Listeners to Sean Hannity’s radio show got a surprise when Gov. Ron DeSantis assumed hosting duties.
Yet the Governor’s opening monologue offered fulsome tribute not to the man for whom he was filling in, but for the man who pioneered the national iterations of conservative talk radio that persist to the present day: the departed Rush Limbaugh.
“Rush really paved the way for so much of what people like Sean had been able to do. Hell, he paved the way for things like me and like me being in office and pursuing a conservative agenda,” DeSantis said.
The Governor was alluding to how Limbaugh giving him a platform in 2018 helped him score what the political establishment once thought to be an unlikely win against former Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam in the GOP gubernatorial Primary.
DeSantis is known for enjoying a certain skill-based game with 18 holes, and it turned out Limbaugh did likewise.
“I got to know him as a friend. And you know, I got a chance to play golf with him a bunch of times, and Rush loved golf,” DeSantis related, describing how Limbaugh was featured on an instructional series on a niche cable channel.
“This was probably about 10 years ago now, and I remember asking Rush, how did that go? He said, ‘Nothing screwed up my swing more than doing that Golf Channel thing.’”
Yet Limbaugh’s swing wasn’t “screwed up” for long, DeSantis added during his Wednesday hosting stint.
“But by the time we were playing more as I got to know him better. I remember being out with him one time and Rush is just lighting it up. I mean, one shot after another. So we get about halfway through the round. I said, ‘Rush, let’s just improve the pace of play. Don’t even drive the ball anymore. I’m going to walk the ball out to the middle of the fairway, just drop it down and let you play from there.’ He put his cigar in his mouth and he just grinned ear to ear.”
DeSantis went on to describe Limbaugh as among the five most influential conservatives since World War II, ranking him with William F. Buckley, Ronald Reagan, former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and current Justice Clarence Thomas.
DeSantis then jumped into a story about how Palm Beach Democrats may have rued the day they didn’t want to comply with an order to fly flags at half-staff from the Governor after Limbaugh’s passing earlier this decade.
“The liberal majority on the Palm Beach County Commission rejected that, and they actually refused to lower the flags to half-staff for Rush. And I always thought that that was very, very disrespectful, because even if you disagree with him, the guy was a pioneer at the craft and he was a longtime Florida resident. You should be happy. But Palm Beach has been like a longtime liberal bastion.”
Ultimately, though, punishment came at the ballot box in 2022 for the anti-Limbaugh cadre.
“We took a county that had been blue for decades in the Governor’s race. But maybe more importantly, we now have a majority of Republicans on the Palm Beach County Commission. Nobody thought that was possible. I think that’s Limbaugh’s revenge over that County Commission. I know he would be smiling thinking that his home county went red.”
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