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Rush Limbaugh is a non-believer. God gave him a beautiful voice, an extraordinarily quick mind and a glib tongue. For many years he was just a radio personality, but eventually he found a niche urging what he knew were lies on his audience. You could see it in his smile and chuckle: he knew his diatribes were illogical, based on untruths and just demogoguery. But Rush got to laugh all the way to the bank.
But there is a price to your soul for selling out your true talents. The first price Rush paid was that he was not broadcasting sports, his true love. Eventually, Rush, a call in radio host, became completely deaf. Despite being a member of the neo-con right, his religious right political friends failied to point out to him that perhaps God was punishing him for something. His hearing loss was inexplicable, and the irony was bitter if not overwhelming. Rush never listened to his critics, his fans or his callers. If they weren't "dittoheads", they were nothing, and he didn't need to pay attention to someone agreeing 100%. His inability to hear affected his God-given voice. Rush got mechanical ears installed, and the pain of something created by science and logic and truth afflicted him. He still didn't get the message: truth, logic and compassion are painful to people who reject them. But he was his own master, and turned to pain killers.
And he became addicted. Horribly addicted. It's hard to muster sympathy for a soulless sell-out who betrays the spirit of dissent of his country who becomes deaf. I worked on it. I didn't know of his pain or his addiction, but I occasionally heard his nasty innuendos and insinuations against the less fortunate and less white and the more liberal. I was having dinner with a conservative last night, who argued that what Rush had said was not racist, but rather a comment on the double standards of racist press. I disagreed. Context is everything. Had this been a statement by someone without a long track record of making such comments, perhaps it could be misconstrued, but on it's face the first part said the player was incompetent, and the second part accused those praising his talent of being part of an open conspiracy to promote incomptence on the basis of race. Had Rush a long history of sports discussions arguing why, say, Jerry Rice, was arguable the greatest player ever, maybe the context would be different. But Rush had spent years illogically insinuating that black people, liberal people and non-"dittoheads" were just stupid and inferior and incompetent.
So the man gets his lifelong dream job, and his motor mouth is on auto-pilot spewing hatred that became reflexive behavior only because of his sell-out job, and he loses his dream, a dream he had only for a few weeks. I would wager that he still doesn't get the irony, still doesn't see it as God's punishment.
Deaf, in horrible pain, addicted, unable to control the words coming out of his mouth, Rush doesn't seem to understand that he sold out to the devil for money and fame. Sold out doesn't mean rented out, it means you sold your mind, your talent and soul. Absent true repentence, there is no going back. There are any number of liberals who could sell out and start making tons of money and/or acquire fame. But we live once, and living right, if modestly and in obscurity is not a choice when compared to selling out. Rush, we are liberals because we think that what we do and say and how we treat others matters 100 percent of the time.
I'd like to say that I feel badly for Rush's deafness, his pain, his addiction. I am shamed by my lack of Christian charity for Rush, this soulless pawn of the devil. But when I see all the hurt and pain this man spreads in the world, and how wealthy he became voluntarily spreading his venom, I can't do it. I don't feel like celebrating, but I don't have any sympathy for the guy. Personally I don't know if God is actually punishing Rush Limbaugh, or it's karma or something else. As a scientifically minded Christian, I don't think that God works that way, and I don't believe he does. But I am not so arrogant as to avert my eyes entirely from a truly fearsome retribution and warning and think that I might be wrong, and I should stay every minute on the straight and narrow.
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