After two weeks of bad press and fleeing advertisers, radio host Rush Limbaugh has started “The Only Genuine Rush Limbaugh Twitter Feed“ — that is, in addition to @rushlimbaugh, the official Twitter feed for his show. The first message on the new account, posted today, is a link to a blog post that bashes the Limbaugh haters at Media Matters. The same tweet appears word-for-word on the other account.
The personal Limbaugh account was reportedly created way back in 2009, so it already has over 100,000 followers (compared to @rushlimbaugh’s 60,000), but fans shouldn’t get too excited. “I’m not going to be a daily tweeter,” Limbaugh said during his radio show today. “I’m not going to be hanging on Twitter fifteen hours a day and tweeting, ‘Just had breakfast, have a wonderful day! Bye! Here’s a picture of me eating some cornflakes!” None of that stuff,” he added. It’s hard to believe that fans could clamor for more unfiltered Limbaugh in addition to his daily three-hour radio show, but doubting his devoted followers at this point would just be silly.
“Everybody has been asking me what they can do to help in all of this, and I’ve been saying, nah, just do what you’ve been doing just, if you listen, keep listening, that’s fine, but … there’s an army out there that wants to be mobilized, and so, I figured, use Twitter for it,” Limbaugh explained today. “I’m just going to put some things on Twitter that you can help us circulate. It’s that simple, you just retweet them.”
Limbaugh follows bold-faced names like Conan O’Brien and Rupert Murdoch, who also joined the service while they were in a particularly bright spotlight, the latter while facing a media scandal of his own. But whereas those men excelled right away, Limbaugh’s commitment (or that of whoever is running the account) seems tepid at best; the only other activity on the account is one favorited tweet from a Rush parody account: “HAHAHA did you hear that phone call I got from that bitch Rep. Gingrey? He apologized to me on the air! Apology accepted, now kiss my ass!” Maybe Limbaugh has a sense of humor about himself, or maybe whoever clicked “favorite” on that tweet didn’t see the rest of the feed. These things take some time to get used to.
