Editor’s note: Aug. 1 represents the 20th anniversary of the debut of Rush Limbaugh’s national radio show. WND has asked some of his colleagues and some of America’s most popular pundits to tell us what they think of the role he has played in American politics and media. Read all of this week’s tributes.
I started noticing that Rush Limbaugh’s timing was off a bit during the summer of 2001 while I sat at a red light in downtown San Francisco, cussin’ up a storm over the potholes the liberal Democrats in local government wouldn’t fill, even though they found time to establish the city as a nuclear free zone. I turned up the dial in order to lower my blood pressure with my daily Rush fix.
As I began creeping down the Embarcadero, dodging the sinkholes and listening to the show, I heard a squeak coming from my radio. The talk titan was squeaking. As a trained broadcast professional, pitch and tonality are things I notice. Puzzled, I picked up my cell phone and called a few friends in the radio industry, asking if something was wrong with Limbaugh. There were rumors floating around that didn’t sound good. In fact, they were downright frightening for those of us who admire the man who changed the face and fortune of AM radio with a conservative talk format.
Oct. 8, 2001, Limbaugh himself confirmed what a few radio insiders were hearing – Rush was suffering from autoimmune inner-ear disease and was now almost completely deaf. The hearing in his right ear was completely gone, with only a bit of sound in his left ear.
Oct. 10, 2003. The tabloids splashed the news that Rush was addicted to painkillers, and then the world learned that he was going to rehab to deal with the addiction that began because of chronic pain to his back that even surgery could not alleviate.
Shortly afterwards, Rush and his wife Marta separated and later divorced.
That’s a whole lot of bad stuff happening in a relatively short time, and Rush must have felt besieged. Of course, the left-wing feeding frenzy began like a cheetah chasing a zebra across the Serengeti.
Today is Rush Limbaugh’s 20th anniversary as a radio talk show host, debuting on the EIB (Excellence in Broadcasting) radio network, and WorldNetDaily asked me to write a column honoring Rush. So it might seem fairly odd that I began this piece talking about the personal and professional setbacks El Rushbo has experienced in the past few years. But there is a purpose, a higher purpose. Hang with me for a minute.
I have known Rush Limbaugh since I was a teenager beginning in the radio business in my hometown of Kansas City, Mo., where he and I worked at KUDL radio, a 10,000-watt AM and FM station located at the end of a dusty gravel driveway in the middle of a cornfield. That place was crazy weird. The news director would bring his gun to work, shooting out tower lights when he got mad at some equipment failure (frequently), and the FM program director was shooting smack when he got mad, glad, bored or listless (more frequently.)
But Rush Limbaugh was the perfect gentleman, very kind to me, and I never forgot that. There was some messiness and miscommunication in the middle years. But when he moved to Sacramento to begin his talk show at KFBK, I asked my boss at KGO in San Francisco to give him a listen. I thought he was really so different from anything that I had ever heard on the radio that I recommended him for a job as a talk show host. He didn’t get the gig.
Clearly, my opinion didn’t matter for much, but that disappointment and others did not stop Rush Limbaugh. He used it to springboard onto the national scene.
This is the thing about Rush Limbaugh that most of America doesn’t know and I want to tell you – Rush has overcome some very tough times. He admires others who overcome adversity. He preaches that quality on his show, and he lives it daily, surviving the searing fires that come with an industry that burns through people and talent like a pyromaniac.
A lot of people (both inside and outside of the broadcast industry) are peeved because he has signed a multi-million dollar contract that stretches beyond the Alpha quadrant (that’s a little Star Trek lingo for those from Rio Linda.) These are jealous and petty individuals. Most of them are liberal, too.
Let’s go back to the setbacks I mentioned before. Rush searched for a way to stay involved with his love, his passion, by hiring a translator, learning to lip read and getting a cochlear implant. Circumstances would not stop the immutable force that is Rush Limbaugh. A pain-pill addiction? Fine. Rush tried on his own to stop taking what was now poison to his body, and when he recognized he couldn’t do it, checked into an Arizona clinic. Fired from a job? Rush picked up and moved to the next city, the next market, the next station where he could make his mark.
This is the reality of Rush Limbaugh. The need to succeed, to move beyond the pain, figure out the next step. This is the reason my old pal whom I knew as Jeff Christy, rock ‘n’ roll disc jockey, returned to the radio as his true self, as the one and only Rush Limbaugh, and today has changed the world. Rush’s intelligence, tenacity and pure, red-blooded love of America reshaped, revived and reformed AM radio.
We can’t forget his humor. Oh, that Nobel Peace Prize thing didn’t hurt either. He made history. He is history.
Rush likes to say that he won’t quit until everybody agrees with him. If I were a critic, I wouldn’t doubt him.
As I said to Rush when he appeared on the Web telethon I co-hosted with Michelle Malkin in June, “I know that your granddad lived to 103. Thank God. If the genes stay true in your family, you will be with us for decades to come.”
“Right on, right on, right on,” laughed Limbaugh.
It is funny how life turns out the way you envision it, even if there are some speed bumps along the way. Limbaugh flattened the speed bumps and lifted all of us with his genuine love of America. I am thankful that God loaned him the talent.
