Rush Limbaugh
posted
to www.marxmail.org on
Rush Limbaugh, the dean of rightwing talk radio, was forced to resign as football commentator for the ESPN cable sports station (he actually got his broadcasting start in sports) after stating on a pre-game show last Sunday:
"I think what we've had here is a little social concern in the NFL. The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well. There is a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he didn't deserve. The defense carried this team."
It is one thing to bash affirmative action on his radio
show. It is another to bash it in a sport where blacks have a powerful voice as
star athletes. Perhaps Limbaugh would have been better advised to attack gays
and lesbians, who are regarded as open game in the professional sports world.
Such prejudice finally convinced Boston Herald sportswriter Ed Gray to come out
of the closet. In a column that announced his homosexuality, Gray cited recent
comments by New York Giants tight end Jeremy Shockey,
who called Dallas Cowboys coach Bill Parcells a
'homo', and
Gray stated, "I'm out because I can no longer, in good conscience, choose to ignore the unabashed homophobia that is so cavalierly tolerated within the world of sports. I’m out because the silence of a closeted gay man only serves to give his implicit approval to bigotry."
Today Limbaugh's reputation took a turn for the worse when
the New York Daily News reported that he was a heavy user of black market pain-killers.
His housekeeper Wilma Cline supplied him with OxyContin,
Lorcet and hydrocodone,
which are heavy-duty opiates prescribed for acute pain such as that suffered by
cancer patients. OxyContin in particular has become
an epidemic in economically ravaged regions, such as
Although Limbaugh is on record as favoring the legalization
of heroin, cocaine and marijuana--an unsurprising choice for a
libertarian--many of his followers are social conservatives who will be deeply
shocked and disillusioned by this revelation. It will certainly have an impact
on the unraveling now in progress as the Bush administration contends with
In my review of "The Revolution Will not be
Televised", I drew attention to the overtly counter-revolutionary role of
private television networks in
WABC sets the pace for rightwing radio. Through syndication,
personalities like Limbaugh and Sean Hannity can be
heard by tens of millions of people across the
On the Marxism list we have been discussing a perennial
chestnut, namely why the
"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance."
Is there anything that the left can learn from the likes of Rush Limbaugh? The other day I was reading an interesting commentary on George W. Bush in the NY Observer (http://www.nyobserver.com/pages/frontpage7.asp). It stated that he has been underestimated by the left and is capable of a wolverine-like intelligence when it comes to the imperial interests of the USA and the privileges of the ruling class--and just as importantly, he *never* doubts himself. He is absolutely convinced that he is acting on behalf of humanity and that disaster awaits us one and all if the program of the Republican Party is not carried out mercilessly.
By contrast, the left in the