Rush Limbaugh's cousin, Julie, has an article up on Salon this week about the burden of being a Limbaugh. I found her article more interesting for what it didn't say than for what it did. Julie Limbaugh, a cousin of Rush Limbaugh, has been dogged throughout her life by her famous last name. She mentions countless times when she was automatically vilified for her last name, but never mentions a time when she was lauded. Surely Rush has such a large audience that at least once in her life someone said, "You're a Limbaugh? Awesome!" If so, Julie left that out. According to tradition, an article like this would include a component of, "He's a really nice guy in person, very normal and down to Earth, nothing like he is on the radio." Julie makes several motions in that direction, but she never overtly praises her famous cousin. Instead, she relates a series of scenarios which are mixed at best. For example, "Sometimes he invites you to his house for Thanksgiving, you and every single one of your relatives, all expenses paid, and he puts you up in a resort that makes you feel like a movie star. He gives you a room key that doubles as his credit card…" This is certainly a kindness, but one which could be mistaken for a boast. It's generous, yes, but it also serves to frame him as a distant plutocrat, dispensing cash favors in place of familial affection. Don't get me wrong - I think it's really nice of him. But it does have a strangely distancing effect. Julie Limbaugh blasts people who attack her from the position of their own ill-informed assumptions about Rush Limbaugh and her relation to him. But I find it more curious that she herself has apparently never taken the time or effort to form her own assumptions about Rush Limbaugh. She admits that she "rarely" listens to his radio show, and even then only for a few minutes at a time. She says that "I would like to believe that he has created a semi-tongue-in-cheek persona for entertainment's sake, a self-aware self-parody, the original Stephen Colbert." (Italics mine, for emphasis.) Having read the article, my question is, "Regardless of what you would like to believe, what DO you believe?" I have the feeling that she is holding her own opinions out of this article, perhaps because of a sense of family loyalty. In which case, what's the point of having written the article at all? Julie takes a rueful, "boys will be boys" sort of attitude towards Rush's shenanigans. I can't help but wonder, what does she think about the time he dubbed U.S. soldiers who want out of Iraq "phony soldiers"? When he compared the events of Abu Ghraib prison scandal to a fraternity hazing and asked, "You ever heard of the need to blow some steam off?" When he said "we're male chauvinist pigs, and we're happy to be because we think that's what men were destined to be"? When he said that the NAACP "should get a liquor store and practice robberies"? I want very badly to like Julie Limbaugh's article, to find it poignant and heart-warming, but it's simply too frustrating. Too much is left unsaid; too many words are carefully chosen for their ability to seem to be useful, while actually saying nothing at all. Too many assumptions are alluded to without question, and too many statements are veiled in double-speak and passive voice and sentence constructions which remove the conclusion at least three levels of abstraction from the subject. I can't help but wonder... is it genetic?!