BRETT: Today is one month since we lost our dear Rush Limbaugh. Now, the thing about loss that we have to remember — it’s especially a profound one — is that time moves differently afterwards. It does. It always seems to change when you experience a profound loss, a loss of a parent, a loss of a grandparent, a beloved spouse, aunt, uncle, and — God forbid — a child. Things change. Things become different.
Rush always looked forward to getting older. He loved life, but he always looked forward to getting older, with one exception: The reality of losing people that he loved. Now we’ve lost Rush. I remember the phone call I received one month ago today just within minutes of the program starting and Rush’s beloved Kathryn taking to the microphone to announce the horrible news that we had lost Rush.
I remember how for a moment I just sat in stunned silence, and I know all of us did, and many of us are still stunned. I heard Ken Matthews yesterday talk about the fact that we hear him on our stations and in our cars, and we just go back to how it always was, and then we realize we’ve lost him. Now this is where we get to march forward, to carry on his memory.
It’s why we’re keeping his voice and words as part of your day, because he would want you to remember them — the lessons, the logic, most definitely the laughter — and we’ll have a ton of that today. While it may not be the same, it is still the Maha. And like anything you love, it’s to be remembered and cherished always. So today we welcome you to call in with your forever dittos as we continue to remember Rush.
Our number, as you well know it, is 800-282-2882, to share your thoughts, to share your remembrances, and of course to share the smiles that I know he gave you across the years. We all were honored and privileged to be a part of this journey.
We were all honored and privileged to be a part of the wisdom and the laughs that Rush was able to produce on (chuckles) a moment-by-moment basis. It really is evident that this is the fastest three hours in radio, the fastest week in media, as he was famous for saying. So I think it’s important to remember right off the top, right off the top who Rush was and his thoughts on getting older and the power of nostalgia.
RUSH: I’ve always said, folks, that I love getting older. I have never feared getting older. I’ve always been, in my own life, borne out that’s been true, the next year has been better than the previous one. When I was 15, I wanted to be 21. I wanted to get all this childhood, teenage stuff out of the way. I wanted to get successful. I wanted to get on the track.
I wanted to get moving and as I looked at life, everybody older than me seemed really happy, really self-sufficient, and I had that as a goal. And it’s always been true. There has not been a year that I have had regretted getting older yet, except for things like this. The unavoidable reality that once you hit your 60s, the news is going to be more frequent that your friends and acquaintances are sick, ill, and have passed away.
That’s the one unavoidable downside of getting older.
But, you know, I’ve always had a belief that nostalgia has a unique way of only — at least in my case, nostalgia for me is never negative. It’s always positive, when I think about the past and remember things of people that I’ve met and meant a lot to me, it’s always positive, always uplifting. Never is any of it negative, never is there any anguish about it.
Do not lose the faith.
Keep the faith.
BRETT: The journey we’ve taken over the years listening to Rush and the simultaneous events of our lives that we’ve all shared, the national stories, the international stories, the politics, the scoundrels and the heroes. But we’ve also taken this journey with Rush, and that journey has also brought with us our own family and friend experiences with people that we’ve gotten to know across the years, children that we’ve had and spouses that we’ve married and all of that journey.
And, you know, it’s interesting, because when you lose somebody so near and dear to you, so close to you, you realize very quickly as you think back, you don’t dwell on the arguments, the tough times, the challenges. You think back about the things that make you smile, that give you that warmth inside your heart. Rush was always a fighter. Rush was confident. Rush understood the courage of convictions.
And that’s exactly how Rush would want us to remember him, with good cheer, smiling — and we’ll have plenty of that today. We’ll have plenty of laughs today. We’re gonna continue to carry the standard forward, the standard that was set by Rush. Also, I want to share with you something very special. Kathryn, his beloved Kathryn, has shared a message from Rush, videotaped earlier this year, capturing him in a moment where he’s reminding us to never give up.
You can listen to that message over at RushLimbaugh.com, and you can see him and hear him, and you’ll see that twinkle in his eye and that confidence and that energy as he urges us on — and that’s what I think is most important. To connect to that, to connect to the notion that we must soldier on. We must march on. We must continue to be of good cheer.
That’s what makes this side of the argument all the more attractive to people. Conservatives, by and large, don’t walk around with a dour cover, an angry sort of countenance. Conservatives are confident because conservatives are advocates for freedom and for liberty. Rush was that: An evangelist for the individual to reach heights that individual thought to be impossible.
Yet it’s interesting. As we’ve enter into this year I’ve found myself reading some of the is to I can say, the Ancient Romans and Greeks who had theories and thoughts about civilization, society, the way government should work. I came across a phenomenal quote from Marcus Aurelius that I think is so fitting for Rush. Marcus Aurelius said, “It never ceases to amaze me.
“We all love ourselves more than other people but we care more about their opinion than our own.” In a way, it reaches across the 20 centuries talking about the notion of a cancel culture, any of that stuff. Rush was supremely confident. Rush was of good cheer. Rush understood what it was going to take to battle those folks who would try to shut us down, to shut him down, because he did it for 30 years — and success, success is its best encouragement.
He famously said, “Free speech gives us the ability to react vigorously with effective arguments and expose the weakness and misdirection of the other side’s claims.” Let that sink in for a moment. It means you have to be confident in what you’re arguing. You have to utilize effective arguments. You can’t just go by feelings or tantrums or yelling and screaming and pounding the desk.
No. It goes to the very core of our logic. It goes to the core of our beliefs, the idea that you want to expose the weakness. That’s where you get the pounding and the yelling and the tantrumming and the misdirection of the other side’s claims, misdirection being the attempt to confuse you with a bunch of disconnected gobbledygook, as Rush would say.
Rush was spot on, and he understood how it was we were to proceed. Never surrendering the battlefield, the intellectual high ground, and utilizing humor to make the point when just a plain old argument wouldn’t work. Over the course of the next three hours, we’re gonna go through this.
We’re gonna talk about what’s happening today and look at Rush’s prescient mind as it relates to the current condition of the body politic and the culture itself — and I want to encourage you that Kathryn has shared a message from Rush videotaped earlier this year, capturing him in a moment where he’s reminding us to never give up. When you feel a little down cast or sad, fire it up and take a look at it.
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