In This Episode
In our 32nd episode of This F*cking Guy, Erin and Alyssa dive deep into the past of the bigoted big mouth, Rush Limbaugh. From having a face for radio, to his obsession with “feminazis” to spouting disinformation about smoking and covid to his very last days, this may be one of our most deplorable guys yet.
For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.
Sources:
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/biography/rush-limbaugh
https://visitcape.com/rush-limbaughs-cape-girardeau-a-tour-of-the-radio-legends-roots/
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/rush-limbaugh-dead-trump-ruined-america
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/17/business/media/rush-limbaugh-dead.html
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/limbaugh-draws-fire-on-obama-parody/
https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-did-rush-limbaugh-mock-aids-death-radio-show-1570282
https://www.espn.com/nfl/news/story?id=1627887
https://www.espn.com/gen/news/2003/1001/1628537.html
https://www.bet.com/article/u945ji/limbaugh-dumped-by-group-hoping-to-buy-rams
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-nov-18-et-rush18-story.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/28/us/rush-limbaugh-arrested-on-prescription-drug-charges.html
TRANSCRIPT
[AD BREAK]
Erin Ryan: Welcome to another episode of This F*cking Guy, the series where we pick one fucking guy who has made America worse and explain why they suck. I’m Erin Ryan, host of Crooked Media’s Hysteria podcast.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: And I’m Alyssa Mastromonaco, the other host of Crooked Media’s Hysteria podcast, Happy 2026 everybody.
Erin Ryan: We’re kicking off the year with a real piece of shit.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Former piece of shit.
Erin Ryan: No he didn’t improve as a person he died. [laughter] We’re talking about Rush Limbaugh today folks now before you raise your hackles about celebrating a death just sit tight because if you’re not familiar with the sort of death celebrating Limbaugh did on the regular by the end of this episode you will be Fox trotting across Limbaugh’s grave like you’re in the Dancing with the Stars finals.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Cruelty and hard earned stupidity are Rush Limbaugh’s legacy. Everything we’re about to say about him today was hard-earned by him before he died of a disease he gave himself.
Erin Ryan: Rush Hudson Limbaugh III was born on January 12th, 1951 in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. His first name, Rush, was a family name originally given to his grandfather in order to honor the maiden name of another family member, Edna Rush.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Wait a minute, Rush Limbaugh was named after a chick?
Erin Ryan: He sure was, as was his dad and his grandpa. Little Rush was born into a prominent Republican Missouri family. Now, this was before the Republican Party’s only political aim was owning the libs. A turn that actually can be partially attributed to Rush Limbaugh. Rush’s grandpa was a big deal, a lawyer, state representative, and at one point, Eisenhower’s ambassador to India. A historian who dug into Grandpa Rush’s past found that he seemed like a legitimately okay guy, like a pillar of the community who cared about things like philanthropy. Rush the first lived to be 104 years old and was still practicing law after his 100th birthday. Limbaugh’s dad, Rush II, was a lesser version of his dad. A lawyer and former fighter pilot whose approval Rush was always chasing but never fully got.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: According to Brian Rosenwald, who wrote a book about American Talk Radio, Rush’s dad, Big Rush, was a prolific dinner table political pontificator. You know the type, the confident lecturer who is more interested in delivering a sermon than having a conversation.
Erin Ryan: Father knows best and won’t shut up about it. Even though he worshiped his dad as a boy, Limbaugh didn’t dream of the courtroom like so many of the men in his family. Instead, he was obsessed with the radio. His greatest ambition was to host a top 40 radio show with sound effects, goofy characters, and pranks on it.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Oh, the prank-loving boy to insufferable man pipeline.
Erin Ryan: Should be studied. Now, I don’t believe that Limbaugh was really interested in radio per se. I think that he just saw it as a means to an end. And that end goal was getting as much attention as possible to make up for the attention his dad wasn’t giving him.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Interesting, go on.
Erin Ryan: Yeah, you know how we discussed in our Clarence Thomas episode, how if Thomas had grown up under slightly different circumstances, he had the biography and personality of a serial killer?
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Rings a bell, tell me more.
Erin Ryan: Rush Limbaugh, in my opinion, simply wanted to do the least amount of work to get the most attention. I think that if Rush Limbaugh III, had grown during a different era. He wouldn’t have been drawn to radio. He would have been a wannabe influencer, maybe an aspiring YouTube prankster, a Nelk boy, if you will. Maybe he’d aspire to be on reality TV. But lucky for him and that face of his, during his formative years, radio was a great way for an ugly inside boy to get famous. So that’s what he pursued. At only 16 years old, Limbaugh’s radio dreams began to come true as he got a job DJing part-time at a local radio station.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Only 16? Erin, he must have been talented.
Erin Ryan: So, I don’t think he was so much talented as he had a dad who’d once been part owner of the radio station. Yeah, Rush Limbaugh III got his start in radio as a nepo baby.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: This spoiled rich boy to adult pretending to be a self-made man pipeline.
Erin Ryan: That pipeline also should be studied. After the first gig, Limbaugh would enter a bit of a bumpy patch. According to an unauthorized biography of Limbaugh called Talent on Loan from God, Rush spent two semesters in college where he failed just about every class before dropping out to pursue a career in radio. According to a profile published in Rolling Stone the day he died, titled, Rush Limbaugh Did His Best to Ruin America.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: That’s a sparkly little obituary.
Erin Ryan: That’s how you know your life was well-lived when your obituary headline contains an insult. Rush was fired from a series of radio gigs after Kanye-ing out of college. The profile strongly implies that at least one of those firings was over the fact that he found himself a lot more amusing than the audience did.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: In the story Rush Limbaugh tells about himself during these early years, he brushed up on conservative writings by the likes of William Buckley.
Erin Ryan: We know that these fucking guys are usually full of shit. Observers note that what’s probably more likely, given his complete lack of interest in anything but getting attention, was that Rush was not reading books, but rather doing a sort of two-bit impression of his dad’s dinner table rantings. This theory is bolstered by the fact that Rush Limbaugh didn’t care much about conservative politics before he was making money yelling about conservative politics on the radio. He didn’t register to vote until he was 35 years old.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: What a phony! Life is tough for a wannabe radio clown from a lawyer family, but eventually Rush landed on his feet at a DJ gig in Sacramento, California where he invented an entirely new kind of radio. It was part rock and roll part theatrical sound effects, part racism.
Erin Ryan: It was during this time that Rush really ramped up the lib triggering that would characterize the rest of his career, and after a few years of flushing toilets and ranting about culture war issues, the Rush Limbaugh Show went national from W.A.B.C. New York in August 1988. At the time, he boasted about 250,000 listeners and could be heard on more than 50 stations.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Now why was he able to do this? And what contributed to the absolute explosion in partisan media from the late 1980s onward? Like many things that suck ass in America, this can be traced back to Ronald Reagan.
Erin Ryan: Yup, Reagan’s FCC killed something known as the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. The doctrine had mandated that radio and TV stations provide equal time to opposing views. Without it, places like Fox News and people like Rush Limbaugh were able to run rough shot over American airwaves like kudzu vines.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: And like the invasive species that blankets the American South, Russia’s particular brand of brain rot would eventually take hold on an entire generation of Americans, displacing critical thought and facts themselves. At first, Limbaugh’s radio program didn’t involve guests. He didn’t do interviews. He did have imaginary one-sided conversations with a character named Bo Snurdly. And rather than refer to notes or an outline, he simply displayed an array of newspaper clippings in front of him while he yapped for three hours.
Erin Ryan: I mean, honestly, that takes some skill.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Ha ha ha!
Erin Ryan: By the early 1990s, he was the most popular radio host in the country, with 20 million people per week filling their brains with his fetid slop. How did he achieve this? Well, Rush Limbaugh was first and foremost a loud dumbass, and the reason he became as successful as he was, and was as beloved as he was, is that a lot of people in America are also loud dumbasses. He says what we’re thinking. Yeah, because you were exposed to high amounts of aerosolized lead as a child. Never developed critical thinking skills, and or don’t believe in going to therapy.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Writing in Rolling Stone, Bob Moser described Limbaugh’s style like this. And I’m going to read a direct quote from the piece, because I couldn’t have said it better. Quote, “he wasn’t selling political ideas, and he never has. He was selling political attitude, the swaggering certitude, the mocking dismissiveness, the freedom to offend, the right to assert your privilege without guilt or embarrassment.”
Erin Ryan: Limbaugh found that selling Americans the freedom to be total fucking assholes was a great way to get attention. In 1989, he started staging what he called collar abortions on air, where he’d cut off collars with the sound of a vacuum and screams. Apparently that’s how an abortion sounds in Rush Limbaugh’s imagination. I don’t know. When I had mine, I just took a pill. But whatever.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: He was also a successful author of New York Times bestsellers like The Way Things Ought To Be and See I Told You So.
Erin Ryan: In 1995, he started selling ugly ass neckties.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Why?
Erin Ryan: Alyssa, I truly do not know. It was his thing, like a kind of Tucker Carlson with his bow tie. We have like Rush Limbaugh with his ties.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: You know where he should have been?
Erin Ryan: Where?
Alyssa Mastromonaco: He missed his calling on QVC.
Erin Ryan: You know, maybe. I think he would have done really well on QVC. He could have had like a husky boy show. So like we mentioned, everything Rush touched turned to gold in the early 1990s. And so eventually he got his own TV show produced by Roger Ailes.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Of course it was.
Erin Ryan: On the show, Rush glumps around a set designed to look like a library in front of a live studio audience and whines about things displayed on a series of TV monitors. In the first episode of the show from 1992, he’s hidden behind a blue dot because he’s so dangerous. It’s a joke that gets old after about five seconds, but it goes on for a couple minutes. Rush’s TV program consisted primarily of bitching with a hearty helping of moaning on the side. He bitched and moaned about how TV character Murphy Brown chose to have a baby and raise it as a single mother on a show that he didn’t watch anyway. He bitched and moaned about what the women were saying. He bitched and moaned about gay people. You could call it culture wars. Could call it clout-whoring, Rush was great at knowing how to pick easy-to-understand cultural flashpoints and having wrong, loud opinions about them.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Limbaugh was such a big star, literally and figuratively, that he was featured in this 1991 60-minute segment where even CBS News’ Steve Kroft couldn’t resist pointing out that Rush Limbaugh was a big, sweaty slob.
Erin Ryan: More journalists gave it to the temptation to point out Limbaugh’s poor scene physique. A 2009 Michael Wolff profile called Limbaugh, THE MAN WHO ATE THE G.O.P.. When Limbaugh began attacking First Lady Michelle Obama’s looks, an NPR panelist scoffed that Limbaugh’s wasn’t exactly Denzel Washington himself. An article about Limbaugh’s opposition to Mrs. Obama’s Let’s Move program joked, does Rush Limbaugh want your kids to be fat? In 2013, Rush Limbaugh suggested on his radio show that Oprah Winfrey had faced discrimination not because she was Black, but because she was fat, which led to a graphic on The Young Turks that read, the pot calling the kettle fat.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Rush gave the media a chance to live out there. We don’t hate you because you’re fat. You’re fat because we hate you, Art.
Erin Ryan: A few years later, former SNL wise ass and future Minnesota senator Al Franken would pen a book called Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations and that would go on to sell a million copies. Now, a few decades have passed since that book was published and we’ve made some progress. I don’t think if Franken were writing that book today, he would have called it Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot. He’d probably have called Rush Limbaugh was a Big Fat Idiot.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: No lies detected. [laughs]
Erin Ryan: As far as I’m concerned his body’s fair game here It was a perfect visual representation of what the human id would look like in physical form.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Limbaugh often critiqued the looks of women, claiming tongue in cheek that feminism as an ideology existed to give ugly women access to mainstream society.
Erin Ryan: Counterpoint, Rush Limbaugh’s show existed to make unattractive old men feel entitled to critique the looks of hot women. If I were to judge Rush Limbaugh’s appearance using the same standards for decency he used to judge women, I’d say it’s ironic for a man who looks like Humpty Dumpty, even in a well-tailored suit, to have any opinions about how anybody looks.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: I just thought of Rush Limbaugh in a tank top and I think I’m gay now.
Erin Ryan: Well, I mean, you’re already listening to Indigo Girls. [laughter] 50% of the way there. Speaking of gay, Limbaugh was rabidly homophobic. Like, he thought way more about gay sex than I think a lot of gay men even did. He was obsessed with it, suspiciously obsessed with it.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: On his show, Limbaugh further captured the lowest common denominator with a segment called AIDS Update, where he’d mock gay men who had died of AIDS during the height of the epidemic while playing Dionne Warwick’s I’ll Never Love Like This Again. Later in his career, Limbaugh would claim that Michael J. Fox, who had been living with Parkinson’s disease for decades, was exaggerating his symptoms in order to garner sympathy. Fox would later go on CNN and react to this clip which in my opinion. Wasn’t it a bit mean to play it for him? Like, who fucking cares what Rush Limbaugh thinks? He loves when celebrities dignify his garbage with a response.
Erin Ryan: Yeah, exactly. Side note, Rush Limbaugh could not possibly be more dead, and Michael J. Fox is still alive.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Yes, indeed.
Erin Ryan: Limbaugh was also obsessed with women’s behavior, whether they were sufficiently compliant to male preferences, specifically his preferences. He particularly had a problem with feminists using the portmanteau feminazis so often that some sources say he coined it.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: He said this unironically. On one episode of his TV show, tapping a pointer at a TV screen displaying Gloria Steinem posing with a cat. Gloria Steinem is a feminist, but she is also undeniably a stone-cold fox to this day at 91 years old. I mean, look at her. Saying feminists are ugly when this is one of the country’s most prominent feminists at the time? Be so fucking for real.
Erin Ryan: I know. Rush also claimed once that women live longer than men because their lives are easier. We know that this, like most confident opinions Rush Limbaugh had, is false. Research shows that women life longer than man because women are better than men.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Limbaugh once compared then 12-year-old Chelsea Clinton to a dog.
[clip of Rush Limbaugh]: Cute kid in the white house / no no no that’s not the kid that’s that’s the kid. [applause]
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Picking on a kid.
Erin Ryan: I’m so glad he didn’t like have children.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Oh, it’s a blessing. It’s such a miracle. He had some wacky beliefs about rape. Here he is struggling to understand the concept of consent in the context of sexual activity.
[clip of Rush Limbaugh]: The only thing that matters in American sexual mores today is one thing, you can do anything. The left will promote and understand and tolerate anything as long as there is one element.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: What is it?
[clip of Rush Limbaugh]: Do you know what it is?
Alyssa Mastromonaco: No, tell me.
[clip of Rush Limbaugh]: Consent. If there is consent on both or all three or all four, however many are involved in the sex act, it’s perfectly fine, whatever it is. But if the left ever senses and smells that there’s no consent in part of the equation, then here come the rape police. But consent is the magic key.
Erin Ryan: Yes.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Yes, you better seek consent, otherwise the rape police, otherwise known as the police, will come and get you. One time when it seemed like Limbaugh may experience a real consequence of flapping his big mouth was in 2011, when Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke testified before a congressional committee about the importance of including birth control on the list of preventative care covered by the then nascent Affordable Care Act.
[clip of Rush Limbaugh]: What does it say about the college co-ed, Susan Fluke, who goes before a Congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex? What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? Makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. Ms. Fluke, and the rest of you feminazis, here’s the deal. If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. And I’ll tell you what it is.
Erin Ryan: So fucking dumb.
[clip of Rush Limbaugh]: We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.
Erin Ryan: Okay, fine. Having medication paid for means that you are getting paid for whatever the medication is needed. By that logic, whoever his insurance company was, was paying for him to smoke cigars when he was dying of lung cancer. You know what I mean?
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Yeah.
Erin Ryan: Following this incident, more than 20 advertisers fled from Limbaugh’s show, but like most things that advertisers do, it was kind of full of shit because once the controversy died down they came back.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Yet another reminder that corporations are not your friends.
Erin Ryan: Limbaugh ended up issuing a sarcastic non-apology apology that he posted on his website and read on his radio program days later. In it, he mocks the controversy around the snafu and concludes it by sarcastically propositioning Fluke and encouraging her to dress more like Callista Gingrich.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: A weird person to be horny for. Fun fact, he played Peter Gabriel’s In Your Eyes in the background of that excruciating read and Gabriel sued him over it.
Erin Ryan: Love that for him. When confronted about his incendiary rhetoric, Limbaugh always had a playbook. He would claim that he was just joking. This is known as the pussy way to handle being called out for saying something fucked up. Rather than owning what he was saying, which at least requires balls, Limbaugh would shrink back into plausible deniability and claim that people who didn’t like what he said simply could not understand jokes.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: I can think of a few conservative figures who rely on this Schrodinger’s joke method of avoiding accountability.
Erin Ryan: I can think of a few ex-boyfriends who relied on this, but let’s not forget about the racism. Limbaugh had a lot of stupid things to say about Black people too. He once told a caller to his radio show to take the bone out of your nose and call me back.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Oh, Jesus.
Erin Ryan: Despite this long documented history of being a braying bigot, in 2003, somebody at ESPN decided it’d be a good idea to hire him as a commentator on Sunday NFL Countdown. I’m picturing him just working as hard as he can to suppress his racism so that he wouldn’t piss off the wrong executive, but that effort only lasted until week four of the season when Limbaugh had this to say about Eagles starting quarterback Donovan McNabb.
[clip of Rush Limbaugh]: I think there’s some total of what you’re all saying is that Donovan McNabb is regressing. He’s going backwards. And my, I’m sorry to say this, I don’t think he’s been that good from the get-go. I think what we’ve had here is a little social concern in the NFL. I think the media has been very desirous that a Black quarterback do well. Where it’s in Black coaches and Black quarterbacks doing well. I think a little hope invested in McNabb and he got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he really didn’t deserve—
Erin Ryan: As a Go Birds household, rut-row. These comments did not go over well with the people who were not sitting at the desk alongside Rush Limbaugh that day. Donovan McNabb, who 100% could have, and probably should have, kicked Rush Limbaugh’s ass, had a problem with it.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: As did Black journalists and democratic politicians. Limbaugh resigned from the job days later, and ESPN called the remarks insensitive and inappropriate.
Erin Ryan: Limbaugh’s comment about McNabb was also a great example of how racism makes you sound like a stupid fucking bitch. Donovan McNabb had an incredible season that year. He played in the Pro Bowl. His team, the Eagles, went 12-4. And since McNabb’s career, Black quarterbacks have become more and more dominant in the NFL. By 2017, all 32 NFL teams had at least one Black quarterback on the roster. And in early 2025, half of the starting quarterbacks in the league were Black for first time.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Once again, Rush Limbaugh was dumb and wrong. In 2009, Limbaugh tried to stick his nose into the NFL again, joining a group that planned on bidding on the St. Louis Rams as a limited partner.
Erin Ryan: But then people were like, what the fuck, this racist piece of shit? And the group bidding on the Rams dropped him before moving forward with their bid, citing the fact that Limbaugh’s involvement caused complications. Among the complications were resurfaced comments that Limbaugh had made about football games resembling gang wars between the Crips and Bloods.
[clip of Rush Limbaugh]: One of the things that is going around out there is that Black NFL players will boycott playing the game if I am an owner in the league which of course is patently absurd but this is is being reported in its since uh… It’s designed to affect the outcome of all of this.
Erin Ryan: You know, Alyssa, something tells me that the appeal of bidding on an NFL franchise was that Limbaugh kind of always wanted to feel like he owned some Black people.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Ugh.
[AD BREAK]
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Limbaugh’s show was also known for its cringe-worthy parody songs, many of which were performed by Paul Shanklin. Paul Shanklin is a conservative humorist and impressionist, and he’s about as funny as a dad getting kicked out of a middle school volleyball game.
Erin Ryan: According to his website, Shanklin has written over 1,300 parody songs, including many that got famous on Limbaugh’s radio show after he joined forces with the host in the early 1990s.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Here’s an excerpt from one of his many works, Banking Queen, a parody of Abba’s Dancing Queen, except written about former U.S. Representative Barney Frank. Here are some sample lyrics. You can build, you can buy, any house our heart desires, zero down financing, I am the banking queen.
Erin Ryan: You know, those lyrics are such a long, boring walk to get to the punchline, which is like, Barney Frank is gay. Ha ha ha. [both speaking] Queen, oh, there we go. Shanklin’s most noteworthy collaboration with Limbaugh was a 2007 parody song called Barack the Magic Negro, wherein Shanklin impersonated the Reverend Al Sharpton, lamenting the appeal of then upstart Illinois Senator Barack Obama. The title of the piece was not a Limbaugh original creation. It was taken from the title of an op-ed published in the Los Angeles Times, but I digress.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: This is 12 year old boy farting into a tape recorder level humor, but the idiots who listened to Rush Limbaugh slurped this slop up. It’s set to the tune of Puff the Magic Dragon and I cannot believe Peter, Paul and Mary didn’t sue for copyright infringement.
Erin Ryan: They absolutely should have. Barack the Magic Negro was such a hit among the AM radio dipshit crew that it even played a role in shaping Republican politics. Yeah, in early 2009, Chip Saltsman…
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Chip Saltsman? Come on!
Erin Ryan: It’s a great name. Chip Saltsman was forced to withdraw from the race to run the Republican National Committee when it came to light that for Christmas in 2008 he’d gifted his friends a Paul Shanklin CD containing the track Barack the Magic Negro.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Imagine being gifted a political parody CD in 2008. I would be furious.
Erin Ryan: Imagine being gifted a political parody CD in 2018 containing songs that were at least a year old.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: But in Republican politics jokes.
Erin Ryan: They sure don’t. That’s why the MAGA crowd is still laughing at I identify as a toaster jokes and proclaiming that their pronouns are kiss my ass they were cracking up to honey badger don’t give a fuck for like for like six years. Republicans repeat jokes like they repeat trickle-down economics. Even if it didn’t work the last 10 times they tried it, it might work this time.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Limbaugh was not without his vices.
Erin Ryan: In 2003, a former housekeeper for Limbaugh told investigators and then the national inquirer that she’d been supplying her ex-employer with thousands of pills and that Rush was being investigated for his participation in a South Florida drug ring. The conservative hardliner who had previously advocated for tougher anti-drug enforcement on his radio show, was hoovering up the opioids Oxycontin and hydrocodone like a fat anteater. On October 10, 2003, unable to deny reality for any longer, Limbaugh admitted to his audience that immediately after his broadcast, he’d be entering rehab for 30 days. After that, the state seized his prescription records and found that he’d obtained at at least 2,000 pills from doctors over the previous six months.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Erin, that’s a horse-killingly large number of pills.
Erin Ryan: Yes, it is. Prosecutors alleged that he’d obtained these pills by doctor shopping or going from physician to physician, seeking overlapping prescriptions with the intent of gorging his gullet with those sweet, sweet opioids.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Sounds like a pretty serious amount of drugs. What ended up happening to him?
Erin Ryan: The gentlest little slap on the wrist. After a two-year investigation, Limbaugh surrendered himself at the Palm Beach County Jail on one single felony charge. The charge was concealing information to obtain prescription drugs. He posted a $3,000 bail and entered a not-guilty plea. Eventually, prosecutors and Limbaugh’s legal team agreed that the charge would be dismissed after 18 months if he met a series of conditions, like continuing addiction treatment, submitting to random drug tests, giving up his guns temporarily. And paying $30,000 to reimburse the county for the costs of the investigation into his pill popping.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: What a punishment.
Erin Ryan: Yeah, pretty bad stuff.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: It’s like jaywalking.
Erin Ryan: I know. I mean, and to make matters even wilder, after he complied with these conditions, charges were dropped, which meant that Limbaugh, who was caught illegally obtaining 2,000 pills through fraudulent means, did not serve prison time and did not have a felony on his record. You know, Alyssa. This reminds me of one of my favorite anecdotes about the dumbest Nazi, Hermann Göring.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Always interested to learn of a very dumb Nazi.
Erin Ryan: Yeah, so during World War II, Hermann Göring was the head of the Nazi Luftwaffe, which is a very cute sounding name for a very not cute thing, the Nazi Air Force. Göring, like Limbaugh, was a pill fiend. He was such a prolific pill fiend that at one point, he was redirecting the entire German supply of an opiate called paracodeine to himself.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Um, okay, okay. If Limbaugh had had more time to suck up to the Sackler’s, do you think he could have cornered the market on Oxy?
Erin Ryan: Yes, I feel like if Oxy were still being produced today and if Limbaugh had not croaked, he would be, they would all just be going directly to his house.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Okay, so more serious question. How do we know Rush Limbaugh wasn’t selling the pills? I mean, 2,000 pills in six months, who could possibly take that many?
Erin Ryan: We don’t know. The system is unfair and it lets rich people get off easy. There’s no evidence that he was, but you know, that’s a lot of pills. That’s a LOT of pills and Rush Limbaugh’s pharmaceutical foibles weren’t done. In July 2006, Limbaugh went away on a boy’s weekend to the Dominican Republic and on his return to the States in a private plane, customs officers found a bottle of Viagra in his luggage prescribed in the name of another man, Steven Strumwasser. This is a no-no for international travel, especially for a guy who had faced a drug charge.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: The Smoking Gun got hold of a passenger manifest from the trip and reported that Limbaugh had in his possession 2900 milligram Viagra pills. Later Limbaugh claimed that the Viagra had been prescribed for his quote “exclusive use” and that Strumwasser was his doctor. You see, Limbaugh had the drugs prescribed in a different name, quote, “to protect my given the embarrassing nature of Viagra.”
Erin Ryan: More embarrassing than having erectile dysfunction is getting caught with dick don’t work pills on your way back from an all dudes trip to a known sex tourism destination. Like, yuck.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Yuck. It probably seems like Limbaugh is impossible to knock down, like a giant Weeble, but he did experience quite a bit of failure in his life. Dude was making about $85 million per year pretending to care about issues that impact regular blue collar Americans, but his success had some pretty clear limits.
Erin Ryan: One of the main limits was that people didn’t really like looking at him, mean but true. The Rush Limbaugh TV show only lasted a few years in the 90s, blazing onto the scene with much fanfare, but fizzling out as audiences realized that watching Rush Limbaugh on TV took more of a commitment than listening to him while driving between roadside murders on a long-haul trucking route.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: He simply was not interesting to watch. Everything he understood about his brand of Klan Morning Zoo Radio didn’t work on a visual medium.
Erin Ryan: Another area in which Rush Limbaugh failed a lot was in actually embodying the idealized vision of masculinity he pushed on his listeners. The sort of patriarchal idea was probably more of a regurgitation of what he heard around the dinner table than an honest reflection of his own beliefs, if he even had his own beliefs. Even though Rush bled with desire to please his father, he simply was not built to be the sort of stern patriarch his dad exemplified.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Let’s talk about Rush’s marriages for a second. His first wife Roxy was a secretary at a Kansas City radio station. Rush was 26 when the two were married and 29 when Roxy filed for divorce on the grounds of incompatibility.
Erin Ryan: Rush married his second wife, Michelle, in 1983. She’d been an usherette at the Kansas City Royal Stadium. Why does every job have to have a girl name? She could just be an usher. She’s an usher, whatever. But this was back when Rush had basically failed out of radio and had given up to work at a sales job. Michelle left Rush during Christmas weekend in 1988. Their divorce was finalized in 1990.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: You gotta be pretty ripped shit to blow up your marriage on Christmas weekend, but I guess Michelle wasn’t starting off 1989 with that fat albatross around her neck. [laughter] So his first two marriages and divorces happened basically before his career had even gotten legs.
Erin Ryan: Exactly. Wife number three was a Florida aerobics instructor named Marta Fitzgerald, who, according to reports, he met on the internet in 1990.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: 1990 on the internet? Rush must have been a true pioneer of the worldwide web which only debuted in late 89.
Erin Ryan: I guess. Before Marta met Rush, she too had been married and divorced twice, and she had two children from her previous relationships. Apparently she and Rush’s love blossomed, and in 1994, the two were married at the home of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Of course.
Erin Ryan: What the fuck? Thomas officiated the ceremony. James Carville and Mary Matalin were in attendance.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: That also weirdly tracks.
Erin Ryan: It sure does. According to the Palm Beach Post, Marta was rarely seen in public while she was married to Rush, although there are photos of the two of them together. And she kind of looks like a, like an unsurgically enhanced version of Maria, AKA DJ Tumbles, from Members Only Palm Beach. She really does. But then again, then again. Everybody in Palm Beach looks like they’re working toward the same face surgically.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: More than a decade after their 2004 divorce Marta wrote a self-help book called What it Looks Like which is currently unavailable on Amazon So take it right off your book club list.
Erin Ryan: After his third divorce, Rush stayed single for a few years before marrying a woman in her early 30s named Kathryn in 2010. I’m sure she was in love with him for his personality. Kathryn inherited Limbaugh’s garish Palm Beach mansion after he died.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Congrats girl, you did it. You landed the gold digger triple axel.
Erin Ryan: So for those keeping score at home, despite being such a simp for the patriarchy, Rush Limbaugh was not a patriarch. He was married four times, he had zero children, even with the aid of his doctor’s Viagra prescription.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Which is honestly fine, Rush Limbaugh seems like he would have been a crappy dad, and the fact that he didn’t bring children into the world and subject them to whatever intricate constellation of shame and fear he had that led to his myriad addictions and vices, that is probably a good thing.
Erin Ryan: Well Rush’s brother David did do the whole lawyer-patriarch thing. David is still married to his original wife and the two have five kids together. Maybe David should have been the one named Rush III. [laughter] Rush Limbaugh was also an utter failure at taking care of that precious vessel that was his body. He performatively puffed on cigars and was an unapologetic former cigarette smoker. He ridiculed the notion that the government should regulate tobacco at all. Here he is claiming against medical evidence that secondhand smoke doesn’t cancer.
[clip of Rush Limbaugh]: Second-hand smoke kills more than six hundred thousand people worldwide every year according to a new study they found forty percent of children and more than thirty percent of non-smoking men and women regularly breathe in secondhand smoke I mean this is pure bunk. All of this is just a crock and I did and I, I look at this this kind of stuff this debate’s been going on for thirty years [laughter] I don’t know how many people have been around secondhand smoke all their lives. This is just, it’s all lies. It’s what the left does. [laughter] Lies about our light bulbs, lies about global warming, and now lies about this. [overlapping speaking] All for the express purpose of ending up controlling people’s lives.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: He’s mad about LED light bulbs.
Erin Ryan: You know, take it from me, a guy that flunked out of college after two semesters who’s been going over these science studies. I know what I’m talking about. Limbaugh further claimed that there was no proof that nicotine was addictive or that smoking caused cancer or emphysema, among other scientifically illiterate but discomfort-alleviating statements he’d make over his long career of yapping. Another way Limbaugh failed to live up to the idealized version of masculinity he preached to his fans was that he was not a healthy or robust man. In fact, he frequently relied on the expertise of the sort of scientific elites he’s implicitly derided on his show to save his ass.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Like in 2001 when he received a cochlear implant to save his hearing. One of his specialists said that she couldn’t rule out the possibility that his opioid addiction had contributed to his hearing loss. But thanks to modern science, brought to you by government grants and years of sacrifice of academics devoted to studying the world around them, Limbaugh got to keep his hearing.
Erin Ryan: In 2014, he got another cochlear implant in his other ear and credited God for the improvement that medical science had provided to him.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Of course, Limbaugh was a total simp for Donald Trump, and can you blame him? It’s kind of like looking in a mirror, a circus mirror, but a mirror regardless. It’s hard to ignore the similarities between Limbaugh and the 45th and 47th President of the United States.
Erin Ryan: Limbaugh loved Trump’s rhetoric around deportation, cutting environmental regulation, and punching down. Actually, when I saw that clip of Limbaugh impersonating Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s tremors, I was kind of reminded of this clip of Donald Trump mocking a disabled reporter.
[clip of Donald Trump]: Written by a nice reporter. Now the poor guy. You got to see this guy. Uh, I don’t know what I said, uh, I don’t remember. He’s going like, I don’t remember. Oh, baby, that’s what I said. This is 14 years ago. He still, they didn’t do a retraction.
Erin Ryan: You know what? I’m gonna bright side that video. When you compare his level of liveliness and apparent health in that video to like what we’re seeing today.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: He was much more dynamic.
Erin Ryan: There’s been a bit of a decline. Hashtag Hopecore.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: On January 20th, 2020, doctors diagnosed Limbaugh with lung cancer, which by his own pronouncements should have been impossible. In the past, he’d sneered to his millions of listeners that tobacco, quote, “takes 50 years to kill people if it does.” Limbaugh was Trump’s guest at the State of the Union the day after Limbaugh announced his diagnosis. At the speech, the then president announced that he would be awarding Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom, thus single-handedly eliminating the significance of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Previous recipients of the award include Duke Ellington, Jonas Salk, Martin Luther King Jr., and Arthur Ashe.
Erin Ryan: To be fair, there have been some turds who received the medal as well, like Henry Kissinger, Strom Thurmond, Ellen DeGeneres, although she’s not in the Strom Thurmond level, and Margaret Thatcher. The COVID pandemic blew up shortly thereafter, and of course, Rush Limbaugh was a stupid bitch about that too. Right after the number of cases started picking up in the US, Limbaugh mocked public health officials’ concerns.
[clip of Rush Limbaugh]: The coronavirus being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump. Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks. The drive-by media hype of this thing as a pandemic, as the Andromeda strain, as oh my God, if you get it, you’re dead. Do you know what the… I think the, the, um… The survival rate is 98%. 98% of people who get the coronavirus survive. It’s a respiratory system virus. It probably is a CHICOM laboratory experiment that is in the process of being weaponized. All super power nations weaponize bio.
Erin Ryan: That’s such a gross thing to be like, well, 90, only 2% of people die. Well, what about the people that get it seriously? What does their lives look like?
Alyssa Mastromonaco: The portable morgue trucks in New York City tell a somewhat different story.
Erin Ryan: This was despite the fact that he was a stage 4 cancer patient trying to live with a severely depressed immune system. But you know what, Rush, whatever. Do what you want.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: By October 2020, doctors had proclaimed Limbaugh’s illness terminal, which should have been impossible given the fact that according to him, smoking doesn’t cause cancer.
Erin Ryan: Still, Limbaugh was a metaphorical cancer on American society until literal cancer itself got him. In the waning days of the 2020 presidential campaign, he hosted a virtual rally for Donald Trump. Trump was recovering from a serious bout of COVID-19 that had resulted in his hospitalization. Both men who never wanted for anything in their spoiled lives found a lot to complain about. Limbaugh’s time on this mortal coil was drawing to a close, but there was still plenty to be wrong about. His post-January 6th broadcasts were classic Limbaugh. A confident, bombastic dumbass who was wrong about things like election integrity, the nature of the deadly January 6th riots. He blamed the Democrats for what Trump had incited and stoked. He also did this from the comfort of his studio, which is just down the road from his 50-million-dollar Palm Beach mansion. To the very end, a ghoul insulated from the consequences of his rhetoric, but not from the consequence of his choices.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Limbaugh claimed that the plan of the Biden campaign all along was to install Kamala Harris’s president days after his swearing in. He lived long enough to see himself be wrong about that, too, but not much longer. Limbaugh died of lung cancer on February 17, 2021, at age 70, an insane waste of life from a man descended from a grandfather who had been a brilliant lawyer until he was nearly 104 years old.
Erin Ryan: Yeah, it’s called wasting your genes, buddy. When Limbaugh passed, Florida Governor Meatball Ron DeSantis ordered flags in America’s capital of invasive boa constrictors and geriatric chlamydia to be lowered to half-staff, much like Rush Limbaugh’s penis without the aid of illegal Viagra.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: R.I.P. Rush, you would have loved pretending you weren’t on Ozempic.
Erin Ryan: R.I.P. Rush, you would have loved Heated Rivalry. [laughter] Something I’ve seen passed around about Limbaugh since he died that I agree with is that nobody seems to miss him as a human being. He was influential, but nobody really talks about what kind of a guy he was because he was a shitty, vacuous shell of a person who only cared about indulging his addictions, who only made the world worse. He’s the biggest influence on the meanest, loneliest old man you know, the patron saying of dads whose kids won’t talk to them anymore and the unattractive, Fox News-obsessed married manager who gets drunk and hits on the interns at the company holiday party.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Was he funny? No. Was he attractive? Was he interesting? Also no. Was he wrong? Almost always. But he was also a star because at any given time about one third of the country saw themselves in him.
Erin Ryan: So there you have it, Alyssa, Rush Limbaugh. How would you rate him on our matrix of fucking guys?
Alyssa Mastromonaco: I have to say, I think he’s just a reckless, dumb ass and an opportunist. What do you think?
Erin Ryan: I find that if somebody is in the public eye for a very long time, if they start as an opportunists, the arc of history bends them toward true believing zealot. Like they start to like get high on their own supply.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: I guess you’re right.
Erin Ryan: Literally and figuratively. I think he started out being a opportunist and then, eventually, who you pretend to be becomes who you are. So be careful who you’re pretending to be. You know?
Alyssa Mastromonaco: All right. Well, thank God I just pretend to me. Uh, and that about wraps up the time we have for this episode of This F*cking Guy. If you like what you’ve seen, hit subscribe, share with your friends, and leave us a comment if you’ve got an idea for a future fucking guy we should spotlight.
Erin Ryan: Thank you, by the way, for getting us to half a million subscribers.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Yes.
Erin Ryan: Let 2026 be the year we make it to a million plus. Sky’s the limit, guys. This episode was written by me with an assist from Alyssa Mastromonaco. Claire Fogarty is Hysteria’s associate producer. All the rest of our credits, as well as links to our sources like Bob Moser’s posthumous Rolling Stone toast of Limbaugh can be found in our show notes. Take care, be well, remember that you can’t say something doesn’t cause cancer just because you like it.
Alyssa Mastromonaco: And fuck that guy.
Erin Ryan: Fuck that guy!
