I may be one of maybe 10K people who was a pioneer listener to Rush Limbaugh when he debuted in Sacramento, CA in 1984. I can tell you to this day where I was. I was on the track at Natomas High School running laps, listening on my Sony Walkman. I was only listening because there was a big story in the news that the previous host, a guy you may know by the name of Morton Downey, had been fired the day before because he called a liberal Chinese City Councilman a "chink" on the air. So I wanted to see what this new host was going to be like. I have been listening since, though these days I tend to read the transcripts of the show rather than listen.
Rush Limbaugh gets a lot of credit for the resurgence of American conservatism. Without him there would have been no Newt Gingrich and the 1994 Republican smashing of decades of Democrat rule in the congress. There would have been no Clinton impeachment. There would have been no Donald Trump. But more than anything, he alerted the public to the dangers of unbridled liberalism, and drove the left into convulsions like no other personality until Trump came along. That is a pretty compelling legacy.
Of course he was an unabashed lover and endorser of cigar smoking, and in spite of the fact that cigars are generally not inhaled, there is a lot of smoke, tars, carbons that get into the lungs as a result of just puffing. Also, he is a former cigarette smoker. I sincerely hope he is able to get effective treatment. Undoubtedly with his resources he will have the finest physicians and latest advances available. I expect that he will live quite a while with the disease. There are things today like immunotherapy that can buy a cancer patient years, so I have hope that this is not necessarily a death sentence. Look at Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
