had spilled its load along I-40 near Conway, a mishap that would eventually cause a 20-mile backup. About an hour later, I heard another report on the wreck that included one small detail: pig entrails.

According to a story in Saturday’s Arkansas Democrat Gazette, an unidentified pedestrian had stepped onto the interstate to retrieve a bag. The driver of the pig-entrails-bearing tractor trailer stepped on the brakes and rear-ended a car. The truck jackknifed and then spilled its guts along 100 feet of highway that was nice and hot on this 90-degree-plus day.

Initially, I thought the part about the entrails was a hoax. Too fantastic. Perhaps, I thought, it was a wiseguy deejay having fun on a Friday.

I’m an avid listener of the radio, particularly AM talk radio, but I often find myself wondering if what’s being said is even true. Is there really a project afoot by the Chinese to build a non-government-regulated highway through the middle of the United States?

There’ve been some rumblings — and a lot of outraged squeaking from conservative talk-show hosts and bloggers — that the Democrats want to reintroduce the Fairness Doctrine, a long-defunct FCC regulation that would require balance when presenting controversial views. Last week, the House of Representatives voted to bar the FCC from using federal funds to impose the regulation. I see this less as a victory for freedom of expression and more as much ado about nothing. It’s hard to believe that the FCC is powerful enough to put a muzzle on someone like Rush Limbaugh while contending with the companies that make a ton of money from his show. And heaven forbid if the Fairness Doctrine were effective. Do we really want to make Limbaugh a free-speech martyr?

So back to those entrails — a true story and also fantastic. A backhoe was used to pick up the bigger pig parts and a chemical was used to make the blood congeal for easier scooping.

Susan Ellis

ellis@memphisflyer.com