I just missed meeting the great Rush Limbaugh in person on several occasions.  Whenever he was in Louisville to play golf with Fuzzy Zoeller, he usually wound up at this little pub, which has long been a favorite watering hole for down-home conservatives.  My buddy had an office next door and would text me anytime there was a Rush sitting, but never in time to join them.  No matter.  Rush shared his talent and his person with us 25 million fans on the radio for over 30 years.

He also helped a lot of people with their big breaks into the conservative movement.  He did the same for me, on a smaller scale.  In fact, my friends and I rejuvenated the local GOP here, using one of the first Rush Rooms in the state — at this place.  The pizza is still pretty good, and we now have a really red state. Thanks, Rush!

Rush never had a problem finding something to talk about for three hours every day for 32 years, with his "great big stack of stuff," not just from older conservative outlets, but all the new guys who followed, like American Thinker.  I bet like a lot of you, I first went looking for this site when Rush praised it 20 years ago and its then novel idea of having articles chock-a-block with hyperlinks to demonstrate the author's assertions and references.

When I saw the cool and simple way they were doing things at AT, taking articles and blog posts from knowledgeable people, who were not all career writers but had interesting and topical things to say, it motivated me to try sending them some pieces.  Happily, my bits were frequently accepted, and later at a few other national sites.  Again, thanks, Rush!

Can anyone be the next Rush?  Of course not, just like there is no next William F. Buckley, Jr.  But there is an army of talented men and women following him who will build on his legacy.  Maybe the singular part of that legacy is the BS-detector skills in popular culture, Rush left us.

Rush was very tough on the prominent left-wing jerks who mess up our society, and he rarely misfired on this.  One of the few times was a couple of weeks in 1990 with his AIDS update satires.  That was over the line, and he quickly apologized for it.

But for most other "unforgivable moments," he was right on target — such as calling out Michael J. Fox in 2006 for possibly faking symptoms in his notorious stem cell commercial for a referendum in Missouri.  It quickly turned out that Rush was right, Fox was overmedicated the day of filming, and his tremulous condition was played up by the director for sympathy.  Fifteen years later, we now know, embryonic destruction is not necessary for stem cell research; it doesn't work for Parkinson's anyway; and, nice to hear, Mr. Fox was mostly cured years ago, with non-controversial micro-brain surgery.

Sandra Fluke was also a cause célèbre years ago, claiming before Congress that there could be no religious exception for contraceptive insurance, because it costs women up to $1,000 a year.  Rush ripped into her as some kind of weirdo, trying to get paid to have sex.  Again, Rush was right; it costs just a few bucks a month to buy contraceptives at Walmart.  Fluke later admitted she was only speaking of a story she had heard, of just one woman with a rare medical condition who somehow needed about $1,500 a month for pills and many related things.  More liberal BS.

Inspired by Rush, a whole lot of people on our side these days, from Tucker Carlson to James O'Keefe, have gotten really good now at tracking down and ridiculing all this liberal BS in our culture.  And with the Biden administration, there will be plenty more of it coming.  So, yet again, thanks, Rush!

You can get a pretty good picture on someone by considering the quality of both the friends he makes and the enemies he acquires.  Rush had millions of the finest people in our country, back in his corner every day, while his enemies were always the worst collection of creeps imaginable.  There may be no better testament to a man's life than that and how he affected our country.  Thanks so much, Rush!

Frank Friday is an attorney in Louisville, Ky.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.