From the Fresno Bee: “Limbaugh fueled the hate speech, Trump took it to new heights, Americans must end it”

And people say we have nothing to celebrate.  Horse hockey.  Rush Limbaugh is going off the air.

For more than 30 years, Limbaugh, the country’s most popular incendiary radio talk show host, had been spewing his hate speech into millions of Americans’ minds. We think of Trump as being the progenitor of the idea that the media at large is involved in a conspiracy to forward a liberal agenda, but Rush had been at it long before anyone outside of the New York real estate world had ever heard of our current president.  What Trump called “fake news” Limbaugh referred to as “the lame stream media.”  By the time Trump was saying, “Believe not what you hear or say, but only what I tell you,” and “The press is the enemy of the people,” Limbaugh had been vomiting this all over the United States for over a quarter century.

Now the hard work begins.  We need to rebuild a country that is coming together, not being aggressive pulled apart. A country that bases policy making on science, not on Big Money and conspiracy theories.  A country that takes a leadership role in the world of environmental responsibility, not one that denies the reality of climate change and goes on with business as usual, blithely poisoning the planet so rich people can get richer.

This won’t be an easy task, but now, with both Trump and Limbaugh gone, nor will it be insurmountable.