Is Hendrik Hertzberg a DUer? His thoughts on Limbaugh's Addiction

[Stephanie]

I love this man! This article in the current issue of The New Yorker provides great rebuttals to the current In Defense of Rush Talking Points being shouted ad nauseum on hate radio and RW TV.

And I just love seeing the pilonoidial cyst story and the words Chicken Hawk appear in the staid and proper New Yorker.

Hendrik Hertzberg - another great LIBERAL New Yorker.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?031027ta_talk_hertzberg

COMMENT
RUSH IN REHAB
Issue of 2003-10-27
Posted 2003-10-20
— Hendrik Hertzberg


"We do not need General Clark or any of the rest of you liberals. We don’t need to change the definition of patriotism in order to conform to the antiwar, hate-America-first radicalism of the Democrat leadership. And that’s what this is all about.”

In case you don’t happen to be a regular listener to “The Rush Limbaugh Show,” the above is a fair sample of the sort of thing the star of the show has been saying lately, or at any rate was saying until a week ago, when he checked in to a drug rehabilitation center. It’s not very different from what he’s been saying throughout the twenty years he’s been talking about politics on the radio. We know the sample is fair, because it was the featured quote last Thursday on the home page of Limbaugh’s own Web site, emblazoned in big blue letters right next to the smiling photograph of the patient himself. Limbaugh’s target this time was Wesley Clark, because Clark is a leading candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination. As a four-star general, Clark led nato’s first and so far only major military action, which put a stop to ethnic cleansing in Kosovo; as a combat officer in Vietnam, he was severely wounded and awarded the silver star, the bronze star, and a purple heart. The person impugning his patriotism, Limbaugh, sat out the war in Vietnam—though not very comfortably, one must assume, since, as Joe Conason noted in Salon, the future scourge of cowards and slackers avoided the draft on account of “a persistent boil on his backside.”

Limbaugh is a prime example of what is known as a Chicken Hawk—a noisy, preening master of the martial art of talking who, back when it was a question of getting anywhere near harm’s way for the sake of his country, discovered that he had (as Vice-President Cheney once put it, explaining his own absence from the fray) “other priorities.” He has now joined another élite corps—the Vice Versa Virtuecrats, they might be called—whose members crusade against “moral relativism” and in favor of absolute standards of right and wrong backed up by draconian punishments while indulging themselves in devilment on the side. Like Newt Gingrich, who vowed to attack Bill Clinton in every speech for hiding his sad little dalliance with Monica Lewinsky while he himself was carrying on a years-long affair with a congressional staffer young enough to be his daughter, and William J. Bennett, who made millions promoting flinty self-discipline while gambling away comparable amounts in Las Vegas fleshpots, Limbaugh took a stern line on demon dope (“If people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up”) while himself possessing and consuming controlled substances in prodigious quantities. In Limbaugh’s case, the difficulty goes beyond an embarrassing inconsistency between professed beliefs and private behavior, because the “problem” he has acknowledged having—being “addicted to prescription pain medication”—correlates strongly with committing acts that the law defines as crimes. <more>

[kentuck]

1. Which is more politically correct ?

"Addicted to prescription medications" or "Hooked on illegal narcotic drugs"?? Isn't the latter more appropriate for Rush Limbaugh?

[Cha]

2. "Hooked on illegal narcotic drugs"! Is what it Is!

[caledesi]

5. Oh yeah! I was thinking (bad sign) about Rush in group therapy

Can you imagine it?

Rush: This is nothing but psychobabble!

Rush: I was on PRESCRIPTION DRUGS; it's different. I was in pain!

Therapist: Well Rush, why didn't you enter pain management which doesn't involve any drugs.

Rush: Uh, well, hmmm, I am a celebrity and it would be difficult not to be recognized in pain management.

Therapist: So the answer is to send your housekeeper out to score for you?

Rush: I resent the term "score" - that is reserved for junkies on the street.

Therapist: Rush, you are a junkie.

[Stephanie]

3. Here are the rebuttals to the Talking Points - thanks Hendrik!

Actually, under federal law there is no distinction between Oxycontin, Limbaugh’s reported pill of choice, and drugs like cocaine, methadone, and opiates. All are Schedule II drugs, which have medical uses but a high potential for abuse, and simple possession of any of them is punishable by up to a year’s imprisonment. Though Limbaugh may well have been introduced to painkillers via a doctor’s prescription, the suggestion that he became addicted to them under a doctor’s care is almost certainly false. So is the suggestion that he wasn’t taking them “recreationally”—i.e., to get high. The prescribed dose of Oxycontin, one tablet every twelve hours, is usually sufficient to relieve severe pain. The Enquirer has Limbaugh purchasing nearly twelve thousand during a four-month period in 2001—enough to soothe his back troubles for sixteen years.

[Clete]

4. Great and informative post again Stephanie.

In my day there was a distinction between legal and illegal drugs. If your dad got wasted every night down at the saloon with his work buddies and your grandma burned holes from cigarettes in the upholstery, no one said anything because it was legal. If your mother was stoned all day with tranquilizers and even more stoned with a pitcher of martinis in the evening, no one said a word because it was legal.

No one at that time would admit that they were as addicted and drugged as those Mexicans across town smoking marijuana, and those low-life black musicians at the local Jazz club main lining heroin. Since the line has blurred between legal and illegal in the last fifty years, we now have respectable addicts supposedly as against unrespectable addicts like say your everyday average crack whore.

The more things change, the more the remain the same.

[Stephanie]

6. Yeah, that's what they're going for

Rush was in PAIN. He started off with a PRESCRIPTION. It's for his BACK.

Meanwhile he's rendezvousing in parking lots to pick up his stash and paying $100,000 bribes to the maid to keep her quiet.

[mac56]

7. ask any junkie -

they'll tell you they use because they're in pain.

[Stephanie]

8. Right - but if you're a millionaire bloviator your pain is more real

If you're rich and famous and a world-class hypocrite then you NEED to medicate your pain with illegal drugs. Other people, especially POOR people, should just tough it out.

[julka]

9. I feel sorry for him........really

[julka]

10. seriously

[Stephanie]

11. You're too kind

Maybe you can visit him in prison. That would cheer him up.

[JackSwift]

12. For the Dittoheads, the underlying theme is always unte-menschen

They are deathly afraid of the sub-humans: the poor, non-white, non-fundamentalists that make up most of the population of this country and are the population of the rest of the world. This is the one theme that ties everything together and explains their bizarre positions.

A consensual affair by poor white trash and the Jewess temptress(Clinton/Lewinsky) frightens them. Their language someday being less than the only language frightens them because whenever they hear people talking another language, it is a plot or joke at their expense. They are against taxes that may one day be levied against them in their self-image of entrenched rich white people, and in favor of taxing those identified as the racially inferior other, even if the reality is the opposite. They whine constantly about immigration, but to steal a line from Ann Coulter, nobody works in these families, and they would consider picking crops or washing dishes for a living.

But seriously, as a middle-aged, balding, white guy, I have no fear of other people communicating in another language. It doesn't bother me a bit. I have no fear of immiagrants: the immigrants I know are great people and hard working.

[Stephanie]

13. I had to look up Untermenschen

http://library.thinkquest.org/12663/glossary.html?tqskip1=1&tqtime=1023

Master Race The plan to create a superior race of purely Aryan descent (blond hair, blue eyes). Toward this end, Jews, people with handicaps, and enemies of the state were killed. In German, Herrenvolk. (The word Volk, originally meaning people, took on the connotation of unity via blood alone under Hitler.) The other races, in contrast, were called Untermenschen (subhuman).