Dictator Rush, by Scott Bieser
www.scottbieser.com
my blog: www.bigheadpress.com/TheTimeSink
my Cafe Press store: www.cafepress.com/libartworx

Limbaugh Humbug!
by L. Neil Smith
lneil@netzero.com

Attribute to The Libertarian Enterprise

Long before the days of Opie and Mayberry, Andy Griffith starred in a movie called A Face in the Crowd, made in 1957, about a radio personality and demagogue of the worst sort who allows celebrity to go to his head. He dreams Idi Amin-shaped dreams of becoming President, but he's destroyed when the woman he wronged leaves a microphone open as he blathers on about what gullible simpletons his audience consists of.

Sometimes life imitates art, and it seems to have happened again recently on the Rush Limbaugh show. I haven't listened for a long time specifically, not since September 11, 2001 when I knew exactly what line he would take regarding the attack—but I listened a lot during the Waco Willie Administration when Rush was a breath of fresh air. I often said I disagreed with him half the time, but at least it was a different half than I was used to disagreeing with the liberal mass media.

Here is a man who started out by advocating individual liberty and private capitalism (that's why I listened, even though he often got it dead wrong, usually for religious reasons) while decrying left wing socialist trespasses against them—only to betray everybody and everything that America is about, in the end, becoming nothing more than a pimp for the despicable George Bush, his plutocratic cronies, and the splendid little wars they cooked up to make themselves even richer.

What a waste.

I suppose it was the beginning of the end for Limbaugh when he was exposed as one of the country's foremost hypocrites. Not unlike all of the various neoconservative Republican officials and self-righteous Bible-thumping clergymen who have proven themselves deviants and child molestors of one species or another, Rush turned out to have feet of clay, himself. At that, it wasn't even a particularly good quality of clay.

After castigating individuals like Kurt Cobain (his fans actually believe he was murdered) and the hapless Darrell Strawberry, for their apparent inabilty to avoid drugs, no matter how high the stakes, the man with twenty million daily listeners, who made about twenty million dollars a year, finally confessed publicly that he was a drug addict, himself.

And for twenty million dollars, he couldn't give it up?

I don't really blame Limbaugh for that. I've had some really good drugs—like morphine—for a very limited time, for perfectly legal medical reasons, and the way that opiates, at least, lifted the weight of the world off my shoulders is something I greatly fear I could get used to. But the fact that, as far as I am aware, he never apologized to Darrell Strawberry, or, posthumously, to Kurt Cobain, is beneath contempt.

But as always, I have digressed. This was supposed to be about Andy Griffith, A Face in the Crowd, and coast-to-coast broadcast demagoguery.

The news today (I read Matt Drudge and Lew Rockwell every morning the way my dad read the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News) carried a story about Rush Limbaugh declaring over the air that what America needs is for him to be its "conservative dictator" for a while.

He'd sure as hell get things straightened out, by gum.

What needs "straightening out", of course, is the rapid and now irreversible disintegration of the world empire he tried to help the Skull and Boners erect. The voters are in revolt against both wars in the Middle East, communist-style oppression at America's airports, the disgusting Patriot Act, surveillance cameras everywhere, the teutonic concept of "Homeland Security", the government's secret prison system and its foul, shameful regime of illegal abduction, confinement, and torture.

Imagine that.

Not everybody in America is against everything on that list of course, and flinging themselves blindly into the equally vile clutches of the Democratic Party was not the answer, but for the Busheviks, the party's over, and Limbaugh is too thick-witted to figure it out. He dreams of being dictator and pretending the election of 2006 never happened.

But it damn well did happen, and thanks to Limbaugh—among others—the cause of freedom has been set back at least fifty years. I certainly think that deserves some kind of commemoration, so I'm going to propose that my hometown construct a public restroom in his name.

We'll put his bust outside on a pedestal and his picture on every seat.

We won't go to the "john" any more.

We'll go to the "rush" and pay him appropriate respects.

Four-time Prometheus Award-winner L. Neil Smith has been called one of the world's foremost authorities on the ethics of self-defense. He is the author of 25 books, including The American Zone, Forge of the Elders, Pallas, The Probability Broach, Hope (with Aaron Zelman), and his collected articles and speeches, Lever Action, all of which may be purchased through his website "The Webley Page" at lneilsmith.org.

Ceres, an exciting sequel to Neil's 1993 Ngu family novel Pallas was recently completed and is presently looking for a literary home.

A decensored, e-published version of Neil's 1984 novel, TOM PAINE MARU is available at: http://payloadz.com/go/sip?id=137991. Neil is presently working on Ares, the middle volume of the epic Ngu Family Cycle, and on Roswell, Texas, with Rex F. "Baloo" May.

The stunning 185-page full-color graphic-novelized version of The Probability Broach, which features the art of Scott Bieser and was published by BigHead Press www.bigheadpress.com has recently won a Special Prometheus Award. It may be had through the publisher, at www.Amazon.com, or at BillOfRightsPress.com.

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