Weekend Open Thread: Remembering Rush Limbaugh

By
Greg Diamond
– February 18, 2021Posted in: "The OC", Fresh Juice, obituary, Rush Limbaugh

.

.

.

In fact, dangerously fat, if in the missionary position with desperate young foreign prostitutes!

If I want to remember Rush Limbaugh, I can look up the flawed but hilarious Al Franken’s masterful takedown of him in his Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot — which, despite its title, was not an exercise in insulting him but about disproving his political assertions with the vicious tools such as wit, math, and logic that he later employed in Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.  (Those sure were the days, when one can do that and make an impact!)

But that’s not my topic today, the day after he died of lung cancer.  I’m thinking not about Al Franken’s memories of Rush Limbaugh, or my own, or even any likely reader of this blog.  I’m thinking about the young woman (and likely some underage girls) whom he patronized and/or raped on his sex tour to the Dominican Republic in 2006, the one that led to his arrest for carrying 26 Viagra pills prescribed to him in a different medicine bottle so that no one might think that he was a sex tourist likely aiming for the desperate, sad, and unenthused — and the more so the better.

In searching for the facts about this trip, I ran across the transcript of my former Daily Kos colleague and expert prank caller Mike Stark’s phone call to Limbaugh’s show in 2011, where he blindsided the host with a reference to his sex tourism.  If you want to see Limbaugh at his best worst, go check it out.

But I’m not thinking about Mike’s memories of Rush Limbaugh, or anyone else’s from Daily Kos.

I’m thinking about the memories of those young women — and, based on what I’d read in human rights reports about sex tourism, probably underage women, who for this purpose I’ll call “girls” — whom he, armed with Viagra, sought out on his trip.

Maybe a lot of them are dead by now — of AIDS, hurricanes, Covid, violence, or other causes.  But they’d only be in their early 30s if they are alive — still able to remember the loud and uncaring man who rented them.  I wonder whether they — or other largely-coerced participants in the sex tourism industry, given that this was probably not his only time getting away from liberated American women — remember the large man with blue pills and bad manners from 15 years ago.  I hope that some enterprising journalists will seek them out for their comments on his demise.

This is your unusually early Weekend Open Thread.  Talk about that vomitous miscreant, or anything else you’d like, within reasonable bounds of discretion.  (“Decorum” and “dignity” are suspended for this week only.)

Tags: ,

About Greg Diamond

Somewhat verbose attorney, semi-disabled and semi-retired, residing in northwest Brea. Occasionally ran for office against jerks who otherwise would have gonr unopposed. Got 45% of the vote against Bob Huff for State Senate in 2012; Josh Newman then won the seat in 2016. In 2014 became the first attorney to challenge OCDA Tony Rackauckas since 2002; Todd Spitzer then won that seat in 2018. Every time he's run against some rotten incumbent, the *next* person to challenge them wins! He's OK with that. Corrupt party hacks hate him. He's OK with that too. He does advise some local campaigns informally and (so far) without compensation. (If that last bit changes, he will declare the interest.) His daughter is a professional campaign treasurer. He doesn't usually know whom she and her firm represent. Whether they do so never influences his endorsements or coverage. (He does have his own strong opinions.) But when he does check campaign finance forms, he is often happily surprised to learn that good candidates he respects often DO hire her firm. (Maybe bad ones are scared off by his relationship with her, but they needn't be.)