“ It can’t go on this way,” he said, not quite a month before the Jan. What does that latter alternative look like? Well, Limbaugh himself described it in December, not long before his last show, when he told a caller that the United States was “trending toward secession.” Yes, seriously, as in during the Civil War. There is no more pressing task, for either the conservative or progressive movements, than to endeavor that Limbaugh and the style of politics he represented will soon be seen as artifacts of a receding age, rather than forerunners of the next one. It leads to a rancid, cheerless place, one quite different than anything Limbaugh himself talked about in earlier phases of his career when he rhapsodized about his notions of the ideal America. At the age of 70 when he died, Limbaugh lived long enough to see where his brand of commercialized contempt - once it moved from the margins to the center of U.S political culture - would lead. In both cases they often seemed intimidated by him.īut the burial part is more important. Limbaugh was wooed by presidents if they were Republicans, castigated by them if Democrats. Here, in this florid exterior life, he used bombast, humor, insult, indignation, malice, superb timing and an astonishingly facile mind to make himself very famous, very rich and very influential. Praise, of a sort: He was a brilliant performer, a self-invented character who, reading not very far through the lines of interviews over the years, had the interior life of a lonely misfit who came alive and found adoration mainly in front of the microphone. Marc Antony came to bury Caesar, not to praise him, but in Limbaugh’s case it is fitting to do some of both.

Rush limbaugh grave