1 bestseller with his satirical 1996 book, Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations. Saturday Night Live comedian Al Franken, a future U.S. “What I can comment on is the fact that all decent folks can agree that the remarks that were made don’t have any place in the public discourse.”īy then, Limbaugh had long been a popular punching bag for Democrats and liberals of every stripe. “I don’t know what’s in Rush Limbaugh’s heart, so I’m not going to comment on the sincerity of his apology,” Obama acidly told the White House press corps after he phoned Fluke to offer his moral support. Shortly thereafter, Cobb mysteriously burned down.’”ĭuring the 2008 presidential campaign, Limbaugh aired a parody of “Puff the Magic Dragon”-sung by a white man doing an Al Sharpton impersonation-titled “Barack the Magic Negro.” In March 2012, Obama exacted revenge of sorts when Limbaugh’s advertisers deserted his syndicated radio show en masse-and he was forced to issue a highly uncharacteristic apology-after he called Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute” for testifying to a House committee in favor of mandatory birth control services as part of the Affordable Care Act. ‘An informal game was arranged between Central and Cobb High,’ says historian Frank Nickell. The 1953 team was expected to be a powerhouse, but word got around that the kids from Cobb were even better. Board of Education decision, the city built its white students a brand new school, Central High, while Black students continued to attend the aging Cobb High School.Īs Limbaugh biographer Ze’ev Chafets wrote, “Cape Girardeau took its high school basketball very seriously and sometimes contended for the state title. Supreme Court outlawed separate public schools for white and black students in the landmark Brown vs. Cape Girardeau in the ’50s was hardly a bastion of civil rights or racial equality and enlightenment. “Keep up the good work.”īill Clinton, the 42nd president, and Barack Obama, the 44th, regularly grumbled about Limbaugh’s savage, often satirical-and, in Obama’s case, racist-critiques. “I know the liberals call you ‘the most dangerous man in America,’ but don’t worry about it, they used to say the same thing about me,” the 40th president wrote to Limbaugh in December 1992. presidents, depending on their party affiliation, and treasured a fan letter from his hero, Ronald Reagan. He either befriended or tormented five U.S. Yet in his final two decades of life, he managed to dominate conservative talk radio even after near-total deafness-somewhat remediated by a cochlear implant-required him to hire a former court reporter to sit in his Palm Beach control room and instantly transcribe listener phone calls so he could converse in real time on the air.īorn Rush Hudson Limbaugh III into a distinguished and rabidly Republican family of judges and lawyers in the nearly all-white southeast Missouri town on the Illinois border, he ultimately commanded an adoring national audience of as many as 20 million listeners-“dittoheads” in Limbaugh-speak-and became by some accounts (especially from his Democratic detractors) the de facto leader of the GOP and a right-wing media ecosystem built on demonizing its opponents, especially feminists and people of color. Limbaugh-whose wife Kathryn confirmed on Wednesday that he died at 70 after a yearlong and very public battle against lung cancer-struggled through personal adversity, including obesity, four rocky marriages, and an addiction to opioid painkillers that earned him humiliating publicity and a criminal charge (later dropped after the completion of court-ordered therapy) of felony prescription fraud. Rush Limbaugh was a college dropout when he began his combustible radio career, repeatedly losing gigs as a deejay and news-talk host he spent much of 1974 jobless and living in his parents’ basement in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.Īlmost five decades later, Limbaugh kept a fleet of black luxury sedans in his garage, including a $450,000 Maybach 57S, traveled on his private Gulfstream 550 jet, and owned a fabulous oceanfront Palm Beach estate befitting America’s biggest and most politically influential AM radio star-and surely among the richest-who ever mastered the medium.
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