Gotta say, when I first heard Rush, I was very much taken with him. I'm guessing it was around 1990 and he was still broadcasting out of New York. He was funny. He was dead-on right about a lot of the things the Democrats were doing back then. I mean, you had donors buying pallets of Jim Wright's books to get around campaign finance laws and just all kinds of crazy stuff. Rush called them all out and it was entertaining. I listened every day. I bought his books. I watched his videos.
When he moved to Florida, I think he got lazy. It wasn't anywhere near as creative or engaging. It was just angry and ill-informed and sometimes just stupid. All he was doing was reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page to his listeners and vamping on it. I stopped listening then.
And then, in his later years, he was like Trump in a lot of ways. He had a collection of stock phrases -- harmless little fuzzball, half my brain tied behind my back, America's Truth Detector, etc. -- that he would click together to make a broadcast out of. Three hours a day of that, ever day. You always knew exactly where he was going to go before he even came on the air. At the end, he was just chasing the audience. It was all nuts.
Now he's been replaced by even worse people: Hannity (who used to talk about how proud he was to be #2 behind Rush), Levin, Beck, Hewitt, and all the rest. There's such a huge market out there for that stuff that it just keeps going and getting bigger and weirder and more conspiratorial.
This actually happened when I heard Rush on WABC in NY. This would have been within the first couple of years after the station stopped playing Top 40.
A listener was going on and on about "the blacks". Rush actually cut the guy short, and told him that he had no idea what life was like for a black man in the US. He even called the guy "sir" in that typically Rush way where "sir" can actually mean "you're an idiot".
Ah, Rush, the grandfather of the dis-information industry. Wherever he is resting, may it not be in peace.
Gotta say, when I first heard Rush, I was very much taken with him. I'm guessing it was around 1990 and he was still broadcasting out of New York. He was funny. He was dead-on right about a lot of the things the Democrats were doing back then. I mean, you had donors buying pallets of Jim Wright's books to get around campaign finance laws and just all kinds of crazy stuff. Rush called them all out and it was entertaining. I listened every day. I bought his books. I watched his videos.
When he moved to Florida, I think he got lazy. It wasn't anywhere near as creative or engaging. It was just angry and ill-informed and sometimes just stupid. All he was doing was reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page to his listeners and vamping on it. I stopped listening then.
And then, in his later years, he was like Trump in a lot of ways. He had a collection of stock phrases -- harmless little fuzzball, half my brain tied behind my back, America's Truth Detector, etc. -- that he would click together to make a broadcast out of. Three hours a day of that, ever day. You always knew exactly where he was going to go before he even came on the air. At the end, he was just chasing the audience. It was all nuts.
Now he's been replaced by even worse people: Hannity (who used to talk about how proud he was to be #2 behind Rush), Levin, Beck, Hewitt, and all the rest. There's such a huge market out there for that stuff that it just keeps going and getting bigger and weirder and more conspiratorial.
This actually happened when I heard Rush on WABC in NY. This would have been within the first couple of years after the station stopped playing Top 40.
A listener was going on and on about "the blacks". Rush actually cut the guy short, and told him that he had no idea what life was like for a black man in the US. He even called the guy "sir" in that typically Rush way where "sir" can actually mean "you're an idiot".