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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