I just realized one thing about Rush that I had never thought of before.  I wonder if it has also occurred to the rest of Rush Limbaugh’s loyal audience, that he is human, and he might not be around forever.  I think most of us just took it for granted that, from noon to 3:00PM ET, or whenever his program is on where you live, when you turn on your radio, he’s there.  Every day, for three whole hours, he has been there, pretty reliably, for over 30 years.  It simply never occurred to me that someday he might be gone.  So the announcement that he was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer, just hit me like a ton of bricks. Now that I’ve had a chance for it to sink in, and have heard last Friday’s show (I listened to the first hour live through his Web site, before people started interrupting me at work), I am again reminded of his likeness to a Bobo doll-you can knock him over, but he keeps getting back up every time.  And one of the reasons for that is his irrepressible optimism, about himself, about life in general, and about America.

Here, from his two books, are some of what I consider Rush’s best, most pithy, pronouncements.

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So, take some advice.  Lighten up.  We should all laugh more at ourselves. I don’t need to improve much in this area, but admit it, many of you people do. Many of you take things far too seriously in most cases.  Come on, laugh at yourselves, folks.

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We need to encourage people to contribute to the economy, not to sit around basking in self-pity. We need to help them get out of the situation, rather than glorifying and perpetuating it. Encourage them to become economically equal members of this society, rather than a collection of sycophants sidling up to the pig and looking for the biggest nipple they can find.

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Don’t fall prey to the seductive emotional appeals of the Democrats as they attempt to pit one group of society against another with their politics of class envy. Let the facts speak for themselves. If a liberal president gets elected, he, like Jimmy Carter, will make sure “fairness” applies to all economic levels.  He will see to it that we all get poor again.

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The way to save endangered species is to give someone a stake in preserving them. By allowing legitimate ranches to privatize them, we can make sure others don’t pulverize them.

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People are going to have to learn to depend less on the government. We are going to have to separate them from the federal budget sow.  But we can also make their lives better by giving them more choice in how the tax money they do pay is spent.

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I refuse to believe that people, who are themselves the result of Creation, can destroy the most magnificent creation of the entire universe.

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Environmentalists always appeal to the memories of a simpler, more natural time.  They are regressing, wanting to go backward in time.

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I want this to be a great country, and a great country needs as many great individuals as there can be.

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For the black leadership to continue to encourage their people to absorb themselves in the past, instead of helping them to get beyond the bitterness, is doing them a great disservice.

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…man is a spiritual being. If his faith in God is destroyed, the void will be filled with something else. Throughout history that substitute for faith has been a belief in a man-made god called the state. Untold crimes have been committed in its name, Hitler and Stalin being the most bloody recent examples.

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I am convinced that the most important thing conservatives have to do to win is to just keep saying no to the left.  No to their special-interest giveaways. No to their pork-barrel spending projects. No to their privileged congressional empire….Be confident and patient, and never forget History.

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Yes, I am fortunate that I have the opportunity to do what I love.  But nobody handed it to me on a silver platter.  I had to work at it and prove myself every step of the way.  My story is nothing more than an example of the Original American Ethic: hard work, overcoming obstacles, triumphing over enormous odds, the pioneer spirit. These things, my friends–not such vacuous symbolic gestures as wearing ribbons on lapels or government intrusion into every aspect of our lives–are what built this country.

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A man from Alabama recently wrote me a computer letter accusing me of being too upbeat and optimistic. He said that by listening to me, one would get the idea that there is no hurting or suffering going on in the world and that everything is working out for the best. Wrong. I realize that there are failures and suffering.  I just happen to believe that there would be a great deal more of them if everyone had that writer’s pessimistic, defeatist attitude. …What “the Suffering” need is steady doses of confidence-building optimism.

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I have not written a doctoral theses about free enterprise.   Humbly speaking, as the Doctor of Democracy, I am free enterprise. And I operate in the real world, not in the insulated atmosphere of the ivory-tower academy.

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Don’t believe the doomsayers. Don’t believe the negativity-mongers. Don’t believe the America-bashers–even if one of them is the president of the United States. Don’t buy into the lie that punishing high achievers will bring you happiness. Your own success–born of your own ingenuity and industry–is what will make you happy.