Limbaugh has advanced cancer

[billhammond]

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Conservative radio host and Republican kingmaker Rush Limbaugh said he’s been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer.

Addressing listeners on his program Monday, Limbaugh said will take some days off for further medical tests and to determine treatment.

Limbaugh called himself the “mayor of Realville” in announcing his illness. He’d been experiencing shortness of breath that he initially thought might be heart-related but turned out to be a lung cancer.

“It’s shocking to the industry, and it should be shocking to the political establishment,” said Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers magazine, the trade industry publication for talk radio.

Limbaugh’s announcement come at a tumultuous political time, as the conclusion of President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial nears.

He started his first national radio show in 1988 from New York, later relocating to Palm Beach, Florida.

The hyper-partisan broadcaster has dominated talk radio with a raucous, liberal-bashing style that made him one of the most influential voices of American right-wing politics and inspired other conservative broadcasters including Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly.

“Rush you are in our prayers,” Beck tweeted. "We live in a time of modern miracles. Millions are praying you find one.”

On his show, Limbaugh said he intends to work as much as possible. He also said he had focused more “intensely” in the past two weeks on what he called his “deeply personal relationship" with God.

The media figure's endorsement and friendship is a conservative political treasure. His idol, Ronald Reagan, wrote a letter that Limbaugh read on the air in December 1992 and which sealed his reputation among conservatives: “You’ve become the number one voice for conservatism in our country,” Reagan wrote.

Two years later, Limbaugh would be so widely credited as key to Republicans’ takeover of Congress for the first time in 40 years, he was deemed an honorary member of the new class.

Limbaugh has frequently been accused of hate-filled speech, including bigotry and blatant racism through his comments and sketches such as "Barack the Magic Negro," a song featured on his show that said Obama "makes guilty whites feel good" and that the politician is “black, but not authentically.”

[fauxmaha]

Wow!

It's the nature of life that the people you encounter through the media age, and suffer the indignities of age, like the rest of us, but somehow being reminded that he is 69 years old and now with cancer feels surprising.

I have to say, that last paragraph from the AP is really out of line. Calling it "blatant racism" is not only a gross smear, and under the circumstances, totally un-called for, it is simply (as a matter of fact) incorrect.

The "Magic Negro" stuff from Limbaugh was him lampooning the LA Times, who published the following back in 2007. I took Limbaugh's point to be the asymmetry with which charges of racism are made. The AP, it would seem, made his point for him again, 13 years after the fact.

Obama the ‘Magic Negro’

By DAVID EHRENSTEIN

MARCH 19, 2007

AS EVERY CARBON-BASED life form on this planet surely knows, Barack Obama, the junior Democratic senator from Illinois, is running for president. Since making his announcement, there has been no end of commentary about him in all quarters — musing over his charisma and the prospect he offers of being the first African American to be elected to the White House.



But it’s clear that Obama also is running for an equally important unelected office, in the province of the popular imagination — the “Magic Negro.”



The Magic Negro is a figure of postmodern folk culture, coined by snarky 20th century sociologists, to explain a cultural figure who emerged in the wake of Brown vs. Board of Education. “He has no past, he simply appears one day to help the white protagonist,” reads the description on Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_Negro .



He’s there to assuage white “guilt” (i.e., the minimal discomfort they feel) over the role of slavery and racial segregation in American history, while replacing stereotypes of a dangerous, highly sexualized black man with a benign figure for whom interracial sexual congress holds no interest.



As might be expected, this figure is chiefly cinematic — embodied by such noted performers as Sidney Poitier, Morgan Freeman, Scatman Crothers, Michael Clarke Duncan, Will Smith and, most recently, Don Cheadle. And that’s not to mention a certain basketball player whose very nickname is “Magic.”



Poitier really poured on the “magic” in “Lilies of the Field” (for which he won a best actor Oscar) and “To Sir, With Love” (which, along with “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” made him a No. 1 box-office attraction). In these films, Poitier triumphs through yeoman service to his white benefactors. “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” is particularly striking in this regard, as it posits miscegenation without evoking sex. (Talk about magic!)



The same can’t quite be said of Freeman in “Driving Miss Daisy,” “Seven” and the seemingly endless series of films in which he plays ersatz paterfamilias to a white woman bedeviled by a serial killer. But at least he survives, unlike Crothers in “The Shining,” in which psychic premonitions inspire him to rescue a white family he barely knows and get killed for his trouble. This heart-tug trope is parodied in Gus Van Sant’s “Elephant.” The film’s sole black student at a Columbine-like high school arrives in the midst of a slaughter, helps a girl escape and is immediately gunned down. See what helping the white man gets you?



And what does the white man get out of the bargain? That’s a question asked by John Guare in “Six Degrees of Separation,” his brilliant retelling of the true saga of David Hampton — a young, personable gay con man who in the 1980s passed himself off as the son of none other than the real Sidney Poitier. Though he started small, using the ruse to get into Studio 54, Hampton discovered that countless gullible, well-heeled New Yorkers, vulnerable to the Magic Negro myth, were only too eager to believe in his baroque fantasy. (One of the few who wasn’t fooled was Andy Warhol, who was astonished his underlings believed Hampton’s whoppers. Clearly Warhol had no need for the accouterment of interracial “goodwill.”)



But the same can’t be said of most white Americans, whose desire for a noble, healing Negro hasn’t faded. That’s where Obama comes in: as Poitier’s “real” fake son.



The senator’s famously stem-winding stump speeches have been drawing huge crowds to hear him talk of uniting rather than dividing. A praiseworthy goal. Consequently, even the mild criticisms thrown his way have been waved away, “magically.” He used to smoke, but now he doesn’t; he racked up a bunch of delinquent parking tickets, but he paid them all back with an apology. And hey, is looking good in a bathing suit a bad thing?



The only mud that momentarily stuck was criticism (white and black alike) concerning Obama’s alleged “inauthenticty,” as compared to such sterling examples of “genuine” blackness as Al Sharpton and Snoop Dogg. Speaking as an African American whose last name has led to his racial “credentials” being challenged — often several times a day — I know how pesky this sort of thing can be.



Obama’s fame right now has little to do with his political record or what he’s written in his two (count ‘em) books, or even what he’s actually said in those stem-winders. It’s the way he’s said it that counts the most. It’s his manner, which, as presidential hopeful Sen. Joe Biden ham-fistedly reminded us, is “articulate.” His tone is always genial, his voice warm and unthreatening, and he hasn’t called his opponents names (despite being baited by the media).



Like a comic-book superhero, Obama is there to help, out of the sheer goodness of a heart we need not know or understand. For as with all Magic Negroes, the less real he seems, the more desirable he becomes. If he were real, white America couldn’t project all its fantasies of curative black benevolence on him.

[billhammond]

I agree, Jeff -- I hated that last graf.

[Marshall]

Feb 3, 2020 17:14:26 GMT -5 billhammond said:

I agree, Jeff -- I hated that last graf.

Yeah, It was inappropriate for a major media to say that out right. They could have quoted somebody specific if they wanted to include that angle. And then include a pro Rush quote.

But in the larger picture, Rush never pulled any punches on his targets, and quite often hit well below the belt. So, what goes around comes around, you might say. I won't ever mourn for Rush's injured ego. But still, nobody deserves the big C. I hope on a personal level he deals successfully with his health issues.

[Village Idiot]

I wouldn't wish this on anybody I don't like

[Cornflake]

I agree, Todd. Political differences are only that...trivial in the scheme of things.

[John B]

"Limbaugh has frequently been accused of hate-filled speech, including bigotry and blatant racism" is how I read the sentence - with the sentence then continuing on to cite examples of when he has been accused. I did not read the sentence to say he was blatantly racist.

I think the sentence was poorly written. The author was trying to cram too much shit into one sentence, when two or three shorter sentences would have been clearer.

[millring]

It isn't the grammar that's the problem. It's the facts (as Jeff demonstrated).

That's AP. That's NEWS. That's why Iowa last night. That's why Trump.

We are broken.

[brucemacneill]

Never listened to him and only heard disparaging remarks about him but I wish him well. Sorry for anyone who gets this diagnosis.

[Marshall]

And now he has a Medal of Freedom.

[patrick]

Feb 3, 2020 17:01:55 GMT -5 fauxmaha said:

Wow!

It's the nature of life that the people you encounter through the media age, and suffer the indignities of age, like the rest of us, but somehow being reminded that he is 69 years old and now with cancer feels surprising.

I have to say, that last paragraph from the AP is really out of line. Calling it "blatant racism" is not only a gross smear, and under the circumstances, totally un-called for, it is simply (as a matter of fact) incorrect.

The "Magic Negro" stuff from Limbaugh was him lampooning the LA Times, who published the following back in 2007. I took Limbaugh's point to be the asymmetry with which charges of racism are made. The AP, it would seem, made his point for him again, 13 years after the fact.

Obama the ‘Magic Negro’

By DAVID EHRENSTEIN

MARCH 19, 2007

Limbaugh wasn't lampooning the LA Times. The LA Times published an editorial by a conservative writer who generated the "Magic Negro" meme. (Yes, contrary to the paranoid fever dreams of conservatives, they do get guest editorials in "liberal" newspapers.) Then Limbaugh amplified and expanded on the racist meme. This is how the right wing echo chamber works.

In March 2007, Ehrenstein wrote an opinion piece on Barack Obama, in which he used the archetype of the magical negro to describe Obama, who was then an Illinois senator and candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination for president. The title of the piece, "Obama the 'Magic Negro'", was later used in a musical parody called Barack the Magic Negro by conservative satirist Paul Shanklin. This piece of music caused some controversy in late December, 2008, when compact discs featuring the song were distributed by Tennessee political activist Chip Saltsman (a candidate for chairman of the Republican National Committee) to various Republican Party activists as Christmas gifts. Part of Saltsman's response to the controversy was that the song was actually a parody of Ehrenstein's "irresponsible" column itself, rather than a parody of Obama. Ehrenstein responded to the controversy in late December stating, "As everyone knows Whites feel no guilt about America's racist history whatsoever. All they care about is the appearance of politesse — the slimy veneer of 'good manners.' Clearly the Republican party (racist to its very core) is 'split' over what to do in the wake of having lost so much political capital. Chip and his ilk want to continue making childish attacks. Others in the party seek to turn chicken shit into chicken salad by claiming Obama is the second coming of Ronald Reagan."[5]

(Bolding mine)

So a conservative opinionator first tagged Obama as the "magical negro," then a conservative radio host echoed the magical negro meme through his show on right wing radio. Yeah, that's racist.

Also, Limbaugh pretended to be surprised at getting the Medal of Freedom, but I knew that was going to happen this afternoon, it was widely reported in the media.





Just out of curiosity, Limbaugh had two things stuck on his head, both sides, that look kinda like hearing aids, but I've never seen anything like that. Any opinions?

[Village Idiot]

Cochlear implants.

www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/cochlear-implants

[Dub]

I’m really sorry to learn that anyone has advanced lung cancer and Rush is no exception. My late brother went through that and I don’t wish it on anyone.

[Deleted]

My mother died from lung cancer, so I'll offer the disclaimer that it is not a disease to be wished on anyone.

The news of Limbaugh, though, is evidence that karma probably exists. He's long denied smoking causes cancer. He made fun of Michael J. Fox's illness and when Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Ted Kennedy were diagnosed with cancer, he made sport of them, too. He's had all these years in broadcasting as a supposed "conservative intellectuual" but nobody can point to a single idea, concept or initiative that he ever came up with that made its way into law, even with years of a Republican-controlled Congress or a Republican in the White House. His "ideas," such as they are, have never made a mark in any state legislature or in any city council, for that matter. Once you got past the meanness, bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, lack of empathy and outright cruelty, he had no ideas about how society should govern itself.

He didn't have to have any ideas, though. He made his millions doing exactly what his advertisers wanted him to do: criticize government, public education and anything hinting at socialized medicine at every turn. THAT is what they paid him millions to do, so that's what he did. If liberalism paid, he would've been liberal. But if you're a liberal talk-radio host, your target more often than not is large multi-national corporations -- the outfits that are busting unions, sending jobs overseas, keeping wages low, hiding assets, paying zero taxes, polluting the environment, etc. They also tend to be the advertisers. Limbaugh knew who buttered his bread.

Awarding him the Medal of Freedom cheapens the award. There was an actual Tuskegee Airman in the audience. Where's his Medal of Freedom? Here's a guy who enlisted in the military at a time when it was segregated and not very friendly to blacks, and he persevered to become a fighter pilot. He fought for a country that viewed him as a second-class citizen, and he fought with distinction and honor. Where's his Medal of Freedom? Why give it to the guy who -- like Trump -- avoided the draft through questionable medical excuses?

Giving the award to Limbaugh was cheap political theater, and Trump's base will eat it up. Trump and Limbaugh have spent their lives laughing at the base. Someday, the base will see that.

I'm wondering if this experience will cause Limbaugh to change any of his opinions. I doubt it. I doubt he's ever changed a tire, a diaper or an opinion. He hasn't spread any happiness or goodwill. All he's spread is hate, mistrust and fear, all delivered with a good dose of hypocrisy. The cochlear implants he has? Hearing loss is one of the side effects of years of oxycodone abuse. (I'm sure we all remember his OxyContin escapade, right?) Do you think he ever expressed a bit of empathy for people addicted to drugs who didn't have millions to buy their way out of legal trouble or buy a spot in rehab?

That would be a hard "No."

[fauxmaha]

Feb 4, 2020 23:48:04 GMT -5 patrick said:

Limbaugh wasn't lampooning the LA Times. The LA Times published an editorial by a conservative writer who generated the "Magic Negro" meme. (Yes, contrary to the paranoid fever dreams of conservatives, they do get guest editorials in "liberal" newspapers.) Then Limbaugh amplified and expanded on the racist meme. This is how the right wing echo chamber works.

Speaking of fever dreams, you want to do a little digging into David Ehrenstein, pop a few aspirin, then get back to us?

One suspects there is in fact an echo chamber at work here. The one that fooled you into characterizing a lifetime LGBTQ advocate with an unbroken, 16+ year string of contributions to ActBlue and various democratic candidates as a "conservative".

[aquaduct]

Feb 5, 2020 7:23:24 GMT -5 @dhanners55 said:

Awarding him the Medal of Freedom cheapens the award. There was an actual Tuskegee Airman in the audience. Where's his Medal of Freedom? Here's a guy who enlisted in the military at a time when it was segregated and not very friendly to blacks, and he persevered to become a fighter pilot. He fought for a country that viewed him as a second-class citizen, and he fought with distinction and honor. Where's his Medal of Freedom? Why give it to the guy who -- like Trump -- avoided the draft through questionable medical excuses?

He's military. I think Trump made him a honorary General or something yesterday.

There's always that.

[Marshall]

Yeah, Trump made him a General. And the Medal of Freedom is for exemplary non-military service to the country.

That being said, Rush does not deserve it. I thought Trump was doing well in his speech until he did the Rush thing.

[aquaduct]

Feb 5, 2020 9:02:07 GMT -5 Marshall said:

Yeah, Trump made him a General. And the Medal of Freedom is for exemplary non-military service to the country.

That being said, Rush does not deserve it. I thought Trump was doing well in his speech until he did the Rush thing.

Speaking of fever dreams....

January Jobs

Been a really bad couple of days to be a Democrat.

[casualplayerpaul]

Feb 3, 2020 17:01:55 GMT -5 fauxmaha said:

Wow!

It's the nature of life that the people you encounter through the media age, and suffer the indignities of age, like the rest of us, but somehow being reminded that he is 69 years old and now with cancer feels surprising.

I have to say, that last paragraph from the AP is really out of line. Calling it "blatant racism" is not only a gross smear, and under the circumstances, totally un-called for, it is simply (as a matter of fact) incorrect.

The "Magic Negro" stuff from Limbaugh was him lampooning the LA Times, who published the following back in 2007. I took Limbaugh's point to be the asymmetry with which charges of racism are made. The AP, it would seem, made his point for him again, 13 years after the fact.

Obama the ‘Magic Negro’

By DAVID EHRENSTEIN

MARCH 19, 2007

AS EVERY CARBON-BASED life form on this planet surely knows, Barack Obama, the junior Democratic senator from Illinois, is running for president. Since making his announcement, there has been no end of commentary about him in all quarters — musing over his charisma and the prospect he offers of being the first African American to be elected to the White House.



But it’s clear that Obama also is running for an equally important unelected office, in the province of the popular imagination — the “Magic Negro.”



The Magic Negro is a figure of postmodern folk culture, coined by snarky 20th century sociologists, to explain a cultural figure who emerged in the wake of Brown vs. Board of Education. “He has no past, he simply appears one day to help the white protagonist,” reads the description on Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_Negro .



He’s there to assuage white “guilt” (i.e., the minimal discomfort they feel) over the role of slavery and racial segregation in American history, while replacing stereotypes of a dangerous, highly sexualized black man with a benign figure for whom interracial sexual congress holds no interest.



As might be expected, this figure is chiefly cinematic — embodied by such noted performers as Sidney Poitier, Morgan Freeman, Scatman Crothers, Michael Clarke Duncan, Will Smith and, most recently, Don Cheadle. And that’s not to mention a certain basketball player whose very nickname is “Magic.”



Poitier really poured on the “magic” in “Lilies of the Field” (for which he won a best actor Oscar) and “To Sir, With Love” (which, along with “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” made him a No. 1 box-office attraction). In these films, Poitier triumphs through yeoman service to his white benefactors. “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” is particularly striking in this regard, as it posits miscegenation without evoking sex. (Talk about magic!)



The same can’t quite be said of Freeman in “Driving Miss Daisy,” “Seven” and the seemingly endless series of films in which he plays ersatz paterfamilias to a white woman bedeviled by a serial killer. But at least he survives, unlike Crothers in “The Shining,” in which psychic premonitions inspire him to rescue a white family he barely knows and get killed for his trouble. This heart-tug trope is parodied in Gus Van Sant’s “Elephant.” The film’s sole black student at a Columbine-like high school arrives in the midst of a slaughter, helps a girl escape and is immediately gunned down. See what helping the white man gets you?



And what does the white man get out of the bargain? That’s a question asked by John Guare in “Six Degrees of Separation,” his brilliant retelling of the true saga of David Hampton — a young, personable gay con man who in the 1980s passed himself off as the son of none other than the real Sidney Poitier. Though he started small, using the ruse to get into Studio 54, Hampton discovered that countless gullible, well-heeled New Yorkers, vulnerable to the Magic Negro myth, were only too eager to believe in his baroque fantasy. (One of the few who wasn’t fooled was Andy Warhol, who was astonished his underlings believed Hampton’s whoppers. Clearly Warhol had no need for the accouterment of interracial “goodwill.”)



But the same can’t be said of most white Americans, whose desire for a noble, healing Negro hasn’t faded. That’s where Obama comes in: as Poitier’s “real” fake son.



The senator’s famously stem-winding stump speeches have been drawing huge crowds to hear him talk of uniting rather than dividing. A praiseworthy goal. Consequently, even the mild criticisms thrown his way have been waved away, “magically.” He used to smoke, but now he doesn’t; he racked up a bunch of delinquent parking tickets, but he paid them all back with an apology. And hey, is looking good in a bathing suit a bad thing?



The only mud that momentarily stuck was criticism (white and black alike) concerning Obama’s alleged “inauthenticty,” as compared to such sterling examples of “genuine” blackness as Al Sharpton and Snoop Dogg. Speaking as an African American whose last name has led to his racial “credentials” being challenged — often several times a day — I know how pesky this sort of thing can be.



Obama’s fame right now has little to do with his political record or what he’s written in his two (count ‘em) books, or even what he’s actually said in those stem-winders. It’s the way he’s said it that counts the most. It’s his manner, which, as presidential hopeful Sen. Joe Biden ham-fistedly reminded us, is “articulate.” His tone is always genial, his voice warm and unthreatening, and he hasn’t called his opponents names (despite being baited by the media).



Like a comic-book superhero, Obama is there to help, out of the sheer goodness of a heart we need not know or understand. For as with all Magic Negroes, the less real he seems, the more desirable he becomes. If he were real, white America couldn’t project all its fantasies of curative black benevolence on him.

Nobody has ever done a better job of pushing the idea that the asymmetry with which charges of racism are made is about something other than the fact that the impact of racism is, indeed, asymmetrical. Not in the way Rush believes, of course. He giggled and mocked Eric Garner suffocating to death at the hands of the police, which is fairly typical of his humor. He lacks the empathy that many here will show for him. Is this an inconvenient time to bring up that the fact that his stock and trade for thirty years has been hatred and division? Sorry. Cancer is the great equalizer. It comes for assholes and saints, for Republicans and Democrats, atheists and true believers. But it does not erase the past. He gives good radio, but he has been a divisive force, toxic and a poison to civil society. Thoughts and prayers, though. Thoughts and prayers.

[theevan]

Good radio? Not in my opinion. Not a fan at all.

But this morning I heard on the radio that he regularly lands in the top 5 of celebrity donors to charity. That's something he can take to the grave with satisfaction.