[I started on this post about a month back.]
I have never really listened to talk radio, I have a tag on "media conservatives" which I consider a pejorative (sometimes I also refer to the "pop conservative" classification). I'm probably more familiar with Sean Hannity when for a while I followed FNC primetime several years back Occasionally Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin would make guest appearances on Hannity or other FNC programming. I did use to pay more attention to partisan politics in the earlier years of the blog.
To be honest, I wasn't ever really a Rush Limbaugh fan--in fact, I never listened to his daily broadcast, even once. How I came to know about Limbaugh was when I worked as a software developer contractor to ISSC, an IBM subsidiary in Irving, TX after leaving academia in a recession in the early 90's. We could plug into FM while we worked on our computer programming assignments; I'll never forget: this soft rock/adult contemporary station I listened to was suddenly changing forma to talk or whatever, and they left the air with the most bizarre way: playing the Eagles' "Hotel California" on an endless loop. Let me tell you, as much as I love the Eagles' music, "Hotel California" loses its charm after you've heard it 33 times in a row; I didn't intend to listen to it 33 times in a row; they never announced what they were doing, and I was sure someone would change the song any minute now. To this day, I cringe at hearing the opening notes to the song.
Now we APL programmer/analysts are a weird group of characters, and this quiet older geek mostly kept to himself, but every few minutes he would start chuckling hysterically. What the hell was he listening to? Rush Limbaugh. Now he, a pro-choice conservative, didn't always agree with Limbaugh on issues, but he always found him entertaining. Enough so that I started watching Rush's half-hour syndicated show (early evening in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area). I remember that he was battling with Madonna for #1 on the NYT bestseller with Madonna's sex book (with nude self photos). He made some sexually suggestive jokes about their positions on the chart (which I'm sure Madonna wouldn't have been amused by; I'm sure that politically they differed. (I don't know much of her politics, but conservative women don't usually publish personal nudes, and she supported Biden's election). It was sophomoric, the kind of thing you might hear in a high school locker room. Hi program introduced me to the popular Christmas music group Mannheim Steamroller. I don't know what his strategy was for the TV show--to expand his audience beyond his daily radio show, etc., but I still wasn't inclined to listen to his regular radio show or buy one of his books. However, when I moved to the Chicago area in 1993 for my first DBA gig, I wasn't motivated enough to find the local station broadcasting it, and Limbaugh dropped the show in 1996. I don't think he liked the time slots he was getting, etc.
I never came to conservatism through the Joe Six Pack nationalist/populist perspective like Rush Limbaugh. I started my conservatism through starting on my MBA at UH--and I never heard a single professor, economics or otherwise, express a single political opinion, and I was in business school. I had begun to lose my faith in Big Government;. There were things that always remained constant; I was a fiscal conservative (in fact, part of the reason I was attracted to Carter was his zero-based budgeting proposal), pro-life, pro-immigration even during my salad days. I was born an Air Force brat and worked for the Navy--but I was silently against Vietnam War and skeptical of our meddling abroad. I was the kind of conservative who watched Bill Buckley's Firing Line and read George Will's columns, who preferred the Wall Street Journal to Fox News Channel. Rush Limbaugh and I shared a common enemy: the Left. No doubt Rush would have little appreciation for my more conceptual approach as a conservative nerd of sorts. As an ally of sorts, I found him embarrassing at times: he backed NAFTA (good) but his arguments made me wince.
An exhaustive comparison/contrast on the issues is beyond the scope of this post. There's a part of me that loves the fact that one of my favorite free market economists, the recently passed Walter Williams, was an occasional guest host. But to give a few examples, I didn't like his support for the death penalty, American interventionist policy in the Gulf Region, war on drugs, and immigration restrictions.
Perhaps I should have realized that Rush's politically incorrect sense of humor particularly offended humorless Leftists; still, I couldn't believe the jubilation on Twitter at the news that Limbaugh had been diagnosed with late-stage cancer. It should have prepared me for the supersized uncivil reaction at his passing just a few months later. Leftists don't have a clue this kind of toxic incivility does not win friends and influence people. I may have disagreed with Rush on many things, but I respect his talent and connection with his audience and the grief experienced by family, friends and fans.
