Later, Hater

Let's take a moment to consider the man that he was:

Rush Limbaugh was given the Medal of Freedom at the State of the Union last night. Here's a bit on who he is.

Viewer discretion is advised. pic.twitter.com/rWYbfnDThl

— Media Matters (@mmfa) February 5, 2020

Before anyone chides me for celebrating the man's death, let's get this stright, I'm deploring the work that he did. The man that his mourners are calling a pioneer of conservative talk radio was a divisive bigot, a misogynist, a homophobe, an man who literally screamed that a fellow human being was a slut for hours because she believed that birth control should be treated as any other necessary health care.

It may be true that he blazed a path for others, as Father Coughlin or Joe Pyne could have been said to have blazed one for himself--but I would argue that was never a good thing. He lowered the discourse and called it entertainment in the way an abuser knocks someone around and then says they were kidding. He fought against "political correctness"--a made-up term that means when people try to apply some standards of decency to people who have stepped out of bounds, by being hyper-political and seldom correct. 

Anyway, he normalized the kind of rhetoric that made Trump sound so reasonable--it could be said that generations of conservatives had received a Limbaughtomy and their frontal cortexes never worked quite right again. 

I'm not grave-dancing--he hasn't been buried yet. But in a small and nasty way, the tone of my blog probably honors him better than the megadittoes of people who should be asked which inflammatory statements they think furthered conservative thought and ideals, and that's more than he deserves.