On Rush Limbaugh, comics not reporters told the truth

While much of the establishment media routinely extolled Limbaugh’s ‘undeniable talents’ as an ‘entertaining’ broadcaster, comics were decidedly less impressed.

As a general rule, it is a given that comics speak truth to power more often than most journalists do. For irrefutable evidence of this axiom, you need to look no further than how, for decades, smart, irreverent comedians – unbothered by convention or propriety – repeatedly took America’s “poster boy for contraception” and of rancid right-wing radio, Rush Limbaugh, to the woodshed, rhetorically speaking. While much of the establishment media routinely extolled Limbaugh’s “iconic” status and “undeniable talents” as an “entertaining” broadcaster who transformed America’s cultural and political landscape, comics like George Carlin, happily, were decidedly less impressed.