I was very sorry to hear today that the cancer that Rush Limbaugh had been fighting for the past year finally won. With Limbaugh’s death America lost its most powerful conservative voice since the death of William F. Buckley Jr. in 2008.
I first heard Rush Limbaugh on radio back in 1991. At first, I wasn’t sure what to make of him. Here was a guy with strong opinions and he wasn’t afraid to voice them. I had just returned to the United States from Japan and Asia where I had been the Chicago Tribune’s Chief Asia Correspondent.
At the time the United States was engaged in a ferocious trade war with Japan which was flooding the U.S. with Toyotas, Nissans, Hondas, Subaru’s, and Mazda’s—not to mention, computer chips, machine tools, steel, television sets, and a plethora of other electronic hardware.
Our economy was reeling from a recession caused by the S & L crisis and the Gulf War, and Japan was on the verge of passing the United States as the world’s number one economy.
“We have to stop raising the white flag of surrender before economic predators like Japan and run up the American flag,” Limbaugh said. “We need to start fighting back and make America number one again. Most of all we need to keep American jobs in this country.”
Rush was right. I had been covering the U.S.-Japan trade war for eight years from Japan and I had watched Japan blow past the United States in areas of technology research and development, business innovation, banking, and trade.
When I returned to Chicago, it seemed to me that most Americans had simply conceded defeat to Japan.
But here was Rush Limbaugh calling us out. Were we a nation of wimps or a nation of warriors? After all, we had just taken down the Soviet Union and we had the rest of the world’s failed Communist and socialist nations on the run. Capitalism and democracy had won out over Communism and totalitarianism.
Needless to say, I became an avid Rush Limbaugh fan and made it a point to tune in to his radio show whenever possible.
Now that he is gone, conservatives are confronted with a gaping void of fundamentalist thought and opinion. Don’t expect anybody to fill that vacuum anytime soon.
People like Rush Limbaugh only come along once in a blue moon. Liberals, leftists, socialists, and America-haters like AOC and the rest of her ludicrous “squad” are no doubt dancing joyful jigs now that his powerful voice is silenced.
Let them. They were no match for Rush’s common-sense and convincing arguments when he was alive and now that he is gone, they still aren’t.
As I promised in the headline above, here are my top ten all-time favorite quotes from Rush. Enjoy them.
They make a hell of a lot of sense:
10) “Liberals always exempt themselves from the rules that they impose on others.”
9) ““Liberals measure compassion by how many people are given welfare. Conservatives measure compassion by how many people no longer need it.”
8) “No nation has ever taxed itself into prosperity.”
7) “End results that work that don’t involve government threaten liberals.”
6) “Let me tell you who we conservatives are: we love people. When we look out over the United States of America, when we are anywhere, when we see a group of people, we see Americans. We see human beings. We don’t see groups. We don’t see victims.”
5) “In a country of children where the option is Santa Claus or work, what wins?”
4) “The world’s biggest problem is the unequal distribution of capitalism. If there were capitalism everywhere, you wouldn’t have food shortages.”
3) “Progress is not striving for economic justice or fairness, but economic growth.”
2) “What about feeling sorry for those…who pay the taxes? Those are the people NO ONE ever feels sorry for. They are asked to give and give until they have no more to give. And when they say ‘Enough!’ they are called selfish.”
1) “You know why there’s a Second Amendment? In case the government fails to follow the first one.”
RIP, Rush
