Rush Limbaugh, he’s got the life. His days flick through the slot like postcards from paradise. Where most gab-show hosts report for duty at radio studios where candy bars get stuck in the vending machine and the carpeting is a certain industrial shade of indifference, Limbaugh—a man, a mission, a mighty wind—has carved out his own principality in Florida’s Palm Beach, a lion preserve where he can roam undisturbed. Drinking in the rays, puffing on those big-shot cigars, riding the range in a golf cart—he’s got the complete Jackie Gleason how-sweet-it-is package deal. But just as the Great One suffered from melancholia aggravated by alcohol, Limbaugh’s indulgence in his own creature comforts hasn’t been able to insulate him from the demons within. An addiction to painkillers reduced this human boom box of self-sufficiency and strict enforcement—”If people are violating the law by doing drugs,” he once lectured on his syndicated TV show, “they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up” (up the river, that is)—to the furtive, needy ploys of any other junkie who finds the medicine cabinet running dry. After he entered rehab, his third wife, Marta, reportedly vacated the luxury estate (they would later divorce), leaving Rush a Tarzan without his Jane in what the Palm Beach Post in 2004 called his “$24.2 million, 36,500-square-foot secluded monster at 1495 N. Ocean.” Secluded for now, but perhaps after this god of the airwaves shucks his mound of flesh so that his soul can meet Reagan’s in Republican Heaven (where all the angels look like June Allyson), his compound can be converted into a tourist attraction—a combination museum, shrine, gift shop, and spiritual mecca modeled on Elvis’s Graceland, Dolly Parton’s Dollywood. Aging dittoheads can make pilgrimages to pay their respects, rekindle fond memories, and gape reverently at the silenced TV where Rush watched the game he loved so much and understood so little, football.

For us non-dittoheads (that is, the unconverted), a more fitting memorial to Mount Rushbo might be a diorama of the environmental destruction that he did so much to enable in his multi-decade reign of denigration. Global warming’s most popular denialist, talk radio’s most imitated showman, conservatism’s minister of disinformation, he has injected millions of semi-vacant American skulls with a cream filling of complacency that has helped thrust this country into the forefront of backward leadership. He has given Republican lawmakers the rhetorical cover fire to do nothing but snicker as the crisis emerged and impressed itself on the rest of the world. He conscripted concern for nature as just another weapon in the Culture Wars. May the grasses of his favorite golf courses go forever yellow and dust storms whip from the sand traps.

From Teddy Roosevelt, who made wilderness protection a priority and created national parks, bird sanctuaries, big-game refuges, and national forests, to Richard Nixon, under whose bad-moon presidency the Environmental Protection Agency was formed and the Clean Air Act of 1970 was passed, the Republican Party carried a tradition of conservation that crumbled under Ronald Reagan, for whom nature was mostly a scenic backdrop whose resources could be exploited out of camera frame. Reagan’s selections of James Watt for the Department of the Interior and Anne Gorsuch for the E.P.A. put bureaucratic vandals in positions of stewardship, and in 1987 he vetoed re-authorization of the Clean Water Act, a veto that fortunately was overridden. It is a measure of how awful the George W. Bush administration has been on the environment that some activists miss the old, upfront hostility of the Reagan era, when at least the political and corporate machinations took place in open daylight. “Unfortunately, now,” lamented Daniel Weiss, an environmental activist (quoted by Amanda Griscom in her article for online’s Grist), “our leaders are much more savvy—and far more insidious. They undo laws in the dead of night.” Under Bush II, environmentalists no longer need to be engaged, because they’ve been so stridently marginalized and stigmatized as a pantheistic kook cult practicing socialism under the guise of Gaia worship. This was largely Limbaugh’s doing, and now every right-wing pundit from Cal Thomas to Michael Savage croaks the same tune.

It was Limbaugh who inscribed the term “environmentalist wackos” into the political lexicon and hung the “loser” tag on them. He caricatured the fight for wildlife preservation—a broad-visioned tradition that spans from Henry David Thoreau to John Muir to Rachel Carson to Edward Abbey to David Brower—into something weedily hippie-dip. In his 1992 debut, The Way Things Ought to Be, Limbaugh fobbed himself off with a faux barefoot humility over how far he had come in his Horatio Alger saga, the book’s cover photo presenting him as a chubby-cheeked cherub with a grinning hint of mischief—a “lovable little fuzzball,” to use his own pet phrase. “I am in awe of the perfection of the earth,” he proclaimed inside, a perfection crafted by the Creator who made us all, draping the stars in the firmament like the ultimate interior decorator. For all his wide-eyed wonderment, Limbaugh fashioned himself as less naïve than the stereotypical “long-haired maggot-infested FM-type environmentalist wacko” whom he professes to have reasoned with over the plight of the spotted owl, Rush’s ineluctable train of logic leading to the final junction: “If the owl can’t adapt to the superiority of humans, screw it.” It was during this early, jaunty period of Rush’s fame that the theme music for his “Animal Rights Update” was the title song from Andy Williams’s Born Free punctuated by gunfire and animal sounds—the perfect soundtrack for Dick Cheney hunting porn. Limbaugh acknowledged in The Way Things Ought to Be that there were “some decent environmentalists” out there, they weren’t all maggot-infested mulletheads, but portrayed even the sincere ones as socioeconomic parasites. “You and I and the vast majority of other people work for a living,” he wrote. “Most of the people running environmental groups don’t work.” They simply pass around the collection plate to support their cushy lifestyles. As demonization goes, that’s pretty mild.