With assholes like Rush Limbaugh, all you have to do is wait…
For days the rumor has circulated that WLS 890AM, the Chicago market Cumulus-owned talk radio station, is about to drop Rush Limbaugh from its 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday slot at the end of March, although the company has denied this.
It’s not outside the realm of possibility that this “leak” was a way to grind Limbaugh down in contract renegotiations, but then Limbaugh himself posted this curiously self-aware statement on his official Facebook page:
My oh my, that sounds to my ears like the “Mayor of Realsville” admitting defeat, don’t you think?
WHO is gonna miss Rush Limbaugh when he retires? The only person whose life would be changed for the worse is that of the woman who married this asshole. Now he’s got more time to spend with her…
Limbaugh has been with the Chicago station for 25 years, but recently his show has become, in the words of one WLS insider “impossible to sell.” Both TIME and The Wall Street Journal have cited Limbaugh’s “failure to generate ad revenue” and credit his fall principally on social media campaigns like StopRush, BoycottRush and FlushRush that put public pressure on his advertisers, shaming them on social media where any association with Limbaugh is obviously toxic. Another of Limbaugh’s corporate benefactors, IHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel) which carries The Rush Limbaugh Show on over 500 of their stations, reported a quarterly loss of $309 million and upwards of twenty billion dollars in debt. Rush needs to pick up the hint and get the hook before he burns their house down! (He’s allegedly got a $400 million contract with them. Regrets? They’ve had a few hundred million, I’d reckon…)
Who says that hate speech, racism, misogyny and homophobia aimed at an audience dying off faster and faster with each passing year doesn’t pay? Ask the fuckwits tanking their stock carrying Jabba the Rush’s relic of a radio program in 500 markets in 2015! (How incredibly innovative of you, IHeartMedia!)
It will be a good day for America when El Rushbo hangs up his headphones for good, but I for one wish him a long life. Not a happy life, mind you, but a damned long one. May his millions pay the finest physicians that money can buy to keep him alive forever, like the Face of Boe on Doctor Who, his big fat head preserved in a tank of formaldehyde, his mind driven to madness by the realization that his entire life’s work was, in the end, of little value to anyone and with the lasting resonance of a particularly sulphurous fart in the howling winds of history. May he live forever and a day.