A long time ago, I began referring to Limbaugh as Rust. After a short time, another poster pointed out that while Limbaugh & now Don, call everyone else names, it was belittling to myself to call Limbaugh, Rust. So I stopped.

Here now is Limbaugh & the dying Trump campaign in their own words.

On Sept. 29, the day of the first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, Rush Limbaugh had a shocking story to share on his daily radio show. First he read the headline: “Biden’s Texas Political Director Implicated in Massive Mail-In Ballot Harvesting Scheme in Harris County.” To hear him tell it, the story was yet another blockbuster that the pro-Biden media was suppressing. “Now these are explosive charges in this story … and it’s the seriousness of the charge that matters,” “A Biden campaign operative in Texas is attempting to rig the 2020 election with the help of others and a massive ballot-harvesting scheme, according to two private investigators who testified under oath that they have video evidence, documentation, and witnesses to prove it. With the help of mass mail-in ballots, the illegal ballot harvesting operation could harvest 700,000 ballots.”

“They just resent the hell out of fair elections. They resent having to sit for them,” Limbaugh said. “And then they’re doing what they can to frighten you if you show up. You can either get COVID-19 or you can get beat up."

So what was Limbaugh talking about on Sept. 29? The story seemed to exist only on right-wing websites, but I eventually traced it back to a conservative site called NationalFile.com, “America’s New Choice for Real News.” (You might know National File as the outfit that published some vaguely naughty text messages sent by the Democratic candidate in North Carolina’s Senate race.) The article in question cited as its proof two affidavits submitted by private investigators, one of whom appears to be a right-wing voter-fraud obsessive, among other things. (The other, an ex-cop, was fired from the Houston Police Department in 2003 after ordering the arrest of 278 people in a Kmart parking lot as part of a botched drag-racing raid. Then again, who hasn’t botched a drag-racing raid or two in their lives?)

I recently revisited a February 1994 episode of Limbaugh’s radio show that had been simulcast on C-SPAN. The show was a lively three hours’ worth of flippant tribalism, insult comedy, and wacky-pack Radio Guy antics. Limbaugh needled feminists, the NAACP, and tree-huggers—“one of the most beautiful sounds you can hear in the world today is a tree being chopped down,” he proclaimed, over the sound of a buzzing chainsaw. Most of all, he took it to Bill and Hillary Clinton, who in his telling had plunged America into a “hostage crisis,” much like when Iran had seized those embassy workers in 1979. Limbaugh didn’t exactly argue against the Clinton health plan itself so much as all those who backed it. “Anybody who disagrees with any aspect of their plan is being attacked,” Limbaugh asserted. “They’re out there as though dissenting is some crime. ‘How dare these people run commercials against us. How dare these people disagree with us?’ ”

(Limbaugh) doesn’t quite sound like himself anymore. It’s not just because, like his peers in the far-right media, he can’t stop talking about deep-state corruption, and it’s not just because that elastic grin of a voice now sags a bit with age and illness. These days, Limbaugh’s show just isn’t very good, both by the standards of talk radio and by the heights he himself once set. Rather than a roaring iconoclast, he is a creaky, grumbling patriarch amid the din of his own un-shut-up-able progeny.

In 2020, The Rush Limbaugh Show is a stripped down version of the bells-and-whistles paleocon extravaganza of Limbaugh’s glory days. The sound effects are gone, as are the song parodies. He barely bothers to make jokes, even though wryness was central to his act for years. In late September, for example, Limbaugh turned his attentions to how he presumed liberals would respond to Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court. “They hate Christianity and Catholicism and they hate the belief system itself. They hate what Christianity and Catholicism provide the believers: something other than the state to believe in,” Limbaugh said, assuring his listeners that “the genuine disgust and hatred they have for religious people will not be contained.” This argument wasn’t particularly convincing, and it didn’t even try to be funny. It simply felt bitter and stale.

(But now the end is coming of both the Trump Campaign and Limbaugh)

Limbaugh might have had a choice at one point, a choice to stop being a crabbed, reactionary loudmouth and do something different. That choice is gone now. The conservative movement—the wackos and the reply guys, the pundits and the dissemblers, the Q disciples and the truthers—has barricaded itself within the echo chamber Rush built. They swap memes and theories in a big windowless room that admits no outside light, and they have grown so accustomed to the smell that they’re convinced it’s the outside world that stinks.

This is the right wing we’re stuck with, even if Trump loses, even after Limbaugh dies. And a Biden victory can only make it worse, for there is nothing conservative media like more than playing the victim. Spinning spurious grievances into bullshit extending beyond the horizon is the quintessential talk-radio trick. Limbaugh pioneered it. Trump perfected it. (Sadly) It’s a potent, brilliant idea that will outlive them both.

Courtesy the Slate

#3days