LIMBAUGH IN THE SHADOW OF HIS OWN WORDS

"Let's all admit something."

Rush Limbaugh was on his usual tear.

"There's nothing good about drug use," he was saying. "We know it. It
destroys individuals. It destroys families. Drug use destroys societies.
Drug use, some might say, is destroying this country. And we have laws
against selling drugs, pushing drugs, using drugs, importing drugs. And the
laws are good because we know what happens to people in societies and
neighborhoods which become consumed by them. And so if people are violating
the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be
convicted and they ought to be sent up."

And this includes zillionaire radio hosts? Hmmm ...

When you have a talk-radio show 15 hours a week, you have an awful lot of
air to fill. On this particular day, which was Oct. 5, 1995, Rush was
roaring about the scourge of illegal drug use.

Even though blacks and whites break the drug laws in roughly equal
percentages, he noted, black druggies go to prison far more often than
white druggies do. But to the liberal-bashing host, this was no reason to
ease up on blacks.

"What this says to me," he told his listeners that day, "is that too many
whites are getting away with drug use. Too many whites are getting away
with drug sales. Too many whites are getting away with trafficking in this
stuff. The answer to this disparity is not to start letting people out of
jail because we're not putting others in jail who are breaking the law. The
answer is to go out and find the ones who are getting away with it, convict
them and send them up the river, too."

Including zillionaire radio hosts? Well, maybe not.

What a week it's been for Rush! First, he gets chased out of ESPN in a
racial furor. Then, he is accused in Florida of buying thousands of
powerful painkillers from an illegal drug-selling ring.

OxyContin. Hydrocodone. Highly addictive opiates. A gargantuan number of
pills over several years - almost 100 a day on one 47-day binge. His
42-year-old housekeeper, Wilma Cline, says she dealt the closely controlled
pills to America's top-rated syndicated radio host. Some were hidden under
his mattress so his wife wouldn't find them. Others were passed in a
Denny's parking lot.

The story was broken by the National Enquirer, but it's already burst into
the mainstream press. Secret tapes. Incriminating e-mails. Twice, Limbaugh
reportedly checked himself into rehab - and later relapsed.

What will the conservative listeners think?

What pain, what disappointment, what insecurity could explain something
like this? The talker wasn't talking about that yesterday.

Understandably so.

Another public moralist had been caught in a personal jam. And Rush's words
were coming back to haunt him.

The constant digs at Bill Clinton not inhaling.

The heartless shrug when Jerry Garcia died.

"'When you strip it all away," Rush had said of the Grateful Dead
guitarist, "Jerry Garcia destroyed his life on drugs. And yet he's being
honored, like some godlike figure. Our priorities are out of whack, folks."

Rush Limbaugh isn't the first prominent finger-pointer to eat his own
words. It wasn't so long ago that Bill Bennett was explaining how an
anti-vice crusader could also be a degenerate gambler.

And Jeb Bush, the president's brother and Rush's governor, was pleading for
leniency and privacy when his daughter got arrested for drugs. Yet he'd
been happily sending other Florida youngsters to long prison terms for
similar crimes.

Typical.

But there in the dusty Limbaugh archives one glimmer of sanity did appear
yesterday.

It came from 1998, just about the time Wilma Cline's black-market drug ring
was revving up. Rush was on the radio. He was talking about America's
"half-baked" war on drugs. We might all be better off, he said quite
plainly, if drugs were legalized - and then regulated like cigarettes.

"What is missing in the drug fight," he said, "is legalization. If we want
to go after drugs with the same fervor and intensity with which we go after
cigarettes, let's legalize drugs. Legalize the manufacture of drugs.
License the Cali cartel. Make them taxpayers and then sue them. Sue them
left and right and then get control of the price and generate tax revenue
from it. Raise the price sky high and fund all sorts of other wonderful
social programs."

Was he serious? I'm not sure.

But the timing is interesting, you'd have to say. And I'll bet he quotes
those words again.