Rush Limbaugh and “Open Line Friday”
by Jim Boyer
I’ve been a Rush Limbaugh fan for almost three decades and I can’t count how many times I’ve tried to call on “Open Line Friday” to thank him for aiding my education. I’ve never gotten through to share my thoughts with him, so I’ll share them here because I know he follows this website.
It’s a story of progression and “ahh-HA” moments.
During a long ago Easter holiday visit ‘Gramps’ and I were having coffee while my 4 year old son toddled around the back yard searching for colored eggs. An older boy talking to him from his tree house in the yard next door caused him to come in and deliver an awkward parenting moment.
“That kid out there says there is no bunny and that ‘Grampa’ hid the eggs. Did you ‘Grampa’?”
Our jaws dropped, but eventually we summoned the courage to admit there was no Easter Bunny. Our convoluted admission probably made no sense to a four year old, but he seemed satisfied and headed back out to resume his hunt.
Within seconds we heard the door open again. He appeared with a solemn look on his face and asked, “What about Santa?”
Years later it was my turn to think critically. In the late 80s I was working in the SF Bay area and typically had the radio on the dominant AM station of the times. KGO-AM featured a confrontational liberal host named Ronn Owens from 9 – noon. I didn’t realize his political ardor at the time because what he had to say fit just fine with my college indoctrination. If I recall, he mixed political commentary with everything from book reviews to casual conversation and it was just background noise to me. But one day things changed.
Owens took a week vacation and was substituted for by an unheard of guy named Rush Limbaugh. I don’t remember anything from Limbaugh hitting me as particularly startling or offensive. Maybe some callers were a little argumentative but nothing stood out; until the following week when Owens returned.
I was startled to hear callers complaining about the abuses inflicted upon them by the man who would come to change my politics forever. Caller after caller had a specific bitch to share with Owens about some far out statement his substitute had made and how it disgraced the station, the sponsors and the listeners. I was confused and didn’t understand why I didn’t understand. I had been listening and following but now, like my son learning about the Easter Bunny, I began to test myself and the beliefs I held.
Subsequently, Rush Limbaugh’s insight and treatment of topical issues informed me and caused me to think through what I was hearing and reading. He never fails to pull back the curtain and predict what liberals will do before they even do it. His predictions are frequently followed by his signature tag line; “Don’t doubt me!”
Once while hearing a monologue on “a woman’s right to choose”, I thought back to the epidemic of babies born deformed because their mothers had taken the drug thalidomide during their pregnancies. At the time I agreed with millions of Americans who believed it is ultimately a woman’s right to choose. But, abortion was evolving into a lifestyle choice and now I pondered the reasoning behind the landmark decision of Roe.
It had been a time of social revolution when the democrat party was being taken over by a progressive liberal philosophy that I now think many ‘blue dogs’ didn’t see happening. Could the liberals that took over the democrat party have been thinking so far ahead that the cultural issues of the day were just stepping stones to future undermining of the culture?
I wondered.
Could it be that the progressives steering the party had always been thinking forward to the day when young girls could have abortions arranged at school without parental involvement? It hit me that “the right to choose” was a damn clever slogan that had locked in a huge block of voters forever. Subsequently I recognized that the democrat party is often fueled by slogans rather than rational debate or responsible issues; “Coexist”, “Love trumps Hate”, “Hope and Change”.
One thing led to another on my path to awareness.
Affirmative Action to end discrimination sounded good, but were its sponsors thinking ahead to a time of reverse discrimination? Could the idea of bi-lingual education have been thought up by people wanting to let students matriculate through K-12 without learning the language that would let them compete and succeed in America, thus dooming them to field work and housekeeping forever? If not, why persist in these failing programs?
In college I had eagerly helped organize the first Earth Day event on my campus. What could say social responsibility better than cleaning the environment? I even campaigned in support of the EPA. Never did I envision it leading to an unaccountable agency taking people’s property away or jailing them for creating a duck pond or collecting rain water to nourish their gardens. Do these things just evolve, or are these ‘slippery slopes’ the hidden objective for progressives?
Currently, I see the idea of opening our borders and letting anyone vote as a move towards social upheaval and civic chaos. Yet the idea of all those future democrat voters is intoxicating to 100% of the liberal left, isn’t it?
These days I move a little slower and look at things a little deeper searching for a motive. Astonished, I listen to the people that say we have to control speech so as not to offend someone and that anyone who doesn’t vote blindly for all democrats is a woman hating Nazi racist.
Today I wonder how so many members of the generation that demanded we “Question Authority” could now demand that we all submit to authority without question. I wonder about a lot of things.
Thanks, Rush.
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It is interesting how Rush says everyone remembers where they were the first time they hear his show. I remember that day in the late 80s like it was yesterday and was truly shocked at hearing someone publicly articulate my beliefs.
It’s the magnificent camaraderie and spirit of us….It’s the wounded soldier who goes AWOL from the hospital and returns to his band of brothers – and sisters. It is the inconvenience, discomfort, expense,- even danger – of being there when history is made. It is being ALIVE ! Don’t miss it folks. October 30 in Vegas………
I have a Rush story…in early August 2001 I was on lunch break while framing a house with my Uncle in East Texas. Sweaty dirty and thankfully eating my sandwich and lunch. And Rush was on a beat up old radio we had blaring for company…and Rush was going over how the Federal Authorities were planning for future terrorist attacks..and specifically mentioned flying planes into buildings. I kid you not.
Then about a month later on September 11th on the face of things it looks like that happened.
Surrounding the 9/11 analysis, of which there are beaucoup YouTube videos, every now and again some one will say that it was “beyond imagination” or “no one thought of the possibility” of flying planes into buildings. But there it was right on a Rush Limbaugh show a month before.
A good Rush story Boyd, and I don’t doubt it one bit. It’s likely that he had heard some rumblings from the intelligence community,like the middle easterners who were learning to fly jetliners but didn’t seem to have much interest in learning how to land ! Normalcy bias can be so very strong. How many Germans in 1925 – one of the most civilized and educated countries in the world – could have imagined what their country would be like in 1935 ? View Burt Lancaster as Judge Emil Jannings for a moving testament. I credit Limbaugh for his gadfly role, abrasive as he is. When and where, however, will the rubber hit the road ? The trial starts on Oct. 30, in Vegas.
That is indeed the question. I went to Glenn Beck’s 8/28 “Restoring Honor” rally in Washington, D.C. where estimates of 500,000 people attended. In the chatroom of a subsequent Randy Mack show on the old “You Have Tread On Me” webcast Randy pointed out, “What if everybody who spent money going there instead had spent that money on local CoS’s and Militias?”
It was a just rebuke.
All of you who have endured with all it takes to stand through this endless charade of a trial are GREAT AMERICANS!
One of the things Rush (and many of his fans) take pleasure in is how he very often predicts in advance what liberals will do an say in reaction to an event taking place. It is typical for him to predict liberal media responses to an incident and then a week later play a montage of a dozen or more of them doing exactly as he said.
It’s hard to accept your opinion of a program you say you don’t listen to.
Jim :Admittedly, I haven’t listened to Limbaugh for years, but then I don’t listen to any radio. Perhaps he’s a bit more reasoned and less hyperbolic now. My exposure to him was in working situations where the boss habitually played his show. I guess if Limbaugh can get people waking up and thinking – and asking questions – I can’t complain, but I still feel that many of the Middle Americans – the very people we wish to reach and mobilize – will be put off by his antics. For those who are not satisfied with mere sound bytes and seek a creditable basis for their opinions, there are many sources available. For a grounding in the origins of our Republic I could suggest Professor Joanne Freeman’s “Yale Freeman Lectures” on you-tube. Coming to the present day, the redoubtable Ms Hall – Krisanne – embodies a passion for liberty and a great erudition.The untimely death of Mike Vanderbeogh was a great loss to us, but his dead aim darts are still available. Coming to NOW, TODAY…Christopher Yingling of the Pennsylvania Lightfoot Militia is quite articulate. Might I be forgiven if I am partial to the man I was with at Bundy Ranch and Malhure ? Who I was tried in Federal court with in Portland ? Who now has the Federal hacks looking over their shoulders in Vegas ? Ammon is a man in full, a man to believe in. He is emerging as one of the great leaders of our time.
Although I’m a conservative by nature, I’ve never been keen on Limbaugh’s harsh tone of voice and Yahoo antics. I can’t hack listening to him. It would seem that a cool informed determination is more powerful than Limbaugh’s style of loudmouth grandstanding.