Posted on 12/26/2003 4:21:34 AM PST by logic101.net
As fully as he said he would.
You nailed the situation perfectly in your post.
Rush made one mistake. Once he found himself beginning to get addicted, he did not go to his doctors for help; he chose to enjoy the pills a little first. That was all she wrote.
Once addicted, he now had a soft spot where his many adversaries could probe. And open access to it by his attempts to feed his habit (going through unsavory types and too many legal prescriptions).
The good thing for Rush is that this could have ended two ways: either he was going to get caught or he was going to get dead. Getting caught, as horrible as this is, is the preferable of the two.
I hope he can get out of this mess without feeling indignant or virtuous. It's a time for humility and responsibility, but he should not receive more than community service. And his community service should be spent speaking to the public about how easy it is to become addicted to legally prescribed painkillers, and what not to do as you feel yourself slipping.
Perhaps he could share the podium with an addiction doctor who gives people techniques to be able to make best use of pain medication and still avoid addiction, and when to tell someone you are becoming addicted before your personality changes and your number one goal in life is to get more drugs.
That was a procedural error that was caught and fixed, but Rush's lawyer is still trying to keep them from seeing the records, citing a non-existent right to privacy in a criminal case.
Most people here the Drug Warriors accuse of being "anarchists" or "liberdopians" would be VERY happy to just go back to the size of government and laws that existed before the Socialist New Deal hugely expanded the government. That wasn't anarchy (in fact, at the time of the New Deal the offical name for people who wanted that was "Republican"). But it was a LOT more Freedom.
I hate when I do that!
When I saw that clip of Rush on the ESPN sports show, the one where he made the McNabb comment, I thought he seemed pretty wired. In fact, I commented to my DH that Rush seemed wired pretty much of the time on his radio show. And then, right after that McNabb/ESPN fiasco, out comes these rumors/charges/allegations, etc. about drug addiction, pill buying, etc., and I immediately wondered if Rush's demeanor was the result of being high on the oxicontin.
Two of the doctors. I won't defend the incompetence of the prosecutors. I also won't defend Rush's backing out of his promise to cooperate, and his liberal Clintonesque stance of blaming everyone but himself.
If it's a minor slap on the wrist he gets he should vocally support the same treatment of all non violent drug abusers. It's called equal protection under the law and anything less is a disgrace to the nation.
Rush admitted that he became addicted, and isn't shifting the blame for becoming addicted. To assume that you would have admitted the addiction before ever breaking the law is close kin to asserting that you could never become addicted in the first place. Which is, one assumes, about the way Rush thought when he took the first non-prescribed pill.If you are addicted to a drug, and your doctor hasn't been the enabler by continually writing the scripts you want (think you need), then you obviously obtain the pills illegally or not at all. There does not seem to be any claim that the doctors were deliberately acting as enablers, and--on face value the idea that Rush was "doctor-shopping" by being seen by Dr. B who was in group practice with Dr. A and was covering for Dr. A, and had access to Dr. A's medical records is fatuous--is a smoke screen for a fishing expedition.
It's pretty clear where Rush got his pills--his maid was married to a pusher, and blackmailled Rush after selling the stuff to him. I have no patience with claims that Rush is an adult, but the maid and her husband get a pass. Pushing dope is a crime, and one which is not traditionally overlooked as easily as uverusing prescription drugs is. And blackmail?! I await your explanation for the assigning of victim status--implied by immunity from prosecution--to this lovely couple.
The crux of the issue is that a routine case of failed drug therapy degenerating into illegal use of a controlled substance was elevated into a high-priority law-enforcement project, for the self-same reason that the drug pusher's blackmail succeeded--that the person with the weakness was unpopular with a politician and a large portion of the people who voted for him.
Giving prosectutors carte blanche to make mountains out of molehills is a sufficient condition for tyranny.
There's where the wheels come off all your criticism and the source of all your misunderstanding from the get-go! You cannot entertain the concept that he's used traditional American cultural values as the yardstick, not himself as a supposed paragon of virtue.
You have ascribed judgementalism to him and are calling him a hipocrite when he has been voicing the strong feelings of a vast majority of Americans who despise the attacks on the greatest culture in recorded history. Why have you taken some things he has condemned from a cultural virtue standpoint and attributed them as a personal character flaw of his.
The man is under attack from some ambitious political hacks that are using his fame to enhance their careers as prosecutors are prone to do because it works everytime it's tried. Eliot Spitzer is doing exactly the same thing to the Mutual Fund industry because he's pist that they charge too high of fees for their services! Talk about your Democrat hipocrites!!! That isn't even a crime!!!
You must be blind to the "full court press" the desperate Demonicrats are puttin on right at this time.
Fine. You want a witch hunt??
Then YOU won't mind being investigated for "lifting" a few pens from your office back in '92, "stumbling" into porn sites last year, OR your "accidentily" doing 60 in a 45 MPH zone once a week.
Yeah...I have noticed. And no, he's not a bad person, no more or less than anyone else...for we are ALL sinners, saved by grace. But it's like Rush has always said, "they" can't compete with him in the arena of ideas so they must resort to whatever sleazy, slimy method they can come up with to bring him down. And now it looks as though it could happen through the courts, just as they were hoping for Al Gore during election 2000. Their only hope then was to have liberal lawyers and judges steal the election for AG/themselves. But unfortunately for Rush, he's given them the ammo to run with, and I'm sorry but one would have hoped that Rush would have been smarter, more careful than to compromise himself with a drug addiction, and possibly illegal acquisition of same.
At least they're digital now. I'd say it would take a lot of trees to keep the kind of files they want on all of us.
Your screen name says it all. "Absolute" justice! Why don't you just claim to be God?Christ once rebuked a Pharisee with the scripture, "I desire mercy, not sacrifice." But you, being better than God, demand ABSOLUTE JUSTICE!! Don't trouble yourself scrutinizing Rush to find the nearest hypocrite; the closest one looks back at you every morning in the mirror.
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