Saying Rush Limbaugh’s comments of telling people not to donate to the people of Haiti is indefensible, just doesn’t seem to cover what he did. The adjective indefensible doesn’t seem to carry the power of what is needed to describe his statements. I was thinking words more inline with the magnitude of what he said would be words like evil, depraved, malevolent or frigorific rape of morality.

Rush is trying to make the excuse that he wasn’t saying not to donate, but not to donate to the government. That just doesn’t hold water. He’s trying to say that he wants us to donate in some other way. Just which way should that be, Rush? When we donated through the private sector the people of Haiti were being stiffed by Visa and MasterCard skimming money off the top. Maybe you should just come clean, admit that your statements were inexcusable and make a point to at least try to think before you open your big mouth again.

Being from the right, I have long been upset with Rush. It seems every time I defend this guy to the left, he ups the ante and makes me realize, the man does not speak for my values or the values of the sensible right. He will always have his Kool-aid crowd and I will always get e-mails blasting me when I speak critical of him. However, at some point, even the Kool-aid crowd must put down their glass pitcher and sober up to this man’s lack of common sense and humanity.

The truth is hundreds of millions of dollars ago, this man left us. He has long since been the man he was, when we first fell in love with him. Money changes people and that kind of money has changed the very roots of who this man is and where he came from. The Rush Limbaugh who was bankrupt working for twenty thousand a year is not the same person who stands before us today.

rushass2I think the death of William F. Buckley Jr. had a lot to do with his change as well. When Buckley was alive he was more like a father figure to Rush and Rush wanted to please him and cared about his approval. A single look from Buckley could stop Rush in his tracks when he would go too far. That parental eye faded into eternity and no one was left to rein Rush in.

If you look at the career of Rush Limbaugh and compare his behavior to when Bill was alive with after he was gone, you will see a huge gulf. Rush took Buckley’s Conservatism and brought it to a dark place. As elite as Buckley was, the man still held on to the common man. He once said, “I profoundly believe it takes a lot of practice to become a moral slob.” It seems Rush has had a lot of practice since his death.

Buckley said, “I would rather be governed by the first 2000 names in the Boston phone book than by the 2000 members of the faculty of Harvard University” and he meant it. He somehow was able to relate to the common man and listening to Rush since his death has been anything but.

This is very similar to when Gus D’Amato died and Mike Tyson was unleashed on the world with no father figure to keep him in line. The comparisons are eerie to this day. Tyson never got his act together and I fear Rush won’t either.

The people in Haiti have received a blow from Mother Earth on a scales not seen in this hemisphere in hundreds of years, yet Rush turns this into some political ping pong. Now we cannot ignore there will always be politics in something like this, but that is something that goes more unspoken, then aired across the airwaves to twenty million people.

I would rather believe in my heart, the air space that was closed down because too many relief planes were circling the capital of Haiti and there was no room on the tarmac more represents Buckley’s form of conservatism, than Rush’s comments do. I believe in my heart that those planes full of supplies represent my morality and that the words of Rush Limbaugh represent the morality of a moral slob.

C. Rich

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