October 14, 2003 -- DON Imus showed Rush Limbaugh no mercy yesterday, even though Imus himself was off the air several times during the 1970s and '80s because of cocaine and alcohol addiction.
"Rush is a fat, pill-popping loser and an undisciplined slob who was turning his maid into a drug pusher, and she's the one who's gonna go to prison, and - as soon as he gets caught - he starts whining," Imus ranted yesterday on his WFAN wake- up show.
"He's going to rehab because he can't get any more pills and he's gonna go to prison," Imus said.
Limbaugh stunned his radio audience last Friday by announcing that he's leaving the air for 30 days to battle an addiction to prescription pain killers following reports that his maid had sold him massive amounts of black-market pills over a four-year period.
"Suck it up, fatso, and stop taking 100 pills a day or whatever . . . and employ some discipline in your life," Imus said, while offering Limbaugh some recovery advice.
"The rehab I went to was Hazleton, and there's a Hazleton in West Palm Beach, probably a couple of blocks from where Rush lives," Imus said. "Hazleton is hard core. You don't want to go to one of those chi-chi deals, these country clubs, these co-ed deals - you might as well check into the Four Seasons," Imus advised.
"You need to go hard core."
Hazleton spokesperson Jackie Halderman told The Post that federal rules prohibit the Florida rehab facility from confirming or denying enrollment.
"I'm sure everyone is praying that [Limbaugh] recovers from the disease of addiction," Halderman said.
When an e-mailer suggested that Imus lay off the top-rated talker because of his own past experience with addiction, Imus said he's simply giving what he got.
"Everybody made fun of me - and still does," he said. "When I went to rehab, [Howard] Stern was hilarious."
Meantime, Al Franken, the outspoken political humorist who wrote "Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot," told CNN he has no sympathy for the "hypocritical" conservative superstar.
"He called my friend Jerry Garcia 'just a dead doper' when he died," Franken claimed.
I've played the Bob Hope three times and the AT&T twice. It wasn't bad. It's just the game is mental. Once you've mastered the physical aspect, not mastered, but 90 percent of the game, all of the other things being equal is mental, and for some reason, I just was not able to execute my swing today.
And I think it had nothing to do with physical characteristics. There's nothing wrong with me.
This being the same Rush Limbaugh who just told us he became addicted to drugs because of chronic back pain.
October 14, 2003 -- DON Imus showed Rush Limbaugh no mercy yesterday, even though Imus himself was off the air several times during the 1970s and '80s because of cocaine and alcohol addiction.
