"ADDICTED TO RUSH"

I heard something rather amazing on the radio last night. The station I was listening to carries lots of conservative talk shows, you know, Hannity, O'Reilly, and of course, Rush Limbaugh. So it wasn't at all surprising to hear a thirty second spot promoting Rush's show. What was surprising to me was the angle the ad took. Robert Palmer's 80s pop-rock hit "Addicted to Love" played continually in the background, but the lyrics were slightly altered such that the word "love" was changed to "Rush." Get it? "Addicted to Rush." Cute. The idea is that Limbaugh's show is so great that it's simply impossible to stop listening. Over the music, snippets of callers talking about how much they love the show alternated with snippets of Rush's typical yammerings . That's how it became downright surreal: one of Rush's lines was something like "the only positively healthy addiction out there." Pretty wild, huh?

What makes this particularly amazing is that there was absolutely no sense of irony--just in case you haven't heard, Rush is still caught up in a Florida criminal investigation of how, exactly, he was able to feed his very real Oxycontin addiction. There was no radio equivalent of a wink-wink, no little jokes to let the listener understand they were riffing on the scandal. Nothing like that at all. Just the cutesy "Addicted to Rush" theme. Does Rush even understand this? Do his listeners? After years of hearing the wildest contradictions coming out of the right wing, I'm really coming to the conclusion that conservatives just don't understand irony.



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