I was laughing out loud ( :lol: ) this afternoon after reading Patt Morrison's column. she pretty much summed up my feelings toward this mini-scandal. And it touches upon the crux of G-Man and Dave TWB's argument that he admitted to it thus making him exempt from whatever he has coming to him.

quote:
October 14, 2003


Patt Morrison:
Recent Conservative Outcry Reeks of Liberal Leanings

OK, let's get started. My friends, here is a tale you won't believe, but I'm not making this up.

You've all probably heard of this man — rich guy, famous guy, important friends, smart man, everything going for him. He made it big on the airwaves, making fun of people he doesn't like. Once, on TV, he says, "Did you know there's a White House dog?" and puts up a picture of Chelsea Clinton, 13 years old. A funny guy.

Now this man, who told millions of listeners eight years ago that "too many whites are getting away with drug use," that it's time to "convict them and send them up the river" — folks, I am quoting right there — this man now admits he is addicted to something they call hillbilly heroin, OxyContin. I think that's worth passing on.

All right — quick break.

Actually, the break will last about 30 days. That's how long radio host Rush Limbaugh says he'll be in rehab to break his addiction to pain pills. Or, if things go badly for Limbaugh in what he says is an official investigation, the break might go on for years, depending on prosecutors and Florida's sentencing guidelines.

Limbaugh's radio colleagues and myriad fans are pleading for tolerance and patience, asking people to please withhold their judgment until all the facts are in.

Why start now, guys?

The old saying is that a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged.

The new saying — because I just made it up — is that a liberal is a conservative who's been indicted. Iran-Contra leading man Oliver North — patriot, conservative, talk-show host — invoked that pinko 5th Amendment in that radical Bill of Rights, and when his felony conviction was overturned on what GOP Sen. John Warner called a "technicality," some incensed Republicans called Warner a traitor for saying so.

On the same 1995 show when Limbaugh demanded that more white people go to prison for drug use, he said this about crime: " this country appears to be tolerant, forgive and forget You go out and commit the worst murder in the world and you just say you're sorry We're becoming too tolerant, folks."

You know how it goes, Mr. Limbaugh: One man's tolerance is another man's justice.

If worse comes to worst, I wonder which Limbaugh would find more intolerable: doing hard time, or getting leniency and a suspended sentence from one of those liberal judges he's railed about?


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The Limbaugh news was the perfect coda to a California governor's election that was short on news but long on entertainment.

Limbaugh demurs that he's a showman, a talk-show host, not a journalist.

That's true. He's never put in the reporter's shoe-leather of Journalism 101, covering a fire, interviewing zoning commissioners, reporting on a trial, never had to write an obituary or follow the tedious paper trail of a fraud. "Entertainer" is good cover for hyperbole and error — even "mendacity," as former Michigan Republican Gov. William Milliken once characterized the Limbaugh set.

The entertainers declare that what they do isn't news at all. Yet the ranks of people who say they get their "news" from entertainment shows is on the rise, which is like trying to get your daily protein requirement by eating a hundred peanut butter cookies.

Arnold Schwarzenegger knew this when he booked himself not on hard-news interviews, but on the sets of congenial chat-shows (Larry King), of comedy (Jay Leno), of friends (Oprah Winfrey).

Why did Schwarzenegger get a solo, and not the other 134 candidates?

Partly because broadcast's fairness doctrine, instituted in 1949 to make sure reasonable opposing views get aired, was abandoned in 1987 — just before Limbaugh inaugurated the Age of Rant Radio.

Congress has tried to restore the doctrine, but Limbaugh fans, among others, swamped Congress with protests. (I'm puzzled: If the broadcast media are so liberal, wouldn't the fairness doctrine be a good thing, because it would force them to air the other side?)

And candidate Schwarzenegger was free to appear on Howard Stern's louche radio show because the FCC declared Stern's to be a "bona fide news interview program," and thus not obligated to invite the other 134 candidates to be interviewed about news issues, like their policies on lap-dancing.

The L.A. Times wrote dozens of critical stories about Gray Davis' pathological fund-raising, his cronyism with contributors and pay-for-play politics. I pointed out that the most dangerous real estate in California was between Gray Davis and a campaign contribution.

But The Times wrote about Schwarzenegger's vulgar gropings, prompting the candidate to confess to treating women badly, and oh my, suddenly talk radio rushed to defend this poor, world-famous millionaire from the wicked, wicked press.

A colleague at a children's birthday party in Woodland Hills on Sunday found himself defending The Times' story. One woman cut him short with a wave of the hand: "It's not that I don't believe the allegations. I'm sure they're true. And he's probably done worse. I just don't care."

Voters don't have to care. But they are obliged as voters to know, which is why this paper wrote about Davis' money-mongering, too, and why it joined the conservative American Spectator magazine in breaking the Bill Clinton "Troopergate" sex story, and on and on. (Just where do you think the comics get the raw material for their Davis and Clinton and Schwarzenegger jokes? They pay their four bits and buy a newspaper, that's where.)

Limbaugh and his radio empire will survive his confession. Schwarzenegger did. William Bennett, author of "The Book of Virtues" and "The Death of Outrage," the man who gambled reported millions compulsively, 'fessed up and is still on the rubber-rooster circuit. Lawrence Kudlow, who was Ronald Reagan's chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget, acknowledged in the 1990s that he was a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, and he's got a show on CNBC. Just about the only difference between their vices and Bill Clinton's seems to be that it's not whether you do it, but that you confess to it.

If Howard Stern's show really is news, then perhaps I've got to reassess my career priorities. Maybe I'll give up this gig and do something big, something that matters, something that really influences the hearts and minds of millions upon millions of Americans.

I think I'll draw a comic strip.

- click me.

quote:
Now, a Real Drug Challenge

Millions of "dittoheads" around the country will be in withdrawal this week, with their drug of choice — conservative talk show king Rush Limbaugh — gone from the airwaves for a 30-day stint in drug rehab. Limbaugh's announcement that he is seeking treatment for an addiction to pain medication followed claims by a former housekeeper that she spent years supplying him with black-market prescription narcotics. Lots of narcotics — more than 30,000 hydrocodone, Lorcet and OxyContin tablets.

Limbaugh has not publicly responded to her allegations, but his admission of addiction last week unleashed snickers among liberals and contortions among conservatives, who were desperate to distinguish their hero's problem from the moral failings of those celebrity addicts that Limbaugh took glee in castigating. Internet muckraker Matt Drudge even offered this silver lining: "Imagine how good he did on the air on the medication. If we can get him off [drugs], it'll be a real challenge to the liberals in this country."

Forget about the challenge to liberals. Breaking the stranglehold of addiction will be challenge enough for Limbaugh. He's already been through two recovery programs and relapsed. Even the most intense residential programs offer only a 50% chance of recovery for prescription-drug addicts. And unlike many of those abusers, Limbaugh probably won't have to manage his recovery from jail. Although the allegations against him constitute a felony in his home state of Florida, officials rarely prosecute users except as leverage to bring in their dealers. Still, given the publicity in a state so tough that the governor let his own addict-daughter go to jail, it could be hard to justify giving Limbaugh a pass.

In fact, Limbaugh might insist on a little prison time, if he buys his own rhetoric. People who violate the law by using drugs ought to be sent "up the river," no matter their race or social class, Limbaugh has said. But is up the river the place for him? So far, there's been no public push for that.

When Limbaugh emerges from treatment this time around, perhaps he'll understand that he was no different from the addict on the street scrounging for his next fix. Maybe he can contribute something better than macho bluster to the debate over treatment of drug offenders — a group that includes those offering medical marijuana to cancer patients and rich, white radio hosts trying to score pills in the parking lot of Denny's.
How do you spell "hypocrite"? I spell it "Rush. For years Limbaugh has taken the hard line against drugs and drug abusers while all the time knowing that he himself was an addict. Now we are supposed to pray for his recovery and wring our hands for this paragon of virtue who has fallen to this terrible addiction.

One could certainly sympathize with Limbaugh if he had ever shown a modicum of empathy for people who suffered from similar addictions or perhaps were just self-medicating to escape the tragedy of their lives. But it is hard to conjure up much sympathy for a man who was at the forefront of the zero-tolerance, no-on-medical-marijuana conservative do-gooders who lumped all illegal drug users into one big pile and took the "put them in jail and throw away the key" approach. Now Limbaugh can join that other right-wing hypocrite William Bennett, and we can only hope that the embarrassing revelations about their personal lives teach them the meaning of tolerance.

Limbaugh's hypocrisy and clever use of language does not obfuscate the fact the he is, by any other name, a drug addict. OxyContin, morphine or heroin — they are all the same: opiates. Although Limbaugh continually uses the term "prescription pain medication," he fails to acknowledge that he obtained this very popular street drug the same way that the "addicts" he rails against get it — illegally, without a prescription.

Limbaugh, yet another family-values conservative hypocrite, is an outstanding example of the double standard used in the war on drugs: If you're rich and powerful, you are addicted to "prescription pain medication" and you receive help. If you're poor, you're a "drug addict" and you receive a mandatory jail sentence. I wish Limbaugh well in his recovery efforts. I would not want to send him to jail for his illegal drug use. I would, however, like to give him a life sentence for his hypocrisy

And finally I shall post this for all the people who deried the "Peoples Republic of California" and our wacky "liberal" ideas. I think given the circumstances, Limbaugh himself might refrain from snickering and mocking us both on our leniancy towards drugs and towards our ballot initiatives.

quote:
Admissions to Treatment Programs Jump Since Approval of 2000 Ballot Measure

UCLA study tracks drug offenders who received help, rather than jail time, after voters passed Proposition 36.

By Don Thompson, Associated Press Writer


SACRAMENTO — Admissions to treatment programs in five major California counties have climbed sharply since voters decided three years ago that first-time nonviolent drug offenders should not go to prison, according to a tracking study that was to be released today.

Drug programs are having difficulty treating offenders with multiple or severe problems, the UCLA study found.

The five-year study, now in its first year, was published in the journal Evaluation Review. It does not draw conclusions about the success of treatment programs in preventing future crime or drug abuse.

The goal of the study, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, is to identify how best to treat offenders who would have been sent to prison or jail had voters not approved Proposition 36 in November 2000.

The initiative took effect in July 2001.

Since then, admissions to drug treatment programs jumped 27% in Kern County, 21% in Riverside County, 17% in Sacramento County and 16% in San Diego County.

The only county without an increase was San Francisco, which had an extensive diversion program and prosecution policy before the statewide initiative.

Most of the abusers went to outpatient programs.

Counties had less success in treating patients with severe addictions, whose abuse was complicated by mental illness or disability, or who were homeless, according to the study by researchers at UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute.

Still, counties' progress in implementing the voter mandate, and the creative strategies they are using, are "encouraging," the study's lead author, Yih-Ing Hser, said in a prepared statement.

Hser is an investigator with the Institute's Integrated Substance Abuse Programs.

The study found that those diverted from the criminal justice system into treatment programs tended to be male first-time offenders with full-time jobs. Most used methamphetamine and marijuana, while heroin users and injection-drug users were less likely to participate in treatment programs.

The study found significant variation in how counties are complying with the voter mandate.

San Francisco requires no urine tests. At the other extreme, Sacramento County has random urine testing both by treatment programs and its probation department. The other three counties leave it up to treatment programs to do testing.

The counties also vary on providing methadone treatment for patients.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-drug14oct14235630,1,3096373.story?coll=la-headlines-pe-california


and if you want to know WHY this is such a strong story, I think Newsweek summed it up best:

quote:
The fall of a moralist is always a great American spectacle. The Elmer Gantry story—the righteous preacher who turns out to be a letch and a boozer—has a special resonance in a nation that postures as morally superior but enjoys sin. Nothing entertains (or instructs in the essentials of human nature) like hypocrisy on a grand scale. When Bill Bennett, best-selling author of “The Book of Virtues,” was outed as a compulsive gambler, and evangelist Jim Bakker was caught embezzling from his Praise the Lord empire, the lamentations of the true believers were drowned out by the snickers of the knowing.
And that is why this is so riveting. Because the dreaded "liberal" and Clinton don't go around posturing about their moral superiority. While the godly conservatives routinely like to present themselves as beyond any sin and temptation and above what they refer to as moral relativism. It seems we're all human after all, eh? Both us conservatives and those immoral treasonous "liberals".

And if this pisses off some of you true beleivers out there. Good. as has been posted above, I'm sure Limbaugh himself would be at the forefront riduculing and moralizing had it been say Michael Moore or Tim Robbins with this problem. If you can't admit that this is true then you truly are a deluded "dittohead". Maybe this is the wake up call to embrace what I originally said in this thread, true "compassionate conservatism" instead of just lip service to it while continuing on on your merry way of self-righteous *#$@*&.

"OH GOD!!!! THE LIBERALS ARE ON THE ATTACK!!!!! THE LIBERAL MEDIA!!!! I TOLD YOU SO!!!!!! :lol: :lol: :lol:

And just continue to tell yourselves that Rush doesn't have it coming to him.