defrog: (45 frog)
[personal profile] defrog
As I’ve mentioned before, my 45 collection is the result of a variety of sources. Some of them I bought. Some of them belonged to Mom and Dad. Some belonged to someone else’s Mom and Dad.

For example, one time I was at Mr Cat Taylor’s house, and for some reason we started digging through his dad’s record collection to see if he had anything useful or interesting.

And we found this.



Which is notable because that is the same Morton Downey Jr who was Rush Limbaugh before Rush Limbaugh was Rush Limbaugh.

Well, at least he would have been if Rush Limbaugh had been more like Jerry Springer.

To illustrate, here’s a clip of him and Ron Paul shouting.



I don’t have the facts to back this up, but I tend to think that Morton Downey Jr invented conservative talk shows and Fox News mainly by proving there was a mainstream audience for loud, rude conservative jerks to yell at liberals. 

That said, he also proved that it was possible to go too far and spook advertisers and affiliates into dropping you. He also proved that you don’t really have to believe what yr saying in order to pull this off – something I’ve suspected Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck of doing for awhile now.

Anyway, it’s fair to say that in the 80s, a lot of people (including myself) hated Downey – not because we disagreed with his opinions so much as the fact that his goal was to piss people off and get them to shout at each other. I thought he represented a new low in both television and public discourse at the time.

Little did I know he’d only scratched the surface.

How low can you go,

This is dF


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