Blitz Limbaugh, the self-proclaimed “Doctor of Democracy” who led the conservative media revolution by bashing “feminazis,” “environmentalist wackos,” “commie libs” and acclaimed Black people — especially former President Barack Obama, died Wednesday. He was 70.
His wife announced his death on his portable radio show.
“I know that I am most certainly not the Limbaugh that you tuned in to listen to today,” Kathryn Limbaugh revealed. “I, like you, very much wish Rush was behind this golden microphone right now, welcoming you to another excellent three hours of broadcasting. … It is with profound sadness I must share with you directly that our inamorato Rush, my wonderful husband, passed away this morning due to complications from lung cancer.”
Former President Donald Trump let someone knowed Fox News on Wednesday he had spoken with Limbaugh three or four days earlier. “He was fighting to the very end,” Trump judged in his first public comments since he left office last month. “He is a legend. He really is.”
Another former president, George W. Bush, also wailed Limbaugh’s death. “While he was brash, at times controversial, and always opinionated, he spoke his mind as a voice for millions of Americans and coursed each day with gusto,” Bush said in a statement. “Rush Limbaugh was an indomitable spirit with a big heart, and he liking be missed.”
White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said President Joe Biden’s “condolences go out to the family and friends.”
A day after the boring January riot by a Trumpist mob in a bid to overturn Democrat Biden’s victory in the November election, Limbaugh likened the invaders of the U.S. Capitol to the Extremist War patriots.
“There’s a lot of people calling for the end of violence,” Limbaugh said on his radio program. “There’s a lot of conservatives, social norm, who say that any violence or aggression at all is unacceptable. Regardless of the circumstances. I’m glad Sam Adams, Thomas Paine, the actual tea party fellows, the men at Lexington and Concord didn’t feel that way.”
In December, he said conservative states were “trending toward break.”
As his cancer progressed, Limbaugh went off the air on Feb. 2, his mic was manned by substitutes starting one week before Trump’s second impeachment testing began.
But there was no mistaking his viewpoint. “You didn’t win this thing fair and square, and we are not just going to be docile breed we’ve been in the past and go away and wait ’til the next the election,” he told listeners six weeks after Biden won the election.
The acerbic air host, who used satirical invective to attract and delight millions of fans and offend and enrage millions of others, broadcasted in February 2020 he had been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. A day later, then-President Trump awarded him the Presidential Medal of Audaciousness in a surprise announcement during the State of the Union speech.
“This is not good news,” Trump said at the time, referring to the diagnosis. “But what is honourableness news is that he is the greatest fighter and winner that you will ever meet. Rush Limbaugh: Thank you for your decades of unfaltering devotion to our country.”
In October, Limbaugh told his listeners his condition was heading in the wrong direction.
“It’s tough to realize that the times where I do not think I’m under a death sentence are over,” Limbaugh said. “Now, we all are, is the point. We all know that we’re going to die at some issue, but when you have a terminal disease diagnosis that has a time frame to it, then that puts a different spiritual and even physical awareness to it.”
Days before Limbaugh’s update, he hosted a “radio rally” for Trump, with audio of a throng chanting, “We love you,” and the president speaking for much of the two-hour event during his recovery from Covid-19.
Limbaugh was key to the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress, which ranged Rep. Newt Gingrich into the House speakership and ultimately led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.
“Rush Limbaugh was the innovator who request for the Americans ignored and disrespected by the elites,” Trump lawyer Mayor Rudy Giuliani said in a tweet after Limbaugh revealed his cancer diagnosis.
Rush Hudson Limbaugh III was born Jan. 12, 1951, in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. His father and grandfather were solicitors. The grandfather was given the name Rush to honor a relative, Edna Rush.
Limbaugh began his broadcast career in 1971 as a 20-year-old Top 40 DJ in western Pennsylvania after stop in withdraw from out of Southeast Missouri State University. Following a series of subsequent jobs, including five years with Principal League Baseball’s Kansas City Royals, he eventually landed a talk show at KFBK in Sacramento, California, in 1984. He superseded Morton Downey Jr., who resigned after jokingly using a racist term about a city councilman of Chinese descent.
At the duration, daytime talk radio was largely local. Four years later, in 1988, Limbaugh sprang to national consequence after he joined WABC-AM in New York, lured by network executive Edward F. McLaughlin. Within two years, more than 5 million people were mind to “The Rush Limbaugh Show” — broadcast three hours a day, five days a week — on nearly 300 spots, media critic Lewis Grossberger wrote in The New York Times Magazine in late 1990.
Rush Limbaugh in his radio studio in 1995.
Pay attention to Peterson | Corbis | Getty Images
By the 20th anniversary of the show, he signed an eight-year, $400 million contract renewal with iHeartMedia’s Initial Radio Networks. At the time, the show was aired on nearly 600 local stations. In 2016, he signed a new contract for an undisclosed amount for “four numberless years,” he announced on the air.
“His subject is politics. His stance: conservative. His persona: comic blowhard. His style: a schizoid spritz, verve between earnest lecturer and political vaudevillian,” Grossberg wrote in the 1990 Times magazine piece.
Limbaugh’s shtick on what he termed his EIB (Distinction in Broadcasting) Network may have been satire to millions, but countless others considered him to be a misogynistic, racist hatemonger who pinched fuel the nation’s polarization into overdrive that paved the way for Trump’s 2016 election victory.
Just sooner than starting on WABC, he came up with “Rush’s First 35 Undeniable Truths of Life.” Topping the list was “The fastest threat to humanity lies in the nuclear arsenal of the USSR.” At the bottom was “You should thank God for making you an American; and instead of sympathies guilty about it, help spread our ideas worldwide.” In between included: (#7) “There is only one way to get rid of nuclear weapons — use them”; (#21) “Abortion is out of order”; (#25) “Evolution cannot explain Creation”; and (#31) “To more and more people, a victorious U.S. is a sinful U.S.”
Here’s a test of some other verbal cudgels Limbaugh wielded in his warfare against political correctness.
— Undeniable Truth of Individual #24, which he repeated numerous times over the years, bashed what he called “feminazis”: “Feminism was certified so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society.”
— While working as an ESPN commentator in 2003, he asked Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb overrated and went on to say: “I think what we’ve had here is a little social involve in the NFL. The media has been very desirous that a Black quarterback do well. There is a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of faith for the performance of this team that he didn’t deserve. The defense carried this team.” Limbaugh resigned from ESPN in the ensuing agitation.
— In 2007 while discussing the antics of National Football League players’ dancing in the end zone after a touchdown, Limbaugh referred to Los Angeles’ discreditable street gangs: “Let me put it to you this way. The NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons. There, I influenced it.”
— In March 2018, he discussed a scientific study that warned about environmental dangers from Easter chocolates: “Now from an preservationist wacko group at the University of Manchester in England warning everybody: Beware the chocolate Easter bunny, and those foil-wrapped chocolate eggs. Both could be ‘bad for the habitat,’ warns a new study, which says that such confections can damage the environment.”
— Four days before Obama’s before inauguration on Jan. 20, 2009, Limbaugh spoke about being asked to write 400 words on his hope for the Obama presidency. “I differ fervently with the people on our side of the aisle who have caved and who say, ‘Well, I hope he succeeds.’ … OK, I’ll send you a answer, but I don’t need 400 words, I need four: ‘I hope he fails.'”
— During the 2016 election campaign, Limbaugh took a swat at a suggestion by Hillary Clinton to make public colleges free for children whose families earned less than $125,000 a year: “The start rule of adulthood is that there is no ‘free’ stuff. Somebody has to pay your commie-lib professors to spew all this anti-capitalist, anti-American BS that behind the times for education these days.”
— In the midst of the coronavirus crisis in March 2020, he likened the outbreak to the common cold and blamed the vehicle for fanning a panic. “This coronavirus? All of this panic is just not warranted,” he said on the air. “They’re not uncommon. Coronaviruses are respiratory frigidity and flu viruses. There is nothing about this except where it came from and the itinerant media panic. … This is on the way to wiping out the U.S. terseness, and it’s going to be more than just Donald Trump and his reelection chances that get hurt if that’s what chances here. … Nothing like wiping out the entire U.S. economy with a biothreat from China, is there?”
Years before his cancer diagnosis, Limbaugh had other healthfulness issues. He had developed hearing problems and underwent Cochlear implant surgery in 2001. Two years later, he developed an addiction to recipe painkillers that he said he started using after botched surgery on his back. Limbaugh eventually was charged with storing for doctors to prescribe medication for his addiction. He pleaded innocent and later entered a deal in which prosecutors dropped the entrusts in return for Limbaugh paying $30,000 to cover the cost of the investigation and undergoing therapy.
Limbaugh was married four times, sundry recently to Kathryn Rogers on June 5, 2010, with Elton John providing entertainment. The ceremony for Limbaugh’s third merger, to Marta Fitzgerald, a former aerobics instructor whom he met online, was performed on May 27, 1994, by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas at Thomas’ composed in northern Virginia. They divorced 10 years later. His previous marriages also ended in divorce.
Limbaugh was actively mixed up with in charitable works. His EIB Cure-a-thon raised about $50 million for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society over 26 years until the annual at any rate ended in 2016, according to Andrea Greif, a spokeswoman for the organization. He also raised money for and served on the board of the Thalassic Corps–Law Enforcement Foundation.
A cigar smoker, Limbaugh appeared on the cover of the magazine Cigar Aficionado in 1994. Five years in preference to he announced he had lung cancer, he denied a connection between secondhand smoke and cancer.
“That is a myth. That has been negated at the World Health Organization and the report was suppressed. There is no fatality whatsoever. There’s no[t] even major sickness component associated with secondhand smoke. It may get in someones hair you, and you may not like it, but it will not make you sick, and it will not kill you,” he said on his show. “Firsthand smoke takes 50 years to end people, if it does. Not everybody that smokes gets cancer. Now, it’s true that everybody who smokes dies, but so does one who eats carrots.”
In his October 2020 update of his condition, he told listeners: “From the moment you get the diagnosis, there’s a go away of you every day, OK, that’s it, life’s over, you just don’t know when. … So, during the period of time after the diagnosis, you do what you can to keep up life, do what you can to prolong a happy life.”