I started listening to Limbaugh in the 90s and tuned in from time to time in the decades after, drawn in fascination--my contempt was a given--by the way his show was like a neverending "War of the Worlds," a fiction heard as fact that fed fear and despair and wars and denial...

That's what made rightwing demagogues interesting me as a writer: their creation of imaginary worlds, awful as they may be. Like the White Witch's permanent winter in Narnia. Rush lived in a permanent Reagan ascendance of 1984, the sore-winner grievance smirk of an Ollie North...

"Libs" hated Rush because he not only was the worst kind of pompous, blustery, country club ass but he actually sounded the part. He *wanted* to sound the part. He was "good" at radio, he had incredible control of his voice. He chose that character *because* "libs" hated it...

Rush was like the blowhard played by Ted Knight in Caddy Shack only more so. He played The Pretenders & claimed the Rodney Dangerfield character, too. He was the dialectical method of American authoritarianism, thesis--conservatism--antithesis--populism--synthesis: fascism...

In this sense, Rush was ahead of the curve, the harbinger of the new American reactionary style: "owning the libs" by performing--becoming--precisely the creep they accuse you of being.