I was just coming back to work from lunch and a colleague was eating at his desk and had the radio going. After saying hello to others there and taking a look at what was on tap for the afternoon, I heard the radio host bring up Michael Dukakis, with the background music being The Beatles “I’m a Loser”.

What the heck is that?, I asked.

“Calls himself Rush. Its great. He shreds hypocrites.”

That was my introduction to Rush Limbaugh. It was, I think, very early 1989, though it might have been very late 1988. At all events, Rush had only recently started his national show and I was immediately a fan. I had never heard anyone argue in the media with the Conventional Wisdom. Rush was challenging and funny and he clearly didn’t care what liberals thought about him. I think a lot of us remember those early days with their various “updates” and things like the bake sale. It was energizing and fun. And, I think, it played a huge role in the GOP recapturing the House in 1994, thus starting the breakdown of Democrat power in the United States.

He was, of course, before blogging. Before Fox News. Before everything except National Review in Conservative thought. And he was the very first Conservative activist. Not that he gave his audience orders, but that he galvanized us by showing, via his gigantic audience, that we weren’t alone. That millions upon millions shared our dismay with the course of the country.

Rush’s influence simply cannot be overstated. Never holding any office. Never directly participating in any political campaign. He yet got the ball rolling for the breakdown of the Establishment’s grip on the public mind. That Donald Trump was able to get nearly 75 million votes in 2020 – after a year of pandemic and economic crash and after four years of relentless MSM lies – is testament to the number of minds freed because back in 1988 Rush went on the air with the intent to say whatever he thought was right. That we haven’t won completely is no detraction from Rush. He was, after all, just one man. That we still may be able to save this country is Rush’s crowning glory.

I did see the intense hatred directed Rush’s way after his death was announced. We all knew it was coming, but there was something extra pathetic about it. None of the people celebrating his death have a tenth the influence that Rush had. And, just as certain, none of them ever listened to his show. Rely on that: the only people who hate Rush are those who don’t listen. If they did listen, they’d find that he had arguments to make. I didn’t always agree with everything Rush said. But when I did find myself thinking differently, I could still see the force of Rush’s argument…and though I never met him, I’m sure he’d see the force of mine. Those who hate him never exposed themselves to those arguments – arguments which no liberal could in any case win, because liberalism is wrong, entirely.

And while we on the right knew that liberalism was wrong, we didn’t have a voice to express it. Rush provided that. He was a master of his art. Don’t fool yourself: talking for three hours a day and keeping it interesting and entertaining is no small feat. Hardly anyone can do it and Rush did it superbly. He won’t be replaced: we’ll just get along as best we can with lesser lights…but while they can’t stand in the shoes of the giant, in their numbers they will make up for it. And it is because Rush happened that there will be scores of people out there, on the air, saying what they want.

I pray for the repose of the soul of our departed brother and that God may comfort his family and friends.

Found this:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?284357-3/rush-limbaugh-1951-2021

The other day Ace wrote a bit about this friend of his who is a SJW nutcase (I can’t remember which article it was: I searched a bit, but he’s been busy lately and so there’s a lot of articles – I couldn’t find the one) who simply didn’t believe that transgender women (ie, former men) were being allowed to compete against women. Until there was finally a small news story about it, and then she grudgingly admitted it happened, but was sure it was being exaggerated by Faux News. Ace pointed out that she didn’t believe it because the news she listens to simply never told her about it. That got me thinking: it explains a lot.

I get into Twitter and other arguments with liberals and one of their common assertions is that I should turn off “Faux News” and find out what is really going on. I never thought too much of it because I don’t watch Fox News. Heck, I don’t hardly watch any news. Anyone who has been around this blog for a while knows I have utter contempt for the MSM, but that contempt is tripled for the television branch of the MSM. I started rolling it around in my head, and I doubt that I spend even 15 minutes a month watching any sort of televised national news. I might check it if there’s a breaking story with interesting video…but, even then, you usually get the raw video faster in social media. The longest stretch of MSM-watching I’ve done over the past 10 years was Election Night 2016, because I had a feeling going in that Trump might pull it off and I wanted to see the nitwits react to that. And even there, it was only for a couple hours. Then it all struck me: they were not so much wanting me to stop watching Fox, but to start watching MSNBC. Because, man, that is where the truth is!

This burst of revelation was solidified today when a Never Trumper on Twitter was going on a rant and one of his rant points was to say that Republicans went nuts over Obama’s tan suit, but they are letting Trump get away with murder. It immediately leaped to my mind that I don’t remember the Tan Suit Scandal. Honestly, I don’t. I couldn’t begin to tell you when it happened or what the particulars were. I only know about it because since Trump took office, I keep seeing boring, poorly done leftist memes claiming that the Tan Suit Scandal was Obama’s only scandal (when I see it I always post a link to Worst President, as a sort of rebuttal). Do you guys know more about this? I asked Matt and he was pretty vague about it, as well. Bottom line, did any actual Republican go anything remotely nuts about Obama’s tan suit? But here was a guy – a guy who is college educated, top of his profession, etc – getting upset that Republicans got upset about Obama’s tan suit. Did it really happen? Meaning, not “did Obama wear a tan suit” but was there a “Tan Suit Scandal” which roiled politics for a period of time? I don’t think there was – I’m pretty sure I would have noticed it at the time. I did a bit of searching the blog, and I don’t think it even rated an Open Thread mention. I’m now quite certain that there is a world different from reality – we’ll call it TV Reality – where quite a lot of people live, and they believe a lot of nonsense simply because the TV said so…and don’t know a huge amount of stuff because TV hasn’t told them to know it.

You know TV Reality – it is where Trump is Hitler and on his last legs and there isn’t even such a thing as an anti-Semitic Democrat Congresswoman. Where Jussie Smollett was National News until the truth came out and he became a Local Crime Story. TV Reality – where racist hate crimes are all over the place, as opposed to Actual Reality where the hate crimes are exposed again and again as hoaxes. We’ve got tens of millions of people in this country who don’t believe anything they don’t see on TV – and who never, even for a moment, question what they see on TV. These people form the base of the Democrat party – but we’re not immune: I’ve seen plenty of righties, and not Never Trumpers, get themselves into a panic again and again because the TV Reality said Trump did something bad, or that Trump is in trouble over something.

The only advice I can give on this is to shut off the TV – if we did that, Trump would get 80% of the vote in 2020. We do have to find some way to battle this – we have tens of millions of people acting in an amazingly stupid manner because they are convinced that the person on TV in makeup who is reading lines off a teleprompter is real. That when one of these dimwits makes a pronouncement it is as if God Himself were speaking…rather than realizing what they see is a person who got the job because he or she looked and sounded good on TV. Can’t emphasize it enough that brains and ability are not requirements for being on TV – all that is required is looking and sounding good. And they’ve got makeup, lighting, computer programs and sound technicians to make you look and sound really good. I remember that time I went on TV and I had to spend 45 minutes in a makeup chair…for a 10 minute spot! I looked fabulous…and if I had said the moon was made of green cheese, at least a portion of the audience would have bought it because I looked good and I was on TV.

Brainless prats on TV mouthing lines that leftwing propagandists fed to them…mindless boobs at home watching it and thinking, “yeah, sure, Putin rigged the election for Trump to win”. Trouble is the mindless boobs get to vote and their vote counts as much as yours. This is a huge problem for us to get around.

A very good and interesting piece from Matthew Continetti:

Events are turning me into a radical skeptic. I no longer believe what I read, unless what I am reading is an empirically verifiable account of the past. I no longer have confidence in polls, because it has become impossible to separate the signal from the noise. What I have heard from the media and political class over the last several years has been so spectacularly proven wrong by events, again and again, that I sometimes wonder why I continue to read two newspapers a day before spending time following journalists on Twitter. Habit, I guess. A sense of professional obligation, I suppose. Maybe boredom…

I’ve been saying that for a while, myself. But I’m rather late to the game. Here’s another view:

It is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern existence, that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. We announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding. We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a scaffolding. Yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as indicating that that moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still abroad upon the earth. That the man has not fallen off a scaffolding is really more sensational; and it is also some thousand times more common. But journalism cannot reasonably be expected thus to insist upon the permanent miracles. Busy editors cannot be expected to put on their posters, “Mr. Wilkinson Still Safe,” or “Mr. Jones, of Worthing, Not Dead Yet.” They cannot announce the happiness of mankind at all. They cannot describe all the forks that are not stolen, or all the marriages that are not judiciously dissolved. Hence the complete picture they give of life is of necessity fallacious; they can only represent what is unusual. However democratic they may be, they are only concerned with the minority. –G.K. Chesterton, The Ball and the Cross

As I’ve said before, even when journalism is trying to get it right, it really can’t. As Chesterton noted, it only concerns itself with the small number of people who do something odd or have something odd done to them. But it’s even a bit worse than that – because of time and space limitations, journalism can’t give us the full story even of these small slices of human life. Even the most intrepid and honest reporter simply won’t be able to give us all the facts. Outside that, the real problem comes in when the journalist is not being intrepid or honest – when he is just mouthing a line designed to serve a particular end and dressing it up as honest journalism. This is where we are today – in a world where hardly anyone is even trying to report it straight. Everyone’s got an agenda.

It must be remembered that you don’t have to push entirely false information to push an agenda. You can have a whole bunch of true things in there, even if you are trying to get across the most monstrous of lies (such as, for instance, the lie that Hillary was even remotely qualified to be President, let alone the allegedly most qualified person, ever). In fact, the more true stuff you can squeeze in there, the better – makes it harder to attack the main lie. But as I’ve also said before, if you add a ounce of lie to a pound of truth, what you’ve got is all lie. The two things just don’t mix. In the end, you are either telling the truth, or you are telling a lie…there is no half-truth, there is no white-lie.

The bottom line, for me, is that I simply do not believe what I’m reading unless I can ascertain a demonstrable fact…and even then I must be able to fit it all into a coherent worldview, informed by my knowledge of history. Skepticism is a requirement these days – you simply can’t take what is said in the media immediately at face value. It has to be checked – and it has to be pondered. Does it make sense? For instance, in that Georgia House race…we were told, endlessly, that the Democrat was a little ahead and that Democrat enthusiasm was at a huge peak…well, in the end, the Democrat lost by 4 percentage points and didn’t get any more votes than the Democrat had in 2016. It was a gigantic nothingburger from start to finish. I was confident all along the GOPer would win – because there was nothing real which would indicate that a GOP-leaning district was going to repudiate the GOP and Donald Trump. I believed this because I didn’t find any facts to dispute it and all my knowledge indicated it would be like that. But there we went, for weeks people salivating over it…and pouring in untold millions of dollars based upon reports which were simply false.

It is rather sad that it has to be this way – and the fix for it would be easy, and quick. All the MSM would have to do is report things straight for just a few weeks and their credibility would be restored. They won’t do it, at least not any time soon, because most of them are committed to the Progressive cause and all of them are fearful of the wrath of the Progressive gate-keepers if they step out of line. So, for now, all we can be is skeptics.

From Conrad Black:

The two signal facts, or “alternative facts” in the well-chosen parlance of the brilliant and engaging co-counselor and victorious campaign manager of the president, Kellyanne Conway, are that public approval of the national news media now stands at 14%, and the allegations the press are now making against the new administration are of no interest to any serious segment of the public.

After a while, if you lie constantly, no one is going to believe you – even if, for the moment, you are telling the truth.

What happened to the MSM in 2016 was the cumulation of their dishonesty over a many-decade period. This was helped along by the MSM going entirely overboard, even by MSM standards, in their desire to destroy Trump at the behest of their Democrat friends and Trump’s ability to command the center of attention with a willingness to punch back very hard. The MSM is now exposed as a hollow threat – and even mainstream GOP politicians will cease to tremble in fear of offending it. But let’s take a look at how the MSM did this to itself.

G. K. Chesterton – himself a journalist – pointed out very long ago that there was no need of a censorship of the press because we already had a very functional censorship by the press. The press – the MSM as we call it today – takes sides. If they like a person or a particular grouping of people, they will go soft on them. If they don’t like a person or grouping of people, they will be merciless in hounding them. This does have an effect on how some people can be viewed even long after they are dead.

Take, for instance, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. Roosevelt is lauded in the history books as the strong President who got things done. Taft is derided as a well-meaning man who simply didn’t have the ability of Roosevelt. But, if you dig a bit into the history of things, you’ll find that even on something as signature to Roosevelt as his “trust busting”, Taft actually did far more. Roosevelt did start the Panama Canal, but he did it in a manner which caused grave harm to America’s reputation among Latin American people…Taft actually got the thing properly organized for construction and then kept a close eye on matters until it was nearly done (it was completed about 18 months after he left office…but by then it was all over but the shouting). If you’re liked by the MSM, you’ll have an easy ride – if you’re hated by them, then no level of excellence will be sufficient. When you translate this to the political parties, the MSM likes the Democrats, hates the Republicans – and this goes back quite a long ways: at least to FDR, but a case can be made that the MSM has hated the Republicans ever since Republicans thwarted Wilson, whom they liked, after World War One.

Of course, to take sides means you are simply not going to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. You can’t – because the truth will some times work against your side. Even you don’t flat-out lie for your side, you’re still going to present things in a manner which gives best advantage to your side, and most disadvantage to the other side. And you can speak quite a lot of truth without giving the whole truth; of course, if you don’t give out the whole truth, you’ve carried out the functional equivalent of a lie…but as you can’t be caught out in a factual inaccuracy, you can pretend that you just speak the truth. And that is what the MSM did for many decades. As long as their good friends, the Democrats, generally ran things – and from 1932 until 1980, they generally did, in spite of a few GOPers managing to get into the White House – there was no need to lie; you could just tell that part of the truth which reflected most ill upon Republicans. After the election of Reagan – and, especially, his re-election – that started to change.

I still date the break with truth-telling to be Ted Kennedy’s speech against Robert Bork in 1986. No matter how you want to slice it up, Kennedy got out there and delivered a pack of lies about Robert Bork and then the MSM refused to just call them lies. This, I think, is where old Rush gets his view that, for the MSM, it isn’t the facts of the case but the seriousness of the charge which matters…we are to discuss the charge, not the facts. Kennedy made serious charges – essentially saying that Bork was a Nazi set to destroy freedom in America. Republicans were then asked to prove that he – and they – weren’t in favor of Nazi tyranny. We still weren’t to outright fabrication by the MSM, but we had stepped away from telling even partial truth. Later, especially after the GOP won Congress in 1994, the MSM went to flat out lies in defense of their side.

They felt they had to. The reason Reagan won – and Gingrich’s GOP won – was that the system created by the Democrats was starting to fall apart. The Welfare State wasn’t working. The military system and alliances created by the Democrats wasn’t working. The economic system of the Democrats wasn’t working. To tell the truth about anything pretty much meant you were going to have to say something bad about Democrats. The MSM could still tell bits of truth about the GOP which were bad for the GOP – so, of course, whenever a GOPer was caught in genuine scandal, it was played up for all it was worth – but that wasn’t enough, because the GOP was proposing alternatives to failed policies and even if the alternatives were untested, it was clear that we couldn’t just go on and on with policies which were failing right in front of everyone’s eyes. It became necessary to just cook up things to say which would either help Democrats, or harm Republicans. And that is where things started to go wrong for the MSM – took a while, but as I noted, when you lie enough, eventually people just stop believing you.

And it did take a while. It took ten thousand accusations of GOP racism, sexism and homophobia. Ten thousand accusations that GOPers want to starve kids and shove granny off a cliff. It took ten thousand stories about how swell Democrat things are while people could see for themselves that they were getting worse. It took, finally, eight years of servile MSM devotion to Obama winding up in lunatic MSM opposition to Trump to finish the job.

I’ve seen some articles by MSMers wondering how they can get their mojo back – in none of them do I see, “we’ll report the truth, no matter what it is”. They still can’t go there for the same reason they could never go there: they still like the Democrats (actually, of course, they are Democrats), and still hate Republicans. How things will work out for the next four to eight years remains to be seen. But we do actually need an MSM which will just tell the truth. The alternative media is great – and played a role in breaking through the MSM lies – but it is also contains many people just as willing to lie for their own side as the MSM has been. As soon as someone figures out that what will really sell is an MSM outfit which will just tell the truth – the verified, honest truth – no matter whom it hurts, that will be the MSM outfit which comes to dominate all others…and leads to a restoration of a genuine free press in the United States.