Rush (Limbaugh) announced yesterday he had lung cancer. Big surprise, he smoked cigarettes until 1984 or so and cigars since then. I know a little about his history, I’ve listened to him for over 25 years. He’s going to be going through what a lot of ordinary people go through everyday. Like with Kobe though, some people forget 8 others died in that helicopter. For some reason sympathy is in direct proportion to the dead person’s cash holdings.
Rush put country club Republicans on the map. The Trump supporter he ended up being is not where he started. Like Sean Hannity, they went through an evolution in their thinking. Whereas I liked Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul 25 years ago, he didn’t. Rush was very suspicious of movers and shakers. He was very good distraction through the work day, usually.
But I guess what hit me today was his long love affair with cigars. A magazine I never would have heard of except for him, was ‘Cigar Aficionado’. What I gathered was that was where you heard about the fine cigars of the day. What cigar went well with what “adult beverage”. Smoking a cigar on the golf course. Smoking a cigar after a fine meal. Stuff the average person would never have known about cigars.
How many people did he turn-on to cigars? People who got addicted? People who might come down with cancer themselves in 25 years or so? Rush the super-millionaire made smoking cigars cool. Fashionable. But he did end up with lung cancer. So in the end, how smart was it to smoke cigarettes for 15 years and cigars for 35? After he made it sound so cool for so many decades, is he now going to do ‘quit smoking’ PSAs?
Politics and Religion 