Of cancer. At age 70.
I’m going to more remember this day for two other images: the implosion of a defunct Trump casino in Atlantic City, and the utter failure of the deregulated Texas power grid.
But all three news items are intricately linked into a larger problem: America’s self delusions smacking face first into larger reality.
The Republican insistence that we can replace reality, if we simply tell enough big lies, often enough.
(Narrator: We cannot. That would take serious science and social engineering.)
I remember hearing about Rush Limbaugh in the mid-to-late 1980s, and watching his brand of hypocritical ‘conservatism’ catch fire in the 90s.
I knew then, that I was witnessing one of the United States’ potential murderers.
Without Rush, Newt Gingrich, & the rest of the Moral Majority’s talking heads, scientific illiteracy and the denial of science would probably not have been as big a problem in the US.
We’d probably be a less hateful and more equitable society.
Texas…an energy producing powerhouse in the petrochemical industries…could have easily made the leap toward a broader, safer portfolio of clean energy production, with the millions of good jobs attached.
Without millions of resentful, terrified, low-information viewers of Fox News (and its even more rightwing successors) Donald Trump would not have been able to fracture the Republican Party and possibly *fatally* fracture American democracy.
We might have a chance now to pull back from the Abyss.
So yes, I’m glad that evil windbag Limbaugh is dead.