Read Online Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One by Zev Chafets - Free Book Online Page A

ice.”
    Rush was rewarded for his success with a six-figure salary, an estimable income in the mid-1980s, even by his father’s standards. More important, for the first time in his life he really mattered. He was invited to deliver speeches, just like Big Rush. He was an occasional commentator on television and wrote newspaper columns. Politicians and celebrities sought him out. He and Michelle bought a new house and furnished it with products he endorsed on the air.
    The audience in Sacramento was more sophisticated than the one he had had in Kansas City, and more liberal. Jerry Brown, known as “Governor Moonbeam,” had just finished his years in the statehouse, and California was swinging to the right, but it was still a long way from Kansas. I was in Sacramento in the mid-’80s, and I vividly recall boarding a bus bound for San Francisco on which the driver nonchalantly announced that smoking cigarettes, cigars, pipes, and joints was prohibited.
    Marijuana wasn’t Rush’s thing. (In 1993 he told an interviewer for Playboy that he had only tried it twice, inhaled but hadn’t liked it.) Hippies smoked marijuana. Rush wanted to belong to the square adult world, and in Sacramento he had that chance. “For the first time in my life I actively appreciated where I lived,” he wrote in The Way Things Ought to Be . “I was no longer a passing personality but rather a functioning, practicing, and participating member of my community—aspects of life that were new to me. And I loved it.”
    Michelle loved it less. She had a job at a printing company but quit to become her husband’s assistant, and she found the job boring and tedious. She was an outdoors type; he hated nature. When he did venture out he was a klutz. One day fellow disc jockeys Bob Nathan and Dave Williams convinced him to go rafting on the American River, which runs through Sacramento. “It’s a very, very mild ride,” Williams later wrote. “Bob gave Rush an oar and told him to absorb the blow of the canyon wall to give us a little spring back into the current . . . Rush panicked, stuck the oar out, his arms stiff as a board, and upon impact he fell overboard . . . We got Rush back in the raft and the next day he spent the entire three hours of his show talking about his horrendous whitewater grapple with the grim reaper.”
    Rush’s fun, as always, came in the studio. An evangelist in Ohio claimed that the theme song for the old Mister Ed television series ( “A horse is a horse, of course, of course . . .” ) contained a satanic message when played backward. Limbaugh told his audience about it and informed them a Slim Whitman recording played backward also contained a message from the devil. To his delight, a lot of listeners took him seriously, calling the station to report that they were trashing all their Whitman albums to “keep the devil out of the house.”
    The Limbaugh persona, which had been germinating since the “Jeff Christie School for DJs” in Pittsburgh, flowered in Sacramento. Limbaugh became “El Rushbo, the all-knowing, all-caring, all-sensing Maha Rushi,” “a harmless little fuzzball,” and the “Epitome of Morality and Virtue.” His show was carried “across the fruited plain” on the (fictitious) Excellence in Broadcasting Network, from behind the golden EIB microphone. He was on “the cutting edge of societal evolution,” “serving humanity” with “talent on loan from God,” and opinions “documented to be almost always right, 97.9 percent of the time” by the Sullivan Group (another fictitious entity named for local DJ and Limbaugh buddy Tom Sullivan).
    The stylized, satirical lingo began then, too. He mocked the multicultural style of California by proposing to keep “Uglo-Americans” off the streets. Militant feminists became “Feminazis.” The green movement was full of “environmental whackos,” the American left became “Commie pinko liberals,” and the residents of Rio Linda, California,