What love looks like

The professionals:

BUCKLEY:  Rush Limbaugh is by everyone's reckoning a phenomenon, the most spectacular media success of recent years.  His preeminent medium is a culture almost ignored by American critics, even the most beady-eyed, because it's assumed that nobody who really counts spends time listening to people talk over the radio.  We should have taken more seriously the polls that for a couple of decades have told us that one-third of the American people get all their news from radio.

It is news that Rush Limbaugh sets out to give, though he could not  perform as he does without reading scores of daily newspapers and weekly magazines he chews up.  His medium is opinion.  Advise him that the moon yesterday was caught blinking at the sun, and he will run that through his cosmology and come up with a meaning for it all.  And, if the episode was good news, responsibility for that good news would be the Founding Fathers or Ronald Reagan or Clarence Thomas.
If it was bad news, probably it was Teddy Kennedy or the National Organization for Women or the American Civil Liberties Union that is responsible for that frolic.  What astonishes is that no one is surprised and only the humorless are really offended.  In this sense, it's fair to say, I suppose, that he gets away with his scams as no one since Norman Lear got away with his in his series All in the Family, done at the expense of every conservative position ever held and glorious entertainment it was.

Rush Limbaugh was born to a family of lawyers, fooled around doing this and that for a while, decided not to sell potato chips for a living, went to Sacramento as a deejay, then came to New York City a few years ago.  Veni, vidi, vici, it is said about Julius Caesar; he came, he saw, and he conquered.

RUSH:  William F. Buckley Jr. intro'ing on Firing Line.  Nobody like him.  Nobody like him.  We did that show in the drawing room of his maisonette on 73rd and Park, and I don't believe he had a prompter.  There was not a prompter in there.  I think that was all off the top of his head.