![]() ![]() Apart from claiming that Obama was foreign-born, he accused the president of allowing ebola into the US in revenge for African slavery. The George W Bush years seemed to stretch him he said the US torture of prisoners in 2003 at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was “no worse than what happens at a Skull and Bones initiation”, perhaps forgetting that Bush and his father were both members of that Yale University secret society.īut just as Clinton had been a godsend, so Barack Obama seemed to inspire Limbaugh to new heights of partisan venom. Although charges were dropped, WBAL in Baltimore became the first station to ditch his show. In 2006 Limbaugh was arrested on his return from a trip to the Dominican Republic, where he had bought viagra with a false prescription. He was divorced from Marta in 2004, and for the next two years was linked romantically to the CNN anchor Daryn Kagan. He now lived in Palm Beach, Florida, where he produced his radio show from his “southern command” centre. The TV show ended in 1996, but on radio Limbaugh went from strength to strength. He told an interviewer he struggled with love because: “I am too much in love with myself.” He and Sixta had divorced in 1990, and in 1994 he married Marta Fitzgerald, an aerobics instructor. ![]() Limbaugh’s deeply personal anti-Clinton campaigning was so effective that when Gingrich and the Republicans re-took the House, they made him an honorary member of the Republican caucus. ![]() By 1990 he had five million listeners.Īnother godsend for his show was the election of Clinton in 1992, the year in which Limbaugh began a syndicated TV programme produced by the future Fox News boss Roger Ailes. This opened the floodgates to the likes of Limbaugh, and in 1988 he moved to WABC in New York, which became the flagship for a 56-station network broadcast of his show, scheduled, unusually for talk, at midday. In 1987, during the Ronald Reagan era, the Federal Communications Commission repealed the Fairness Doctrine, which had required users of the public airwaves to allow equal time if they broadcast political opinion. “Have you ever noticed how composite sketches of criminals always look like Jesse Jackson?” he asked his listeners.Īfter being fired from several other stations for he fetched up in 1983 at KRBK in Sacramento, California where he began to attach attention. He argued that the existence of gorillas disproved evolution, characterised both the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (2010) and the mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand (2019) as “false flag” operations organised by leftists, and accused the Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe of allowing the Charlottesville rioting in 2017 to worsen in order to boost his presidential ambitions. Limbaugh set the tone for the internet age of politics, calling women’s rights activists “feminazis”, referring to HIV/Aids as “Rock Hudson’s disease” and claiming “environmentalist wackos” were “a bunch of scientists organised around a political position”. His broadcasts, featuring attacks on opponents as purveyors of what we now call “fake news”, became the template for television’s Fox News, and at its peak played a huge part in Newt Gingrich’s “Republican Revolution” of 1994, which recaptured the House of Representatives from Bill Clinton’s Democrats. ![]() Rush Limbaugh, who has died aged 70 after suffering from cancer, virtually created the style of political “shock jock” radio that made him so influential. Rush Hudson Limbaugh III Born: January 12th, 1951 Died: February 17th, 2021 ![]()
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