The Night of Rush

I had a couple of uneasy hours last night when the news first broke that Rush Limbaugh had been taken to a hospital in Hawaii with chest pains. He was reported in serious condition, and then for a couple of hours there wasn't any word at all. The left was going crazy, with vitriol spewing from every pore, as they celebrated what they hoped would be his demise, and the right was offering prayers and hopes for his speedy recovery.

By about 11 pm PT last night rumors started to circulate that various organizations were reporting that he had died (one I saw said the report came from Chris Cuomo at ABC, another cited TMZ). Both could be easily checked and knocked down but that didn't stop the rumormongers. Frankly, I'm sure some of them spreading those stories were hoping they were true. (UPDATE: Wikipedia also pronounced him dead.)

Thankfully the King of Talk Radio was still with us and his own website finally issued a statement late last night.

There's no word this morning on the cause of the chest pains. From personal experience I can tell you there's lots of things that can do that, so we'll wait and see.

Mark Steyn offered some thoughts on Rush's impact on the radio world:

I was chit-chatting about this with Sean Hannity (whose first national audience was as a guest-host for Rush) off-air during a commercial break at Fox News a couple of months back. Sean pointed out that Rush's three-hour block is the anchor around which hundreds of talk stations build the schedule. Just so: Once you've got Rush, you figure out what to program before him and after him, and pretty soon you've filled up the day. But, without Rush, it's not clear whether many of these guys would even be in the political talk business at all: He's your audience base, and your advertising base - the man who sells enough airtime to protect you from an ill-advised gamble elsewhere in the roster.

Rush took a rotting abandoned hulk - AM radio - and reinvented it as a new conservative medium. Critics such as our former colleague David Frum miss the larger point: It's not just about his opinions on this or that policy issue or candidate, but about a strategic savvy few other folks on our side of the aisle can demonstrate.

I owe him a lot personally, and I hope he rests up for whatever time he needs, and then comes back and sticks it to the naysayers till mid-century.

Amen, brother.

There is only one talk radio host that I listen to regularly and that's Rush. He helped inspire this blog and any political activism in which I've participated. His loss to the conservative movement would be enormous because there simply isn't anyone out there who does conservative talk radio as well as he does, mixing information with biting humor and righteous outrage. I frankly can't listen to most other hosts because they spend too much time arguing with idiots.

They can't carry the show by themselves for hours at a time like Rush can.

Rush is at his best during his monologues. I wish he wouldn't take any calls at all because they seldom improve the show. They're usually the most uncomfortable moments in the broadcast for me, not only because some of them are idiots and others just can't seem to get their ideas out of their mouths, but because they impart little new information. Rush knows that and pretty much uses callers as springboards to topics he planned to cover anyway. I don't hear that happening with most other hosts.

Get well, El Rushbo. 2010 will be a big year for the conservative movement and we need the Maha Rushie at the helm.

UPDATE: From Walter Williams on the Rush Limbaugh Show this morning: So far there hasn't been any confirmation of a heart attack. He'll have a full work-up today to try and sort everything out. Still resting comfortably in the Hawaiian hospital.