Emerging from a self-imposed exile in which he was treated for an addiction to painkillers, Rush Limbaugh returned to the air on Monday. And listeners who tuned in during the first few minutes of his radio show would have been forgiven if they thought they were hearing an Oprah-style self-help session.
"I have to admit that I am powerless over this addiction that I have," Limbaugh, speaking from a Manhattan studio, told his listeners. "I used to think I could beat it with force of will."
During a 16-minute opening monologue, Limbaugh, who has spoken in the past about the need to jail more drug abusers, instead borrowed liberally from the teachings of 12-step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous. Asking and then answering a question about what he had learned during a month inside a treatment center in Arizona, Limbaugh said, "You can boil it down to one real simple essence: I can't be responsible for anybody's happiness but my own."
PHOTO: REUTERS
He added, "I have thought that I had to be this way or that way in order to be liked or appreciated or understood, and in the process I denied myself who I was."
Limbaugh acknowledged that "a lot of people" had branded him a hypocrite for urging tough punishment for some drug users while not being forthcoming about his own addiction, which, he said on Monday, dates to the mid-1990s. He has said that he became addicted to painkillers after spinal surgery in the 1990s.
"My behavior doesn't change right or wrong," he said. He acknowledged, however, that for nearly a decade he "avoided the subject of drugs on this program for the precise reason I was keeping a secret." At times, he said, he even pretended that he did not recognize the names of painkillers mentioned by callers.
One of the first calls he took on Monday, from a woman identified only as Mary Jo of Montgomery, Alabama, was about a friend in trouble.
"You have a friend who's an addict?" Limbaugh asked. The caller said that she did, and wanted to know "what strengthens someone?"
"Are you ready to listen?" Limbaugh asked. "I want you to know something now. You are not responsible for what your friend does."
Though the early segments of his three-hour show were devoted to what Limbaugh had learned about himself in treatment, he still took time to practice his stock-in-trade, advancing the message of the right and lambasting the left. He took swipes at familiar liberal targets like Senator Edward Kennedy and Hillary Clinton. And he took pains to assure his listeners that he had not been brainwashed while in treatment, during which, he acknowledged, he rarely read a newspaper and watched little on television other than football.
"Many people feel and think that when you go to a rehabilitation center for addictions or other things, that the people in there turn you into a linguine-spined liberal, and that's not true," he said.
Rather, he said, he tried to incorporate what he had learned about himself and use it to psychoanalyze his opponents. Among the problems with liberals, Limbaugh said he had discovered, is that "they don't like themselves."
"You ever see liberals smile about anything?" he asked.
Limbaugh said there was only one subject he would not talk about on the air: news reports suggesting that he had acquired drugs like the painkiller Oxycontin without a prescription and that the matter was now the subject of an investigation.
"This is something I am not able to be as blunt and open about now as I'd like to be," he said. "That day will come, and it will come soon."
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