And I’m a conscientious objector, which I think has made me wary of celebrating anybody’s death, even an enemy’s.īut most of all, I suppose, I realize how much every human values their own lives. So some people are more heartbroken than we are gleeful. Part of it was that Limbaugh’s wife was on the news, clearly distraught, and she loved him, as other members of his family must have. I didn’t feel that I was superior to those who were celebrating (yes, it was mean-spirited, but I can be, too), but something in me baulked at expressing the verbal equivalent of heart symbols. I couldn’t join the chorus of glee, and yet I didn’t understand why. While I don’t mourn the absence of Limbaugh from the scene, celebrating it just didn’t feel right. But is that really what they want to lavish a cute little heart symbol on?
I don’t begrudge them their relief that he’s no longer ranting. One tweet said that Limbaugh “brought a lot of people a lot of joy by dying.” It was liked by more than 35,000 of the morbidly contented. There was wishing that he would rot there. There was speculation that Limbaugh had gone to a very hot place reputed to have nine circles and a red, horned ruler. The F word, followed immediately by Limbaugh’s name, was taken out for a spin. Of course, they were positively restrained in comparison with Twitter, which is basically talk radio’s less windy bastard child. Several other left-leaning sites took the same tack and tone. “BIGOT, MISOGYNIST, HOMOPHOBE, CRANK: RUSH LIMBAUGH DEAD.” Those were the words, capitalized and adrenalized, that HuffPost splashed across its home page. (Nobody unfriended me.) After all, his existence was a net minus for the world’s welfare-something I’m prepared to believe-so why not gambol with glee when he died? (Let me note that he died of lung cancer, and it was probably a pretty horrible way to go.)Īnd, as Frank Bruni notes in his New York Times op-ed below (expressing a view similar to mine), the celebrations were not only widespread, but pretty mean-spirited: In response, people proceeded to inform me, as if I didn’t know, what Limbaugh’s odious political and personal opinions really were, with some adding me that it was really okay to celebrate. "We believe that the preamble to the Constitution contains an inarguable truth that we are all endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, Freedom and the pursuit of happiness.The other day, depressed with the number of people I saw expressing sheer joy at the death of Rush Limbaugh, I put up a Facebook post: We love and revere our founding documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence," he continued.
We recognize that we are all individuals.
"We want every American to be the best he or she chooses to be. We believe that person can be the best he or she wants to be if certain things are just removed from their path like onerous taxes, regulations and too much government," Limbaugh told the crowd. We don't think that person doesn't have what it takes. We do not look out across the country and see the average American, the person that makes this country work. When we look out over the United States of America, when we are anywhere, when we see a group of people, such as this or anywhere, we see Americans.
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