Rush Redux

Rush Limbaugh—god knows I’ve wanted to say this out loud for years—is a wuss. That’s right, I said it: A wuss and a coward and just one more stigma for responsibly recovering addicts and alcoholics everywhere to deal with.

Not long ago there was that whole ugly Million Little Pieces deal. Maybe, in the long run, it really isn’t gonna matter a whole lot that James Frey lied about his experiences as a recovering addict, but for the time being, it has this ex-boozer pretty pissed off; I’ve known hundreds of people who had far worse stories to tell (I was in rehab with some of ‘em—twice), and were content to tell them in the confines of a smoky and caffeinated AA room. You don’t see ‘em on Oprah.

Now this. Look, Rush is an asshole, an open secret if it’s one at all. So maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that he took the rich coward’s way out--the same path taken, incidentally, by the very people he claims are ruining this country. He bought a deal, just like your basic celebrity, a deal he would have called Faustian had it been made by one of those celebrities he professes to loathe.

Lest you have any doubt that Rush got the special treatment he has so roundly pissed and moaned about in the past, I refer you to the story of Richard Paey, also of Florida, a man with real pain, not just a jones, a man who has been sentenced to 25 years in prison basically because he was badly hurt in an auto accident and medical science, once again earning the big bucks, messed him up more. (Google him. You’ll see what I mean.) Richard, incidentally, does not have a book deal that we know of. We probably won’t be seeing him on Oprah, either, even though he’s in a wheelchair.

The point is simply this: People like Limbaugh and Frey cheapen what millions of recovering addicts go through, in the same way that Ted Kennedy cheapens liberalism and George Bush gives conservatism a truly poisonous taste. They are to sobriety what a kidney stone is to a good night's sleep.

The ditto-heads—who are no doubt still congratulating Rush on his legal shenanigans—will have forgotten by now that their leader called not so long ago for the public flogging of drug addicts and for burning low-level dealers at the stake. I believe he even called for the public hanging of Dangerous Criminal Mastermind Richard Paey. This is the same guy, after all, who, were it not for the weekly drug tests, would probably be ringing up Keith Richards right now, asking him for the name of the doctor treating him after that fall in New Zealand on the premise that any doctor attending to Keith must have access, as they say, to the good shit.

I made some of that up, but you know what? It doesn’t matter. Just ask Frey and Rush.