Rush Limbaugh’s Service to Trump
Rush Limbaugh’s award of the Medal of Freedom is analogous to giving the Peabody Award (“ Distinguished achievement and meritorious public service by television and radio stations, networks, producing organizations, individuals, and the World Wide Web”) to Joseph Goebbels (Hitler’s Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda) for his journalistic service to Jews in 1939.
Limbaugh’s commitment to prevarication, pontificating on lies, and addiction to the twisted narrative has made him Trump’s gauleiter of the Fox Network. This bloviating gasbag has been responsible for creating a generation of sick people who believe, in their guts, everything that Trump says. He has created the misogynistic, xenophobic, homophobic, racist, and religiously-bigoted mold whence Trump’s base sprang.
And, while I certainly do not wish any harm on anyone, I nonetheless found there to be a certain karmic irony in giving the Medal of Freedom to someone whose lungs are now being ravaged by acute cancer, in the aftermath of using his lungs to fuel his evil rhetoric over the last few decades.
Limbaugh helped facilitate the rise of the late Roger Ailes, and likewise greased the skids for Glen Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and the numerous other hatemongers out there, filling our airwaves with their vile, socio-political putrescence.
Someday, we may have a President with the courage and integrity to withdraw the award of the Medal of Freedom from Limbaugh, on the ground that it was not earned and not given to someone truly committed to freedom.
