Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has said flags in the state will fly half-staff for Rush Limbaugh, the hard-nosed radio host who turns 70 this week.
The decision was opposed.
Gary Farmer, Democratic minority leader in the Florida Senate, said: “Every effort to lower our flag out of respect for a man who has helped drive hatred and the prejudices against marginalized groups, coloreds, women and all who are not equal did not, let flare up. him or think like he is wrong and should be recalled.
“It’s not who we are. This is not who we want to be. ‘
But DeSantis, a controversial governor known to some as a ‘mini-Trump’ who is widely thought to have presidential ambitions, called Limbaugh a friend.
The governor appeared with James Golden, longtime producer at the leading ‘shock jock’, and told reporters: ‘If there are things of this magnitude, the flags will be lowered to half-staff when the interim date for Rush is announced. . . ”
Limbaugh has fueled anger among liberals for years. In 2004, former member of the Saturday Night Live cast and senator Al Franken in Minnesota wrote a best-selling book called Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot.
Golden calls him a ‘founding father of the second generation’.
‘The seed he planted,’ he said, ‘is going to sprout in America and keep growing for generations and generations, and America will be wonderful again, not just because of Rush, [but] because of men like – and women – but men like this governor. ”
Limbaugh lived in Florida. He passed away on Wednesday, a little over a year after revealing he had lung cancer. Funeral plans were not immediately announced. He is widely regretted by conservatives.
But the obituary of Limbaugh’s Guardian said he “set the tone for the internet age of politics, calling women rights activists’ feminazis’, calling HIV / Aids’ Rock Hudson’s disease and claiming that ‘environmentalists’ ‘a bunch of scientists was a political position’.
He argued that the existence of gorillas refuted evolution, characterizing both the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (2010) and the mosque shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand (2019), as a ‘false flag’ – operations organized by leftists. Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe that he exacerbated the riots in Charlottesville in 2017 to advance his presidential ambitions.
” Have you ever noticed what compound sketches of criminals always look like? [the black activist] Jesse Jackson? he asked. ”
In February 2020, a day after Limbaugh announced his cancer diagnosis, Donald Trump gave him the highest American civil honor, the presidential medal of freedom.
A month later, when the coronavirus pandemic began, Limbaugh told listeners it was simply a ‘cold’ being ‘armed’ by Trump on the left.
He also said in response to Pete Buttigieg’s strong performance in the Democratic primary, that “despite all the great vigilance and despite all the great terrain that has been covered … America is not yet ready to choose a ‘gay guy who his husband at the debate stage did not kiss. “President.”
Buttigieg replied: “America has moved on and we should have politics of what everyone welcomes … I’m sad about what the Republican Party would become if they accepted that kind of homophobic rhetoric.”
Buttigieg is now transport secretary in the Biden administration.
In his statement on Friday, state senator Farmer said DeSantis’ decision to drop Limbaugh’s flags “turned this distinction into a biased political instrument to greet a man who serves no other interests than his own.” and did his best to land a country along political fault lines ”.
DeSantis had earlier ordered flags to be half-staffed to kill law enforcement officers killed on duty, members of the U.S. Navy during a mass shooting in Pensacola and the Liberal Supreme Court, Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, among others.