Daily Verse | Numbers 20:12
But the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, “Because you did not trust in me enough to honor me as holy in the sight of the Israelites, you will not bring this community into the land I give them.”
It’s Thursday—or Friday Eve as those anxious for the weekend call it.
Rush Limbaugh died yesterday. I’m not going to try and eulogize him because I never became a Dittohead. Not because I disagreed with him, but because, as a working man over the last 30 years, I never had the luxury of listening to him for three hours every afternoon.
I do remember the first time I heard him, though. We were visiting my wife’s sister and brother-in-law in upstate New York and had gone to Letchworth State Park one afternoon. (If you’ve never been to Letchworth, you’re missing a beautiful gorge that is sometimes called the “Grand Canyon of the East.”)
We were sitting in the parking lot and Paul, my sister-in-law’s husband, insisted on listening to Rush’s relatively new show. He couldn’t get enough of it. I listened but didn’t have as much interest in politics as I do today. Yet Rush made an impression on me, even then.
HIS IMPACT
He clearly left his mark on many who followed in his wake. Let me quote from just a few of them.
J. Christian Adams
Running the board at WPBR on this August debut day, I could tell immediately this new brand of talk was revolutionary. It was listening to Sgt. Pepper for the first time. It was the first ride on the looping coaster that defied gravity. It was bold and brash and, most of all, it spoke to Americans about what America was. Rush spoke to what it means to be American, and what America means as an idea.
John Fund
Rush was a unique talent. He started his national radio show in July of 1988, just as Ronald Reagan was preparing to leave the national stage. By the time National Review put him on its cover, he was on 616 radio stations with a three-hour daily show that reached 20 million people a week. The success of his best-selling book The Way Things Ought To Be, which I was privileged to be the collaborator on, practically ushered in an era of mass marketing of conservatives in book publishing.
Victoria Taft
In the late 1980s, when AM radio talents were still trying to make compelling radio by spinning 45s or carts that sounded way better on FM radio, reading perfunctory weather reports, and trying to do news and programming under the equal-time rule, Ronald Reagan’s partial deregulation of the radio industry allowed the other-than-late-night hosts the ability to speak out a little.
Rush Limbaugh, then in Sacramento doing talk radio and coloring outside the lines a bit, was loosed.
He singlehandedly brought back the entire amplitude modulation radio spectrum and made it cool – and profitable – again.
Suddenly, the brash young Rush Limbaugh was appointment radio.
Bryan Preston
In 1988 Rush signed with EFM Media Management, which syndicated him nationally from his first flagship station, WABC in New York. There literally was nothing like Rush on the air then. Though Ronald Reagan had won two presidential terms, and his vice president succeeded him for one term, conservatives had no single voice broadcasting nationally every day. I remember well the very first time I ever saw or heard Rush. It was on ABC’s “Nightline” with Ted Koppell. Rush was a guest, and I was stunned to see a conservative going toe to toe with Koppell on national TV. It was a revelation. Here was someone with a national platform who was not in any political office, but who articulated so well the things I believed. And he was young. And funny! Koppell clearly respected him for his knowledge and his wit, while disagreeing with Rush’s point of view. Rush’s moment to become a movement had arrived.
Mark Steyn
Powerful politicians and longtime fans were often surprised, upon meeting him, to find a man who was quite private and indeed shy – because, like many radio guys, he had no desire to have a public persona other than at the microphone. Unlike so many others in this business, Rush was hugely generous and totally secure. Unlike other shows of left and right, where the staff come and go every six weeks, everyone at the EIB Network has been there fifteen, twenty, thirty years. That includes, in a very peripheral way, yours truly. When I first started guest-hosting, I found it odd that, on the rare occasions Rush mentioned the subs, it would be to put them down. Because, I mean, who would do that? But Rush is the least insecure star on the planet, and I came to see that he was actually teaching the neophytes a very important lesson: You guys need to be completely secure too – because it’s the only way to survive in this wretched media.
A DEFINING SPEECH
Rush gave a speech in 2009 to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), explaining “who conservatives are” and bringing down the house.
“We love people. When we look out over the United States of America, when we are anywhere, when we see a group of people, such as this or anywhere, we see Americans. We see human beings. We don’t see groups. We don’t see victims. We don’t see people we want to exploit. What we see — what we see is potential. We do not look out across the country and see the average American, the person that makes this country work. We do not see that person with contempt. We don’t think that person doesn’t have what it takes. We believe that person can be the best he or she wants to be if certain things are just removed from their path like onerous taxes, regulations and too much government,” Limbaugh told the crowd.
“We want every American to be the best he or she chooses to be. We recognize that we are all individuals. We love and revere our founding documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence,” he continued. “We believe that the preamble to the Constitution contains an inarguable truth that we are all endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, Freedom and the pursuit of happiness.”
If you have the time, you can watch the whole speech here.
HIS FAITH
Rush also seems to have come to faith in Jesus Christ at some point.
After his diagnosis, Limbaugh also spoke about his personal faith in Jesus during that appearance, a matter he often kept private because he did not want to proselytize.
“God is a profound factor; Jesus Christ a profound factor. I have a personal relationship. I’ve not talked about it much publicly because I don’t proselytize these things,” he said.
Finally, be sure to read David Limbaugh’s tribute to his older brother.
It’s always sad to lose someone who has had an outsized impact on the culture, especially one who represents your point of view. Rush Limbaugh is one whose voice is now absent while the cultural rot he addressed for 33 years continues to thrive.
His principles for engaging the culture are still relevant, but is there anyone to fill his shoes? Probably not.