A young college grad gunned down walking his dog, a young mom, Michelle Parker, vanishes after dropping off her little twins at the babysitter. Nancy Grace here. Every day on crime stories, we break down the biggest breaking crime news and study the clues left behind so we can help crime victims and their families every day. A mission every day, another chance to stop crime and keep one more person safe. Join us, listen to crime stories with Nancy Grace on the I Heart radio app or wherever you listen to your podcast.

Welcome to today's edition of the Rush Limbaugh Show podcast. Yes, America's anchorman is away, as I have said at the start of all these guest hosting stints for 15 years now, America's anchorman is away playing among the stars on that great radio set in the sky for all eternity because those radio waves never stop. So three decades of rush of flying across the galaxies now and forever.

And all those early disc jockey shows are up there somewhere to at at Ronald Reagan's memorial, the president's dear friend, Margaret Thatcher said for the final years of his life, Ronnie's mind was clouded by illness. That cloud has now lifted. He is himself again, more himself than at any time on this earth. Rush's mind was entirely unclouded right to the end, as you know, if you heard his last show just a fortnight ago. But for this miserable, ghastly final year, his body was ravaged and that cloud is now lifted and he is free of that wasted shell and in Mrs Thatcher's splendid words, more himself than at any time on this earth.

And I'm not a theological scholar, so I do not know how it works in the great hereafter or whether they need bumper music of the spheres up there. But I hope Rush's hearing is also restored and a grand old disc jockey can once again listen to all his favourite hits like that spectacular intro to Tom Jones doing.

It's not unusual that he especially liked. Rush was unusual, unique and irreplaceable. Nothing like him in the history of American broadcasting. Today, just 48 hours after a grim ending, we all deep inside knew was coming. We will remember Rush and we will hear Rush in that magnificent voice, the perfect radio voice. Some of what we'll hear has been picked out by Russia's beloved Katherine, sung by Mr. Snidely and Ali and others who welcome the show and a couple by me, Markstein.

I've been honored to be the guest host here for a long, long time. If you have a favorite rush moment of your own, please call us on one 800 202 282. We're not going to do open line Friday today, but if you have a terrific rush reminiscence, do let us know. And if you don't get through, no worries. You can leave your condolences anytime of the day or night for Katherine in the family at Rush Limbaugh dot com, you'll see the tab right there on the home page above the big Rush Limbaugh banner.

And by the way, we have a very special show for you on Monday, a very special show that you will not want to miss. And I'll tell you more about that in a few minutes. I would like to start with all great show start and where every episode of this show started with a great signature tune.

And Russia's is one of the very best in the history of American broadcasting is instantly recognizable as Bob Hope. Thanks for the memory or Johnny Carson's Tonight Show theme by my great Canadian compatriot Paul Anka or Martin Block, the very first disc jockey, the man for whom the term was created, and William B. Williams and their make believe ballroom theme.

Beg pardon. I beg pardon. There may be a bit of that today.

The Make Believe Ballroom theme on NCW New York 78 years ago, the most famous theme in right wing radio was written by a hardcore leftist but a sporting hardcore leftist. Here's how Rush recalled it just a year ago.

This song that you're hearing is a looped version of the intro to a song by Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders called My City was Gone. I'm calling attention to this because I haven't I haven't talked about this song in many, many moons. And I don't know how many of you know where the song is from. You just so identify it with this program. Understandably so, 30 plus years. But this song is used with the permission of one of the most legendary female performers in Rock, Chrissie Hynde.

Her publishing company actually tried to take it away. I guess this is back in the early 90s when we were still doing the program out of New York. The publishing firm tried to take it away. And she interceded and told them effectively to pound sand that if I wanted to continue to use it, that I would have her permission to use it. We negotiated a price. We pay them an annual fee for the usage of the tune. I point this out because Chrissie Hynde is out today in a story in the UK Daily Mail and the headline The Pretenders.

Chrissie Hynde praises Trump.

For honoring Rush Limbaugh, despite being a liberal herself. She's doing this because her dad loved Limbaugh and she believes in the right to disagree. This is another reason why, but she was not in New York when they got Shannon, the guy, for asking her about this during the controversy of the I mean, we had them we actually had the song taken away for a period of, I think, three weeks or a month until she interceded.

She was on PLG in New York. They asked her about it. She said, I don't care. I want if Rush wants to use it, fine with me, which totally confounded her publishing company. So we got the song back. The reason is that her dad was a huge fan of this program. Her dad's name was Melville, nickname was Bud. And Chrissie Hynde says that her late father, Melville, would have had and would have loved Trump's presidency, would have absolutely adored Trump.

And would have would have just been excited, as he could be when Trump presented to me the Medal of Freedom at the State of the Union. Liberal rock star, she's a big animal rights aficionado. Of course, you know, we've had our fun with the animal rights activists over the course of this program's tenure.

Liberal rock star Chrissie Hynde shocked her fans by praising Trump for honoring the conservative radio icon Rush Limbaugh, saying her father would have been so delighted. Chrissie Hynde, the lead singer The Pretenders, wrote an open letter to Trump on Twitter yesterday. In which she says her late father, Melville, would have enjoyed his presidency, said Melville, known as Bud, was a huge fan of Limbaugh, who has given the Presidential Medal of Freedom after he announced he had advanced lung cancer.

But she admitted she didn't always see eye to eye with her father. They argued a lot, but that was OK. We didn't cut each other's heads off. Isn't that what being an American is all about? So I wanted to let you hear the actual song here.

This is the opening, this diving in the open. If I if my memory serves, it runs twenty four seconds that we've looped it to make it run about a minute to handle the show up. And I'm going to play the whole thing here. But I want you to hear the song that she made famous, My City was Gone. It's about where she grew up in Ohio, as you will hear is the lyric line. Unfortune. But my city was gone.

There was no train station. Oh, my favorite place. Reduced to walking to go over. So I just wanted to play a portion of the song, let you know where it comes from, and to thank Chrissie Hynde for her comments in the Daily Mail today. Scoring runs today. Her open letter to Trump is actually asking for some leniency for Julian Assange as well. But she points out how her dad would love Trump. And she very much would have a love for her father to have been alive during Trump's administration and to have seen me get the distinguished Presidential Medal of Freedom, our studios, right across the hall at the time.

But I was not we had moved out of there. I think we moved down to Florida time this had happened.

So I have I've never met. She was married to Ray Davies of The Kinks for a while and then some other guy. She's lived in London most of her life, but I wanted to call attention.

Thank you very much for this. It's it's very nice.

It is very nice. And unlike Russia, I actually did meet Chrissie Hynde in a green room over in London many years ago. And you know what she said that this is America. We have the right to disagree. And once upon a time, you would have found a lot of people on the left who would have subscribed to that view. Not any more. Not any more. And so I think Chrissie Hynde, for being a rather principled leftist, she regarded Russia as a right wing wacko.

Russia regarded Miss Hynde as a left wing wacko. But somewhere deep down, I think that Chrissie understood that that great rolling riff that opens her record had found its perfect voice in Rush and the opening of The Rush Limbaugh Show.

And it is one of the great matches, the great music matched to the perfect voice. They found it. I'm glad Chrissie Hynde let Rush use that.

I understand. I don't know whether this is true. I haven't seen her royalty returns or anything.

But I understand that what sealed the deal was years ago. Russia objected to an EPA plan because he was fond of of our furry friends than you might think. He objected to a an EPA plan to use chemicals to test chemicals on thousands and thousands of animals. I think it was something like 4000 different chemicals.

And so he actually supported PETA, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, whatever they called, he he actually supported PETA against the EPA.

And so the left wing wacko and the right wing wacko on this one particular issue found themselves on the same side.

And and Chrissie Hynde donated all her royalties from the opening of The Rush Limbaugh Show to PETA for their campaign against the EPA's wish to test thousands and thousands of chemicals on animals.

And, you know, it doesn't seem like a big deal, but actually there were points of contact between left and right when Rush started this show all those years ago.

And I regret that almost all of them have now been entirely severed. This is Markstein on the one and only Rush Limbaugh show. That's the story behind one of the great theme songs in all American broadcasting. And we will have lots more from Rush and about Rush straight ahead.

Seriously, how can someone be right that much? Ninety nine point eight percent of the time, according to the Sullivan Group. And what is the Sullivan group? How do I get a job like that?

Getting paid to listen to each word Rush speaks and then documenting it as the truth.

You know, before Rush, things were grim. You could be a right wing guy. You could be modestly centre. Right. But you lived in a center left or far left. Well, basically, when you switched on the TV, when you switched on the radio, it was Dan Rather, it was Peter Jennings, it was Oprah, it was Phil Donahue. And there weren't a lot of talk stations because of the Fairness Doctrine.

It wasn't just that you had to balance out the left wing, talk with the right wing talk so you could find a really great left wing guy to give a two hour show to. But then you had to find the right wing guy to give a two hour show.

And that was all incredibly difficult for most radio station owners.

So it was easier just to program soft and easy favorites 24 hours a day or top 40 or country or whatever than actually trying to run a talk station because of the. So the Fairness Doctrine didn't mean. There was left wing talk or right wing talk, it actually meant there was hardly any talk at all. I think when Rush started, there were only 200 talk stations in the United States of America. Now it is the dominant form of AM radio.

And there were thousands and thousands and thousands. And as you know, this show is carried on over 600 of them. But so it was completely new. And as you've heard people say over the last few days, he did some he took advantage of that change in the law, that it made it just too difficult for program directors at little stations here and there to program talk radio having to do all this balancing.

And so it meant that if you you didn't just have to find a talented guy, you had to find another talented guy who had completely the opposite point of view. It was a ludicrous system. And so because of that, millions and millions of people, including millions of people listening right now, remember the very first time they heard the Rush Limbaugh Show? You've heard a few people talking about that on TV and radio in recent days. Here come Brit Hume, Sean Hannity, Dan Bongino, the president of the District Media Group, Beverly Holberg, and then some other loser.

The first time they ever heard Rush.

Along comes this guy that was a reporter working for ABC News at the time. And people say, you heard about this guy, Rush Limbaugh. And I said, listen to his radio show. And it was tremendously fun to listen to 1987 or 88. And I remember I was in a radio studio and somebody told me, you got to hear this guy on the radio.

We accidentally flipped on the radio and heard talent on loan from God. You heard that? He said, Who's this guy? That's the first time we're sitting outside a Queens college and flipping on the dial and hearing the incredible voice of Rush Limbaugh. And it changed my life.

My dad, who picked me up from school every day, always had rush on the radio.

The first time I heard him, we were driving through the north main woods. And suddenly this voice comes in because the radio is like automatically scanning for stations. And we hear Rush for the first time. And wherever I go, we all stop talking. It was amazing, but it's nothing like that.

And that was me right at the end there. And I will never forget that we were very, very deep into the north main woods where no radio station comes through.

And the only one that kind of really sort of does is ninety four point nine.

I think it's out of Portland, Maine, but they got a big transmitter on the top of Mount Washington and that and they're playing that, you know, bland, insipid, adult contemporary, which you wouldn't really want to listen to except there is nothing else. And then even that died and I forgot to switch the radio off. So all just talking and the radio is scanning around the dial, around the dial, around the dial. And we drive for whatever it is, 45 minutes.

And eventually and suddenly, I don't know, just as I said, they're Rush's voice comes on and he starts talking about what happens when the arts and crafts home crowd descend on your small town and he's playing born free, punctuated by gunfire. And he's referring to a recent press release by the NAG'S, the National Association of Gals, which I didn't really know at the time, was his version of the National Organization of Women. And we all just stop talking instantly.

And when I was with to sort of kind of sorta liberals but but skeptical of of the left side of things and weird.

And it's not even about the politics, because I was new to America and they were visitors from abroad. And we're not really sure of, you know, whoever it was they were talking about back then, Phil Gramm or Dukakis or whoever it was, it was how Rush did it.

We had never heard anything like it. And eventually we came to we were up by Moosehead Lake and we came to Kanjo, which has a trading post. And it's the last place you can gas up. So the last place you can get a sandwich in America before you drive deep through the Allagash waterway. And at the end of it, there's the little border post that the new New Brunswick frontier and you're in Canada. So it's the last place you can get gas, last place you can get a meatball sub in America.

And so we we get gas and we come out, we go in and get some food and we eat it outside on the porch and we just we don't talk about anything else except this incredible guy we just heard doing politics in a way that no one had ever done before and none of us had ever heard before.

I will never I will never forget that he rush basically just opened up the possibilities of how you cover politics in that moment. And after I dropped my friends off back in Canada and. I got back to New Hampshire. I made sure I found a local affiliate that carried that station and I was a rush listener from then on.

More in a moment when he was having fun and being tongue in cheek. You can actually hear him wink. Is that crazy? He just knew he was having fun. Thanks for the good times, Rush.

We were talking just before the break. We were hearing from Sean Hannity, Dan Bongino, all kinds of people about the first time they heard the Rush Limbaugh Show. If you precisely remember the first time you heard Rush, you can call us at one 800 202 282.

All you can leave a message you under the condolences tab, which is very sad, but we had to introduce it a couple of days ago because there are just so many people who want to say what Rush means to them. You can find that at Rush Limbaugh dot com right at the top of the page. Just click the condolences tab and tell us about the first time you ever heard Rush.

I said at the top of the show that we were going to have a very special show for you on Monday, and it is going to be one you will not want to miss. Rush's beloved Katherine will join us to take your calls and to answer your questions about Rush.

As you know, he had two great loves in his life. One was you going back a third of a century now and the other took a little longer to find.

But he did in the end, find the perfect lifelong love in Katherine and Katherine. Limbaugh will be here on Monday to take your calls. You will not want to miss that.

Here is something, but I don't think most of you will have heard before. Goes right back to the very earliest days when Rush had found his way to New York City.

And I believe I haven't looked into this and I can't find anything earlier. But I believe this is actually Rush's first television appearance. It's on Public Access Cable in Connecticut, for whatever that is worth.

And Rush is taking calls. And as you know, when you're not doing your own show and you sometimes on some of these other shows, they don't have as many callers or would be callers as Rush does. They've got the same, you know, three or four people who call in to Connecticut Public Access Cable every day.

And so we we we chop the first guy off the caller off because he was just like trying to say that Rush made him mad and he'd had that all his life going back to Walter Winchell. And I guess if you're among Rush's older listeners, you'll remember Walter Winchell.

He used to begin every broadcast by saying, I think, good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea. And he was a huge guy.

He's mentioned in a zillion popular songs. He's referenced in Shuffle Off to Buffalo and and everything else. And and Walter Winchell did make a lot of people mad. And Rush here is trying to explain politely to the guy just how it is he does his show. And what is interesting to me about this is that if you asked him a third of a century later, I think he would have given pretty much the same reply and his interesting comparisons as a former disc jockey between the platters he used to spin when he was playing all the top 40 hits.

And the difference when you're doing talk radio and instead of top 40 hits, you have callers.

And this is very this is his nature. I think this is one of them right at the beginning of his career. You can glimpse from this how well Rush understood his form. Can I be honest with you about something? Yes. You're going all the way back to Walter Winchell, right? We have people who are on the radio and TV as we all well, we could go down the list of people who are there for one reason only, and that's to make you mad.

And the formula for making you the viewer or the listener man hasn't changed a bit yet. People keep falling for it. It amazes me when you know a lot of people, any time I have found any time you express an opinion, half the people that hear it are going to disagree with it. My life average. If you embellish the opinion with confidence and cockiness, then you're getting into and generating hatred and so forth.

There's a lot of people would love to be confident about what they think most people are. And most people are tepid about about their opinions. And if they are subjected to someone such as myself who's not, then it tends to offend them. But the key is knowing that nobody can get everybody to like them. Keeping in mind the law of averages indicates that half the people listen to you're not going to like you still going to find a way to make those who don't like you enjoy listening to your program.

And that is really the key to to the entertainment value that the program contains.

I believe people turn on radio to be entertained, to be entertained, to be entertained. And no matter what, they're turning it on for what kind of programming it has to entertain them. Callers are like records on on a music station. You play the top 10, you don't take bad calls. You don't just sit there and open the lines and say, OK, what do you want to talk about when you invest in callers, your whole hope or your whole chance for success, you're going to fail.

You have to lead them. You can't get along without them. And I don't disparage them. But you can't let them control the show. And that's nothing different. But ABC, for the longest time, I guess the people who have worked there and some of them who still do simply open the phones and deal with what they get. And so people are used to calling ABC, making speeches about whatever else I want, people calling because they're they're reacting to what is happening on my program, not what happened yesterday and somebody else's not what happened on the guy before me if I'm not stirring them up.

And that doesn't mean being negative and pounding them. If I'm not making them compelled to call, I'm not doing my job way. I look at it. I set myself up as the expert. I want to be the reason people listen to my program, the way I react to the guests, the way things happen on my program, the things I might say are things I might do.

I mean, I have never have guests. I never do interviews. And most a lot of what I do on radio requires people's imagination to be fruitful. I'm discovering your technique.

You start out by saying, tell me a little bit about yourself. So you let the guests start off and run the guest jogs or crawls, then it's tough. You have a good guest like me, one who realizes the entertainment value that needs to be on the show. I guess I'll be glad to kick it off and started. Well, it was see, there are bad callers, but in the final analysis, there aren't there are only bad callers if you're not doing your job.

If I'm not doing fine and all I'm trying to do is grab people's attention for what I say. And I know that they're going to be so mad hearing the song, then it's going to take a while before they begin to understand. But that's OK. I'm prepared for take a walk on.

The bottom line is for them to get the message and and be entertained, I think. Absolutely. I mean, the whole thing here is, is a lot of people say you really need the stuff.

You say, oh, it's for you to figure out. Did you hear the way Rush said that?

You say, oh, that's that's Rush back in the 1980s, half a lifetime ago. And he's the same rush you heard on this station just two and a half weeks ago.

He knew he knew who he was. It had taken him a long time.

He'd been kind of circling around, going from this to that for twenty years before a man of undoubted gifts finally found the for the format that showed off those brilliant, superb, unique gifts.

But I love listening to him explain his theories on it. He learned a lot. He was you know, he's just playing whatever it is, The Partridge Family on the radio. Moonlight feels right, whatever it was back then.

But he's learning. He's learning, he's learning. And he knows exactly why his show is working even as he starts it. I want to say one thing, by the way.

I mentioned that once once you the first time you listen to Rush and then you think, wow, I wonder if this guy's got an affiliate near my house. One of the very first affiliates of Rush was a station, a small station in New London, New Hampshire.

I think it was one of actually the charter members of what's now a 600 station family when t.K and when I started guest hosting before they built I station EIB for me in in in an old county jailhouse just in case they bring back the. And it's not fun and we all have to be jailed for doing this kind of show, but I used to go down to A.K., a very small station, and we used to have to ask the Jazzercise class in the basement to hold it down because otherwise it made the microphone just jump around and the owner of the station would bring in the owner of Bud's Chevrolet and his other big advertisers to come and stand in the studio with me to listen to the show, that owner.

Of 20 K in New London. Back around 1991, over 30 years ago, he was sent a life by EIB.

He was sent a life size cardboard cutout of Rush in 1991.

So Rush, you know, 40 years old, whatever, and he has driven around with that life size cardboard cutout in the back seat of his car ever since. Follow these 30 years. And if you ever are up in the upper Connecticut River Valley, whether you're on the New Hampshire side of the river or the Vermont side of the river, and you see some guy driving around with what appears to be a young Rush Limbaugh sitting in the back seat.

That is the owner of A.K. at that time, a guy called Bob Venoco.

And that's actually that's the impact that Rush had on people. There was nothing there was nothing like Rush.

And and people who loved him always wanted to show the degree to which they love him to to the point where some of them I don't know how many cars he's swapped out since he first started driving around with that life size rush cut out in the back seat. Terrifying, terrifying New England liberals, terrifying Dartmouth College professors, terrifying staffers at Ben and Jerry's Vermont ice cream. That's how much that's how much people love Rush. Nothing like it anywhere in the world.

We will take your calls.

Straight ahead. The day did Rush have more fun, speaking of Bill Clinton or Barack Hussein Obama? I'm thinking Clinton, Markstein in for Rush, that is what I have said all these years and it will not change. This is the Rush Limbaugh Show. The one and only Rush Limbaugh show, the number one show in America through all the decades where we're not doing open line Friday.

Today, it's a very different Friday. It's not the Friday any of us wanted. But we are going to take a few of your calls. Let us go to Dayton, Nevada, and Fran.

Fran, you're up first on the Rush Limbaugh Show.

Boy, what a blessing. I've been blessed twice today and I'm fighting back the tears, I'm sorry. And you can you can let them flow.

Fran, we're all we're all a bit like that. And there's no and there's no shame in that. Even as a disembodied voice on your radio set, Rush was the best friend to millions of Americans.

He definitely was mine. And it's a joy to be able to talk to you. I grew up in Sacramento, where, in my opinion, it all started for Rush. Absolutely. Casby K and I grew up there and he taught us all any changes. So all and. I remember so many times over the years him having a little fun with real Linda, he'd always say, he'd always say. And for those of you in Rio, Linda, it means this right and real.

Linda was just across town from Sacramento for me. And but I feel so blessed to have learned so much from this icon and. This man at the and the the last while before his demise and the humility that this man showed. Aye, aye, aye. Can't be forgotten, there's this man, as great as he was, knew that in the big scheme of things he was a little fish in a big pond. But he taught all of us so much and he transformed my entire family blessings to Kathyrn and.

What a great man, a. I don't know where else to go with that, mark. Other than thank you for taking my call. And it's a blessing to be able to talk to you as well.

No, thank you, friend. And you're absolutely right about the way I've talked about this before, but the way Rush handled this last terrible year. And his humility, as you put it, in front of a a he had a grand and glorious life, and that is what we should be celebrating, as he always said, just terrific. And he made sure to let you know. That's why he talked about the cigars and the planes and the big sporting events and flying to Hollywood to do Seth Macfarlane's TV show.

He wanted he wanted everybody to know what a what a grand and glorious story this was.

And when it turned out to have a complete stinker of an ending, he faced that with the same kind of absolute, absolute honesty as the one and only mayor of real real ville has retired that position.

It is held in abeyance, as they say, of the great aristocratic families in the Almanack D'Agata and there will be no more Mayor Mayz of real Phil.. He was as real as it gets. Thank you so much for that call, Fran. One 800 202 282.

And don't forget that on Monday you'll be able to speak directly to Katherine about what Rush means to you. Markstein for Rush. More in just a moment. Don't you hate it when your parents said I told you so?

But let's face it, we all loved it when Rush said I told you so.

Markstein for Rush, I mentioned earlier. The way that until Rush, basically everybody on the right lived in a left wing world that was just, you know, Phil Donahue and Dan Rather and all the rest of the gang. And it's different, I think, to a certain extent that is still the same.

Our culture is left wing and where and we stand in opposition to that. If you find us and it's different for lefties and liberals, they just think, well, that's all they hear all day long, is their own views reflected back at them.

And it was always funny to me the one time they didn't was when they had to take their car in to be inspected or to be repaired or whatever.

And it was always fantastic because in my town, all the guys in the body shop listen to Rush while they were working on the car so they'd get in the car, retune the radio from NPR to Rush, and they'd forget to tune it back to NPR when they gave the car back to the liberals. So the liberal would like drive out of the body shop onto the road, and suddenly the radio would come back on and they'd all be like, what the hell is this?

How is this? And they'd be frantically trying to listen to NPR, get back to NPR.

But sometimes they didn't and Rush converted them.

What makes community coffee different isn't just how long you've been around, it's how far we're willing to go. In pursuit of the perfect cup. We select the finest beans and use four generations of roasting experience to give you a rich, delicious flavor. Look first at your grocery store and online at community coffee dotcom.

A young college grad gunned down while simply walking his dog. A mom, Michelle Parker, vanishes after she drops off her little twins as a babysitter.

An Indianapolis mass murderer leaves six dead. Nancy Grace here. These are just some of the cases we're investigating on crime stories. It's so easy to think it will never happen to you, never to my family. Right. That's not true. It does happen. And we want to help everyday on crime stories, we break down the biggest breaking crime news and try to put the clues together. We speak with family members, reporters, investigators, police and specialists.

Every day is a mission every day, a chance to stop crime and to keep one more person safe.

Join us, listen to crime stories with Nancy Grace on Thee I, heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your podcast. When it comes to making coffee, some people make a single cup, others an entire pot at community coffee, we make our coffee with a commitment not just to you, the drinker, but to those who grill it a continent away and process here in our own backyard as a family owned, community driven company. We take great pride in what we make and how we make it.

Find community coffee at your local grocery store or visit community coffee dotcom to order some today.

Markstein in Farraj on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network. Markstein And for us it has been the greatest privilege of my life to utter those words for almost a decade and a half. And I'm not going to change now. As you know, Rush left us 48 hours ago. He had a glorious life and he received innumerable accolades and awards, culminating in the president giving him that medal during the State of the Union just a year ago.

But this award was particularly special to Rush, given his background.

He was inducted. I joined Mark Twain in the Missouri Hall of Fame. Well, folks, I have to tell you what red blooded American kid growing up in the Midwest doesn't dream of being in the Hall of Fame someday. And yesterday I made it into the Hall of Fame in the state of Missouri with a bust.

And it's a great bust. It is an awesome looking bust. What a fun day it was yesterday. And of course, the Libs are derange. The Democrats are beside themselves. This is not the way this is supposed to be happening.

That was a great honor for our family, really is what this really was. And so many of my family showed up, drove from from all over the Midwest to be there for this event. And everybody we got the state capitol, everybody was I must have I must have posed for 200 pictures and signed a bunch of autographs. It was just everybody was just fabulous.

It could not have been greater from the moment we got off the airplane until we left everybody we ran into. Was just a sweet, nice as they could be, you would never make it to the Hall of Fame if you're afraid of failure, you would never make it to any Hall of Fame if you're afraid of failure. I'm next. Harry Truman. Mark Twain. Of course. What's funny is the governor of the state of Missouri is Democrat Jay Nixon.

And honestly, that is a statement from the governor's office yesterday that they're going because they run the rotunda, the speaker, Steve Tilley, is the guy who who suggested that I join the Hall of Fame. He's the guy who spearheaded it. He's the one who made it happen. He's the one that took the arrows.

This guy was being fired on from the moment he suggested this. Never once did he waver, as I mentioned yesterday in my remarks, I mean, I the you know how. After a championship sporting event, they talk to the star of the game. Inevitably, the star of the game says, I'm the first member of my family to go to college on the. Well, I'm the first member of my family not to.

And I'm the only member of my family not to. And I didn't follow the the family path in life, which was the law, and that was my whole point of my remarks, despite all that, everybody in the family was always supportive and always has been.

Let's. We have got some sound bites, some excerpts of this yesterday, the acceptance that was, they said the governor of the state, Jay Nixon, his office put out a statement yesterday saying that they're not going to put my bust in the Capitol Rotunda. Or they're asking for it, not somebody is asking for the bus not to be put there because I say controversial things and I don't I don't deserve to be there, which is fine.

That's that's the way things are today. But let's I have one and we have had one tooth and not the whole thing. They asked me to go eight to ten minutes and that's a cough for me. I went 14. Nobody complained family direction was law.

My family had a very, very domineering, positively so influential patriarch.

Our grandfather, pop, Rush Limbaugh senior.

Everybody wanted to be like him. You know, every family has a mythological carry.

Every business has a mythological figure. About whom the most incredibly positive things, and of course, that legend grows and it's expanded in time, but all the things that were said about my grandfather were true, never smoked, never drank. He was the epitome of dignity and sophistication and so forth. And he was a role model. Everybody wanted to be like him. And there was this vision of a giant Lauffer. Limbaugh.

Limbaugh. Limbaugh, Limbaugh. Limbaugh, Limbaugh. And then go hire somebody else. Just have another name. And on the on the door, I and a lot of the family went into a lot of my cousins and a brother and so forth, but I was never interested. I told them, yes, I hated school. By the time I was eight years old, I found out I wanted to be on the radio in school and it was prison.

And throughout my mind I explained to them my father. Reluctantly supported me as I embarked on my radio career only because it was the only thing in my life I'd never quit.

Up until that time made me join the Boy Scouts. I was a tenderfoot for a year. You know what you have to do to be a tenderfoot? Nothing. You just join. Not one merit badge, nothing tenderfoot for doing so many things everybody else wanted. I just wasn't interested because I knew what I wanted to do and I knew also school couldn't help me in, well, the wrong way to put it. What I mean to say is that I had a talent.

There was no school to go to for talent. And I knew what I wanted to do, and so everything that prevented me from doing it was an obstacle and school was an obstacle. In my immature view at the at the time, but because they family I mean, here I am playing Donny Osmond records on the radio and they look at where is this going to lead? And of course, nowhere, age 28, disc jockey dies over fire for the sixth or seventh time.

And so I quit and went to work for the Kansas City Royals, went back to radio.

I mean, I've told you all this story, but I I spoke of it in brief yesterday as a means of expressing just how much throughout all of this, the family, everybody in the family was 100 percent totally supportive and have been since day one.

And I can't emphasize enough how much the support of everybody in my family has meant throughout this. They have they have never not one of them ever has sent a note or made a phone call.

Could you think you could maybe tone it down a little and has never, ever happened? It's been just the exact opposite. And that you can't replace that kind of love you can't replace. And the gratitude that I feel for is practically impossible to to express. Eventually, folks, I fought the law.

The law lost on this. And now I'm in the Hall of Famous Missourians and I I'm deeply gratified for the honor it. Well, I wish everybody could have seen this. I had no idea what a big deal it was going to be.

I really did. That's Rush being inducted with Harry Truman and Mark Twain into the Missouri Hall of Fame a few years ago, and he's quite right.

You know, anybody who has loved radio and loved radio long before he loved politics, you know, the radio came first and apologized for suggesting he was playing Partridge Family records on the radio. He was playing Donny Osmond records on the radio. I don't want to make any.

There is a well, there is a huge difference there. But, you know, I don't I don't want to I don't want to lower him into any particular pit of degradation that he did actually inhabit.

But if you if you love radio, every everybody, every kid who ever wanted to be on the radio will recognize that. And it's the equivalent. Now, Rush comes from this great family of judges and lawyers. And he says he wants to play Donny Osmond records on the radio and they will, you know, oh, my God, where did we go wrong? That's the equivalent of saying you're going to run away and and join the circus. And in the end, and with all disrespect to Rush's distinguished forebears, he was the greatest of them all.

He never became a hot shot trial lawyer. He never became a federal judge.

But he consulted with presidents and vice presidents and senators and governors and all the most eminent people of this land because he did what he wanted to do. And Rush talks about this when he gives advice. What I found just guest hosting for us is that when you listen to Russia tentatively, he's actually giving you life advice that you would have to pay a huge amount of money for.

And and one of the particular bits of advice he goes is not not to keep prevaricating. You know, Rush was when he wanted to break into radio the eight year old boy, and he'd go around and occasionally you'd run into people who, you know, they do the weather on the local station or the play by play guy on the weekend sports. And he doesn't ask them about this, you know, what do I need to do? And he was just going around asking people what he needed to do.

And eventually one of them said to him, what you need to do is to stop talking and actually stop doing it. And that is, hey, that is a critical bit of rush advice. Now, he did it all this stuff for 20 years. And and none of it was right for him. He hadn't found the perfect format.

But when he did find the perfect format, when he invented the perfect format and then essentially invented a 24/7 radio format for his invented format to sit perfectly in, it was because of that guy who said at a certain point, you know, you you don't you don't.

You need to stop asking people what you need to do because what you need to do is do it. And Rush was brilliant and practical like that.

We'll have more memories of an unprecedented broadcasting success in the history of American radio.

Up next on the EIB Network, tell me what exactly is a harmless, lovable little fuzzball, the greatest companion who's always there, who loves you?

We love songs. That's where it is.

As Rush was saying, he never followed his beloved grandfather into the family business and became a big time judge. But occasionally he interviewed judges.

And welcome back, folks, to the EIB Network and El Rushmore. We are talking with associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, about his new book, a memoir. It is my grandfather's son. I have to know this. I want I want people to hear it. And I waited until you had set the table with this this brief biography of your life to ask this question. How did you and Ginny get through your confirmation process?

I mean, because that had to be one of the toughest survival experiences of your life. And you've people should know this. You went through that. Most people cannot possibly relate to what that was like, even though they have hardships that was televised, the allegations made against you. The thing that I've noticed, but I'm not sucking up here. This is I want people to know there's a thing I've noticed is you I don't hear any bitterness today about anything that's happened to have been said about you.

I don't hear any time I've been with you no bitterness whatsoever. And I haven't heard lingering bitterness over this. But I still am curious how in the world you got through this.

Well, first of all, I don't really have the luxury to be bitter. I don't have the luxury of having negative things in my. Life, when you are trying to do your best, you don't have that support from our backup or insurance from your family or from those around you who can sort of help you compensate or make up for your mistakes, you don't have the luxury luxury of having those sorts of negative things in your life. With respect to my wife and my wife's my best friend in the whole world.

We'd only been married four years when we went through the confirmation. She was 34 and I was 43 years old. Neither of us had ever been treated like that in our lives. And to be honest with you, no one had seen a precedent for that before or since. And ultimately we realized that it was something that she and I was God and our prayer partners would have to work through. And we saw it as spiritual warfare and we treated it that way.

So most of our time was actually spent together. She and I, you know, from time to time, actually on a daily basis, our prayer partners always in prayer or surrounded by music, religious music and hoping and praying that we could survive this and that it would turn out OK.

At what point did you decide to get aggressive in your own defense? And I remember your very vividly your description of the whole process as a high tech lynching and Kafkaesque that had to be strategically planned for the right time to do it. When did you come up with that idea?

Well, I never really did, Rush. I didn't plan anything. And you were reacting to what was happening to you.

I never really wanted to be on the court. And I don't like Washington. When the president asked me, just like my call to become a priest, my vocation, I think when the president asked you to do something, you should do it now. Most people would say, but it's the Supreme Court. Well, maybe they are interested in it as a personal bit of ambition. But I was not on, so it wasn't something I was trying to get.

It wasn't a prize. What was important to me was that my family I mean, I don't have a whole lot. I had my good name. I had and I was too prideful about that, I would admit. But the my grandparents had cobbled together this life. They'd never been better. They weren't upset with anybody. They they got these two little boys. They raised them. They were law abiding. They were religious people. They were frugal.

They were hardworking. And they made us work. They made us adopt those things. And here for no reason other than people disagreed with me or they thought that a black person shouldn't particularly have these views they were going to set upon me and undermine or destroy the little bit we had cobbled together. And at some point, I think that you are obligated to stand and defend that, to defend the honor. And I think I would have shamed my grandfather if I had not stood up and defended what he had given us and defended the legacy he had left us to to provide for ourselves and for our kids.

Well, I know exactly why they opposed you, and I know exactly why they tried to destroy you. And I also I'm going to mention this in our next segment, which, by the way, will set a record. Mr Justice Thomas, no guest has ever gone longer than one hour on this program. You are the first.

We thank you a little less than a minute. Well, it's our honor and privilege, only a little less than a minute here. But I need to ask you, you said you didn't like Washington. You don't like it. You never thought of the court. You did it in accepting the honor and the the request of the president. The other thirty seconds here, do you see yourself as being on the court at the pinnacle of your profession?

I don't see it that way. I am honored to be a part of defending what we think is the best country in the world and the best constitution in the world. And I'm honored to be in this role for my fellow citizens. And I can't complain about it and in any way.

And you know why I played that out of all the stellar interviews, he didn't do a lot of interviews, but when he did, they were with big name people, with presidents and vice presidents. But I chose that one because of the way Clarence Thomas ended it there. I am honored to be a part of defending what we think is the best country in the world, the best constitution in the world. And in that sense, Rush and Clarence Thomas were doing exactly the same job, even though Rush decided that he had absolutely no interest in following all his family members into the law.

And I will say something else, too.

They had other things in common, not not least the special role their beloved grandfathers played in their respective lives, but also when Rush is asking Clarence Thomas about the absolutely disgraceful way he was treated.

Rush was also talking about himself, just as Clarence Thomas understood when he was answering those questions, that he was also speaking for Rush to.

They were two men who have been sorely traduced by an absolutely disgusting media culture that got worse. However bad you think Clarence Thomas is, would you want to be Brett Kavanaugh and go through what he had to go to go through? And so what Clarence Thomas and Rush Limbaugh are talking about there is learning to live without bitterness, as both men have done through all the years that they have suffered this garbage from a disgusting media culture.

I love my dad, but honestly, we weren't close. We never were, but I had the next best thing. I love you, Rush. I really do. Mark Steyn in for Rush, the world's greatest radio program with the world's greatest hosts.

There is no competition. There has been nothing like the run of this show.

We've we brought you a few favorite moments, in particular personal moments telling Rush in which Rush tells how he came to be Rush. It's not a story any of us can replicate, but it's the most interesting part of anybody's life. Any big time celebrity's life is how he got to be who he is. And with Rush, that is a story that takes in Missouri and takes in a disc jockey, shifts in the middle of the night playing Donny Osmond, as he said, and all the time learning, learning, learning and waiting to seize the opportunity.

Now, I just played you a very serious interview that Rush did with Clarence Thomas, who actually was a forerunner of the environment we live in today, where the left just wants to destroy you because you're evil and you have to be destroyed.

And so they're prepared to do whatever it takes. But that isn't this show. This show isn't all about how grim and miserable and awful our world is or is becoming because Russia is also the funniest guy out there. Now, as the show grew, he added, I mentioned earlier that one of his very first stations was anti-gay in New London, New Hampshire, where I had the fun of doing a couple of shows when I began guest hosting this show.

And, you know, I love southern New Hampshire, but I couldn't honestly say that, you know, New London, New Hampshire, it's a great little town if you ever happen to be in New Hampshire. And they got tons of great little stools and everything, but with the best will in the world, it isn't what the radio guys consider a major market.

And one of the things I loved about Rush when he acquired major markets is that if he was in the mood for just a really good prank to wind them up, he didn't care how upset they got.

Here is Rush recalling one such time just after picking up some major affiliates, including WLS Chicago.

We've been sitting here reminiscing, ladies and gentlemen, some of the things that have happened in the in the past, over the course of this program. And one of the we didn't find the tape of this. I wish we had. But the there was an incident early on, shortly after we had secured WLS Chicago as our Chicago affiliate, which to me was huge. I grew up listening to WLS and Karkoc in St. Louis, KMOX as well. And to be on WLS was a real, real, real.

I mean, that was that was major. And shortly after the clearance on WLS, I just playing around, horsing around here, I'd found a word in the dictionary that I found fascinating.

And that's why I looked at this word. I you know what we have found, ladies and gentlemen, away, because they're worried about highway safety. Back then, something happened to highway safety was a problem. I said one of the things that we can do to really clean up highway safety is to get women to stop farting in their cars.

If you could get that stopped and you can see it every time it happens, if you get that stuff, get women to stop farting in their cars, then they'll be paying attention to driving and it'll be a lot safer. Well, all these people started calling.

I can't believe what you're saying. What am I saying? What are you talking. Well, how how do you know that somebody is doing what you said when they're driving? Because you can see it. And I said, tell you something else. Men don't do it. You will never see men farting in their cars when they're driving. And this went on and on. And finally, Tom Trada, who was running WLS, pulled me off the air, canceled me for 45 minutes and called it McGlocklin to say this is not what we signed up for.

This is not the kind of garbage we signed up in. And Tom said, by the way, I'm sick and tired of hearing that Ted Kennedy swung to the philanderer. And so, Ed, Ed, I don't think it was even aware what we were doing, I mean, they didn't monitor every minute of the show, but I knew exactly when I heard this. I said, this is great. Of course, the word was faade F.D..

And I just run that pronunciation real quickly and people think you're saying the other word. And it means to apply makeup. It's French word to apply makeup. So I was on solid ground. I had not uttered an obscenity. I had not even sending off color. But people Foxo, including Tom Trada.

Are these Faint-hearted station managers Rush, talking about funding for a deal?

It's a word from the French meaning to apply makeup. So in those days, women did do a lot of farting in cars. I think some guys do it these days, too.

So that's about, by the way, I open my Oxford English Dictionary and looked at the entry for Fard. And it doesn't just mean from the French to apply makeup, but it it has a whole other dimension these days that it didn't have back when Rush was doing that bit, because it means the something that a a an observant Muslim is obligated to do. So if Rush was to start going on about there being too much fighting in cars, whoever is running wheels or whatever these days would would have far more problems with it than he would back when Rush did it.

I loved Rush when he was just in a playful mood.

And here he is, I mentioned earlier Andy Williams singing Born Free, which would embellished with the sound of gunfire whenever he did an environmental story.

And actually Andy liked it. And I know at least one of the two writers whom I mentioned on this show the other day, Don Black, also had no objection to it.

But Rush, when he liked to do like to do little embellishments of the pop culture tradition.

Here he is. Here he is. This is a great first line from Rush.

Here he is in a festive mood, just moseying over here to the usual loga warm up. Little chilly here in the studio tonight. And I was wrong.

They do actually make your TV set turned into a fireplace and a miracle. And as we see on our own fireplace, this one has the flames go down a little bit low to necessitating a fast forward to get another log on, which we may or may not do later in the program. Ladies and gentlemen, come with me now as we go over to the audience area of the program.

And will the lovely and gracious Janice from Reston, Virginia, please join me.

She is going to be our conductor, our conductor, Janice Hall. Let me let me get my handheld. I forgot to bring it over here.

Here we go. Janice, you are you are here from Reston, Virginia. Is that right? OK, now, do you have any professional experience in singing? Yes, I do.

Was this let me let me take you. Don't apologize to bother.

We throw the doors open here every night and we get professionals from all walks of life who wait till you hear this. We had planned to sing a Christmas Carol tonight, ladies and gentlemen, and we were going to rehearse the audience. I wasn't going to be a part of that. As the star of the show. You have, you know, underlings do that.

Well, I'm back in makeup and I was sitting in there. They can pull this. They're great. They're really great. So I came out here and I actually rehearsed them myself. And how were you chosen to be conductor? It raised my hand.

Oh, okay. So they asked. They asked. Yes.

OK, now now let me let me also, ladies and gentlemen, share with you the tune. I'm sure you're all familiar with the song. God rest, you marry gentlemen. Now, there's a little side note to this. Most people think it's got rest. Ye merry gentlemen, as in God rest ye karma. Merry gentlemen. It's not it, it's God rest you. Merry comma, gentlemen, because not all gentlemen are merry as we know, especially in this era.

Well, what is the name of this feminazi group here. It's so many women's something or other.

The Women's Action Coalition thank you.

Is a local feminazi organization and they are running around two Grand Central Station and and other noted public areas here in New York and singing Christmas carols where they've rewritten the lyrics to reflect their rage and their anger and their overall angst and how unfair life is treating them in America.

Today, we wanted to send a video out to get our just having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have, aren't we?

Yeah. Yeah.

So so we wanted to get videotape of these people singing, but they're doing it even now as we tape. So we can't we wanted to go to their rehearsals. They found out who we are. They shut the door.

So we thought we'd sing it for you ourselves and wait till you hear this rendition. This is very good. So, Janis, from by the way, do you want your last name?

I won't ask if you don't want to go with Luxton.

Janet Janis Wroxton from Reston, Virginia. Are you big Redskins fan? Yeah, well, they got to win, you know, they have to win against the traders on Saturday.

It's in their hand. The Los Angeles traders. All right. Now the song the song is God Rest. Ye Merry Gentlemen. These are the I mean, here is a traditional Christmas song, one of the greatest Christmas songs ever. The lyrics have been bastardized and totally distorted by these angry to you. You tell me if these are not representative lyrics of angry, upset women. Go ahead, Janice. Lead our group.

Don't be gentle and much to cause this may be limited by unfair ranking.

Black gay bashing has actually been a very good.

Give yourself some applause now. How are we doing on time, Sandy, where are we on time? Six minutes, total program time left. Still plenty of time for our next surprise. Good. I want to redo this. Yes, ma'am. We do have another surprise.

The only problem with this was these are angry lyrics. Would you not agree, Janice? Yes, totally angry lyrics.

And you people were happy sounding like my church choir. So I want you to sing this next time. This we didn't rehearse. This is where you prove your mettle. This is where you have to spontaneously on the spot. Perform is commanded by me, the host. So what I want you to do, I want you to you're unhappy. You women, especially for women's lives, are limited.

But be mad, be mad. Ever be angry here, show how filled with rage you are or how unfair life is in America. Are we ready, Janice? Leave the group again.

Oh, very good, sir. Good. If I had right wrightman know. And that's not bad.

You were smiling too much. You are superb, Janice, thank you so much for coming on. It was great. That was great. That was Russia on the old telly show, and he's quite right that it's God rest ye Merry Colma gentlemen, even before you add the angry feminist lyrics, Markstein on the Rush Limbaugh Show.

We will take your calls.

Straight ahead, he is he was talent on loan from God and what that means now.

Don't miss Monday's very special edition of The Rush Limbaugh Show. Rush, his beloved Katherine will be here to take your calls. You can ask. I'm sure she's not going to tell you everything, but you can ask. You can ask Katherine questions about Rush when he was off the air.

The man behind the microphone, Katherine Limbaugh, will be here for Monday's very special show.

Let us go to J.R. in Columbus, Ohio. J.R., it's great to have you on this special edition of The Rush Limbaugh Show.

Mega Rush ghetto's Mark and the same to you. Mega, mega dittos into Eternity.

Agreed. Totally agreed. The last two days have been hell. I can tell you that from my personal life and my friends. But I'm I'm I want to focus on the good things and the best thing that Russia ever did for me, even though I've been listening for 30 years so God only knows the impact he had on my life was the last two years of my father's life. He was in poor health, very fragile. His faculties were totally intact, you know, was still bad.

But every day that I could, which was about six or seven days a week, I would bring lunch. And I always timed it for Rush because him and I both love Rush and we would eat our lunch listening to Rush. And that was the only time in those two years where he would. Looking over belly, laughing, I mean, laughs that I haven't heard in my life. And I'm his son, and I never heard this laugh before, and and and he listened to Rush literately till the day he passed away, and he meant so much to him and so much to me.

It's when Rush passed away. All of a sudden it hit me. I was like, boy, I was blessed to have those moments blessed and Russian made it possible. And that's something I will remember for the rest of my life.

Thank you. Thank you for that story. It's just it's just a wonderful thing. And that is actually the sound.

You don't hear it on the air or if you're driving along in the car. But that is actually the sound of the Rush Limbaugh audience having the best time of their lives, listening to the man they have listened to for all those years.

And your father is very typical of of Rush's beloved audience. And I'm particularly glad and I know Rush would have loved to have heard that story that your father in the last years of his life, he Rush brought you together and you had the best time. Every lunchtime we will have more calls like that.

You can go to Rush Limbaugh dot com. There's a tab above the banner for the show, The Rush Limbaugh Show. There's a tab above that that says condolences. And if you have a story like that, the first time you heard the show, what it meant to friends and relatives who aren't around, go and leave it there. Rush Limbaugh dot com and click the condolences tab. Markstein for Rushmore's straight ahead.

Not just the doctor of democracy, not just America's anchorman who is America's storyteller.

I asked for stories of when you first heard Rush Limbaugh and Marie Bauer's tweets that she first heard him when she was a child. She grew up on a farm. And as soon as she started driving the tractor at the age of 12, Rush was tuned in. And Marie says, for the longest time I thought he broadcasts from the middle of our field. You know, he loved being on the radio and he would have broadcast from the middle of your field and just put a little transmitter on the back of your tractor.

But that's Maryborough's who has been listening to Rush as soon as she started driving the tractor on the family farm at the age of 12 and Rush was tuned in every day.

The governor of Florida, Rhonda Santurce, whom Ron, whom Rush mentioned on his very last show, has said that flags across the state of Florida will be lowered to half staff in honor.

Of Rush Limbaugh, we have our final hour to come. America's anchorman is away, and this is your undocumented anchorman, Marc Stein, sitting in for us.

That is all it will ever be for me. Even though he has left us to play among the stars, the talent has been returned to God. And now that Rush has joined the great majority, I have no idea how they measure ratings in the hereafter, but they are going to be spectacular. We are remembering Rush across the decades. I've picked out a few of my favorite bits. We jumping around the 80s, 90s, aughts, and Ten's covering the great span of what David Cameron has picked out.

A couple of favorite moments, Mr. Snidely Ali in New York and various other people.

On Monday we will have a very special show for you. Don't miss this. This is appointment radio. You will have the opportunity to ask Rush's beloved Catherine, the great love of his life, a few a few questions that maybe the rest of us can't answer, not necessarily about the radio show and all the rest of it, but what Rush was maybe what Rush was like when he was off off the airwaves, things that only only Katherine will know.

She has been so generous, as you know, from that first terrible announcement at the top of Wednesday's show.

In the midst of all her grief, Katherine is a grieving widow, a no different from any other grieving widow, except that she has to share her grief with tens of millions of people in Rush's great extended family across this land. And I'm sure that does not make what happened in the early hours of Wednesday morning any easier. I would imagine that it makes it, in fact.

An awful lot more difficult, but Catherine has been tremendously gracious and courageous and generous, and she will be here on Monday morning and you will have the opportunity to to call PADF. And you can also go and leave your condolences at Rush Limbaugh dot com.

Julianne Moore sent this to me. She says, Can you go back and find one of Russia's episodes about animal rights? Play the theme from Born Free with gunfire. I think I mentioned this earlier in the show in 1990. I was horrified and fired off many ranting letters to Russia. I finally got it later that it was all a joke. And he did love animals.

He adored animals. I made a cat album a couple of years ago and as a courtesy, it had my cat on the cover of the album in a white bow tie, relaxing at a nightclub with me.

And so as a courtesy, we sent it to Russia's beach and my cat sent the album to Russia's cat and Russia's cat sent a thank you gift back to my cat. I had no idea cats could have UPS accounts, but I was amazed. I didn't realize a whole feline correspondence opened up. Rush loved animals, but he also loved parodies. And that's what made this show fantastical parodies. Here he is talking about them.

And we go back to the phones. We have run a highway around. Meanwhile, Russia is in Atlanta. OK, great. How are you doing, sir? Doing great listener. Since about 92 I was in Russia. One of the things that makes your program so outstanding, obviously, despite your humble self, is the parodies that you come up with. I mean, nobody does what you do on a regular basis. And I'm curious about the creative process.

Where do those come from? Do you think of them and say, hey, Mr. Paul Franklin, make me a parody about this, or do people send them to you?

How do they the parody have kind of an interesting life span? When the program first started, I was I mean, was it every every song parody and bit was something that I had prepped and stored up and wanted to use for a while.

This inspired people to start sending things in and some of them were usable. And I did ignorantly. I thought they were genuine contributors. And later I started getting bills and people demanding that I announce who did the parents. I stopped accepting anything that was submitted. I learned early it was a big trick behind that, not just with Paradies, but in any number of things where we currently are now, we have a satirist, the white comedian Paul Shanklin, who lives in Tennessee, who he basically scripts these.

He does the impersonations, he does the voice synthesizer and to facilitate the impersonations. And it's all a result of what happens on the program that serves as the inspiration. Sometimes I have an idea to ask him to do it, but he submits. I like it, use it. If I want some changes, change him, but basically spontaneous based on what happens in the news. The parody is the satires of taking a fascinating. I stop and think about it road in the way they happened.

If the there are many phases this program is going through phases, the opening phase, when it was brand new. Nothing like it, nothing else out there, like it was just hot as firecrackers going through the roof. I remember going to Atlanta to a football game in the whole stadium, stopping and applauding, said Busch Stadium in St. Louis. Because it was so. Was nothing like it. It was the first national conservative show. And it was it wasn't just politics.

We're making fun of liberals with parodies and all kinds of stuff.

And then that dies down after it becomes more settled in and program, hopefully never static. It's constantly growing and changing and adapting to all kinds of factors. The host gets older and more mature. The subject matter becomes more serious, a different power players in Washington and in the media determining what's discussed. It's just it's a it could never get stale if you stay hip to it. And and so the parodies are the same way.

And early on, when it was brand new, you know, success has many fathers and failure is an orphan. And couple that with robust naivete on my part.

So first two years, I mean, I've got all kinds of little helpers out there that I don't know. People are sending me their thoughts on things. And most of it was up and up and some of it. This is really good and I would I would share it sometimes I identify it or not. And in some cases, I found out that people sending stuff had their own websites. And I ended up being accused of copying and stealing from their website.

It was a setup. There were other times where a spouse, you know, you've used enough of this.

Don't you think you should start paying this guy? So I'm just trying to be nice for crying out loud. You're going to the trouble of trying to be nice. So I basically said, to hell with it. The inclusiveness is just going to be me. Only me.

None of this other outside stuff being nice doesn't work. And the parodies are the same way there were there were things that were submitted over the transom, one of the most famous parodies here that was not commissioned, Persay, was the parody of Dán and The Wanderer, the swimmer with Ted Kennedy. And that was that was submitted by a couple of guys in Albany. And. Yeah, it's a it's a great time for Deon Tomoki, the song was Ted Kennedy singing it.

Yeah, let's hit this a little bit of it here, people flavor what we're talking about here. This was submitted over the transom from Albany. Didn't know the guy played it over and over again for. I'm the type of guy who would ever settle down, pretty girl. Well, you know that I'm around like a man I love them to be. They're all the same. I get so gosh darn Hamied. I don't even know their name.

I'm a philanderer. Yes, a philanderer. I sleep around. Around, around, around, around my view. Around the lip. Got a bimbo on the ride. Only got pulled over. I'll be passing out tonight. And if you want to dance with the girl I love the best. I'll tear open my shirt. Godmother Rosie on my chair. And I'm a philanderer. Yes, a philanderer. I sleep around around. Around around around me.

I'm the type of guy who likes to roam around. I never in one place I roll from town to town and when I find myself going for girl, I hop right in that car. Rabbi, I think for a world to die with dignity, yes, I get it in the cockpit round and round and round and round and round. And I go every every time we play one of these that inspire others, and we had a group from California called the Dave Smith Band, and they they alerted us to the Clausen's me.

It was it was the massive growth era. But the current evolution now is that Paul Shanklin is is our official satirist and parody produces them. And he's the white comedian in lives in Memphis or somewhere in Tennessee. Doesn't matter where he is. And it's all derivative of what happens on the program. So it's a it's a collaborative process, but they're not scripted in advance. It's a lot of it's the singers have to be hired and all that. But it's the more improv it is, the better.

And the sooner it gets done after an event happens, the better. Some of these things used to take three months, three weeks to produce. And by that time, you know the issues over and dead and gone with.

I am born free. Well, that was that was just Andy Williams, and I just put a bunch of guns and bombs and explosions over it, tweaking the tweaking.

We had all rushed the knife rush, the knife, this one what in history, a FedEx driver or UPS in Las Vegas. Created Rush the Knife based on Mack the Knife by Bobby Darin, and it was just classic. It was it still holds up to this day. And we can't play it because it's owned by the estate of whoever it was, it owns the three penny opera and we're under threat of jail if we ever play it again. So on the anniversary shows, we've snuck in like 20 seconds of it, fair use and we just roll the dice under the philosophy.

It's better to apologize and ask for permission. And the Rush Hawkins singers and Barbara should law that was over over the transom and the opera singer from the soloist, soprano from from Dallas, the audience got into the program.

They were just the number of people buying billboards for the Danz bake sale in Fort Collins, Colorado. Anyway, that's that's an overview of the of the Perati situation. But here's his question was about the creativity of it, I think. And that's it all is inspired by what happens on the program and creative juices flow from that. I mean, for every parody that you hear there, probably two or three that are submitted that don't pass muster. We're kind of like Apple in that regard.

We don't use it. We're ready to use it. If it's right. Sometime we'll test market, something we're not sure of. And all of these are on display constantly for people to call the program on hold. That's what we do, is play the parodies, you know, rather than elevator music. Muzak put people to sleep. Do you know I haven't heard the philanderer in whatever it is, 20, 25 years that I still knew every word asleep around, around, around, around, around.

I'll give you I'll give you a tip if you want to submit any new Parratt is the trick is always to stay as close to the original as possible. That's what the great Alan Sherman, who did whatever it was when you walked through the park and get grabbed in the dark, that somehow wrong. And that that was his tip. And it's true with all the Rush parodies, too, like Barney Frank singing ABBA, I am the banking queen.

Just oh, I must just add one other thing called the Mack the Knife business, where they did it as rush the knife, that litigious guy.

That was the guy who stopped Rush using it. That was the basically the estate of Bertolt Brecht, the German left winger who famously said after the East German elections went badly for the commie status, that it is time, it's time for the state to elect a new what did he call it, electing a new electorate or whatever it was. That was Bertolt Brecht, whose state is the most. I've had trouble with them, too. And the other reason I mention it is because I think the very first email I got from Rush just after I started a guest hosting this show, I think at about 2:00 in the morning, he emailed me out of the blue and I thought, oh, what's it going to be about?

Is it going to be about the federal deficit? Is it going to be about foreign policy? Is it going to be. No, he emailed me to agree with me that Bobby Darin's record of Mack the Knife is a great record. It is. And I wish we could still hear Rush that I Markstein in four rush.

We are remembering Rush and hitting a few of the highlights from the 80s, 90s, aughts and tens as we jump around today. More straight ahead.

It's been my daily voice of truth. I always loved it when my wife would say, You know what? He's right for the first few years, I checked to see if he was right after I just stopped checking because he once was the voice of truth.

Markstein in Farraj. We might as well play this because I've had tweets and emails about it and it has become a kind of leitmotif of today's show. This was actually the first British song to win an Oscar by my old friends, John Barry and Don Black, and a huge hit for Andy Williams.

But Rush liked to play it a little differently when there were environmental stories in the news.

Go. Oh, yeah, is that lovely orchestral intro. Stand well back, though. That's enough of that I'm having to having too good a time listening to that, and as we were talking about earlier, Rush absolutely loved animals, but there was that's just a brilliant comic idea. And it was one of the many brilliant comic ideas he came up with in the beginning of the show. And that stayed with the show for years and years and years.

And, you know, Rush and I totally different when it comes to how we work. Rush like to get into the studio very early, I think around eight thirty in the morning. So, like, he'd be in the studio for three hours beforehand before the show began. And I never like to do that because I find it like tires me out and everything. I always arrive about half an hour beforehand. And what team EIB do is play half an hour of those parodies down the line to me at my station EIB, which I always make sure I'm in the studio for, because what it is is a way of immersing me in Rush World through all the years.

Ali Lim, Bali, the great Islamic equivalent of Rush on Afghan radio with talent on loan from Allah. And I always listen to half an hour of those parodies because it is the best way to immerse myself in Russia's world.

Russia's viewpoint, Russia's way of thinking, nothing like it anywhere else, more than just a guy on the radio.

Friend.

Really good friend Mark in us, as we remember, a giant of broadcasting and the indispensable man to American conservatism for three decades and Mike, who I've worked with for four years in New York, Mike just told me that when they used to do the animal rights update and they'd crank up the old Andy Williams version of Borderfree that Mike used to actually do that live, he'd fire off the gunshots and the animals howling differently every time just to make it more fun for the listeners, because it would be a whole new herd being slaughtered every time.

And as I mentioned before, you know that Rush loved animals. I just want to round out a thought when I said that years ago, the very first e-mail rush sent me in the middle of the night, 2:00 in the morning or whatever, and I was sort of a bit startled by it. And I could see, you know, Rush Limbaugh. So I didn't open it immediately. I went downstairs and I made a cup of coffee. And then I sat down back again at the laptop and I opened it up.

And there was this two line thing saying about what a great record Bobby Darin's record of Mack the Knife was.

And I had no idea I would just I just froze. I thought, what is this? What's up with it? I was naturally suspicious. And I wondered for a moment, you know, what is this, some particularly subtle form of Nigerian e-mail scam? And I didn't know what to do. I thought, what if it is Rush? Then it would be expecting me to respond to it. But what if it isn't subtle? Nigerian email scam.

And eventually I contacted late friend Kit Carson, who was Rush's chief of staff for many years, and he said, no, no, that is a rush email from a very what he called a very deep, deep, deep rush email address.

You know, in other words, a highly personal one.

But it it paralyzed with fear. It was such. And because Rush had a broad range of interests and as you well know.

This happened to a certain degree on his last ever show that sometimes, you know, there would be the big stories in the news of, you know, the Iranian nuclear program or the dangling chads in Florida or whatever.

And instead, what would take off and dominate the show would be a rush aside on a little peripheral cultural issue that might be of no consequence. And this was one of the things that I was amazed by because, again, I'd never heard it before.

Basically, if you listen to radio, the sort of foot of page 37 news stories never made it into political talk shows, political talk shows, talked about politicians.

And and with Rush, there were always these kind of slightly wacky stories that would take off and the audience would just run with it and the phone lines would light up. And you knew that was going to be if you wanted to hear about Mitch McConnell, you are out of luck because Mitch wasn't going to get a look in once one of these stories took off.

And this this this was one such story in which Rush forensically examined the question, vital question, do you become a jerk if all you eat is organic food? Even now, after almost 24 years of doing this particular show and another three and a half years of the show in Sacramento before it went nationally. Twenty seven and a half years, something like that, I am still surprised sometimes over what ignites the audience, this organic food stuff. Has has lit up my emails and standardly even found a couple of calls about it.

I'm just going to tell you what's going to happen, because I, I don't tell you 90 percent of the food news that I read, but there are there's a revolution taking place out there. Farmers are trying to sell directly to customers. This this whole organic foods, I know what it is, it's in reaction to processed food, which supposedly is the reason for the obesity epidemic, and everybody's caught up and not everybody. I don't really care about it.

A lot of people caught up and doing whatever they think necessary to be the healthiest that they can be. So problematic. What's going to happen? This is as predictable as the sun coming up in the morning and setting in the evening all these organic food people are eventually going to become conservatives because what's happening now? Government is figuring out that these organic food places exist and that they're outside the regulatory process and they're outside the tax and fee structure and that.

Cannot stand. So what's going to happen is the cities where these people operate and the state they operate, and then the feds are going to get involved and they're going to start regulating this stuff eventually. They're going to regulate what your free range chicken is given to eat, they're going to regulate every aspect just like they do everything else. And they're going to they're going to come down hard on all of this so-called organic food, like raw milk, your free range chicken running in the backyard that you shoot and kill or whatever, didn't take the whole food market or whatever they call them, organic food market farms that are selling their produce and meats directly to customers.

What's going to have these all these people with their little utopia's, what they think they're engaging in, healthful living and production and so forth, the heavy hand of government is going to find them. And under the auspices of regulating for safety and health, these people are going to find out exactly what oppressive government is. I'm talking about the organic growth that's going to happen. It may not be immediate, but it will. Parma, Ohio. Anthony, you're up first.

Great to have you with us on the program, sir. Hello.

Hello, Rush. Hi. I'm a libertarian Tea Party. Everything else. It is a pleasure to talk to you, informing us, et cetera, et cetera, but. I have some disagreement, you're going after the what you call the food fatty's and organic people, you're making kind of a mistake there.

Well, I'm not reporting the Pew Research Center found out OK, today, held them say today's health for some, it's an MSNBC bunch of people, university people found that organic food people are jerks. The question is, which came first? The the organic food. The question is, did the organic food make the jerk? Was the person the jerk first?

OK. Let me first explain something I'm not. I'm on what they call the paleo diet, like that guy from South or North Carolina was was on that got attacked. I've been on it for several years. I got off insulin, all kind of meds, use of that diet. And I spent the last five. Matter of fact, that gentleman may have got the idea of the paleo diet from me because I write on a lot of different blogs about different things.

I'm 67 years old. I've been on that diet for many years, I studied diets, what is the caveman diet, right? I mean, you do your own hunting and gathering enough. You're out there amongst the wildlife and you wipe them out and you take them home.

And I live in a city. I live in a liberal county surrounded by liberals. Oh, Lord, no. I don't do my own hunting and gathering. But people have to understand that a lot of the stuff that is not organic is sprayed with a lot of poisons, a lot of bad stuff.

Yeah, I know.

It's what I eat these GMO foods, you know, genetically modified stuff. That's what I eat. I would stay away from that. But I'm a libertarian. You put in your body what you want to put in it.

See, this is a difference. You are trying to tell everybody else how they ought to eat now because of your paleo diet. That's them. And you're a libertarian when you're way outside the bounds of libertarianism, like you couldn't be further from a libertarian. Nancy Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, great to have you on the EIB Network.

Hi. Hi, Rush. How are you? Very well, thank you. My gosh, you are just my hero.

Well, I appreciate that. Anyways, I'm just calling because you're talking about the organic food and I'm feeling like it's like the Prius. Just because you eat organic food or because you drive a Prius, does that make you a better person than me? Well, they think it does well, they think it makes them superior.

Oh, exactly. And that's the problem. Like those ribbons that you wear, the colored ribbons, the messages I'm wearing, this ribbon, I care more than you do, I'm a better person and I'm a better person.

Right, exactly. Exactly. And I just ate a steak last night and I cleaned my house with harsh chemicals today. But it's clean.

I love it. You have seen exactly the stuff that you've always used.

You're still using it. And guess what does the trick? But you use what they want for you use what is it? The the top loading washer. Now, does it work or is it the the front loader? Yeah, it's the front loader that got all moldy and stuff.

And then the new detergent doesn't get dishes clean now as we're speaking.

Right. Right. Yes, exactly, and I'm using bleach. You are. I had my steak and I had it rare. And I loved it like a real American babe to me. Have you signed? Have you signed up for Rush Babes of America Facebook page if you haven't. I've got to go there. You should. You should definitely. Well. Well, it's just like their detergent, their new dishwashing. It doesn't work. You have to wash the dishes by hand, but the environment safe.

Your dishwasher is not destroying the planet if you use the Liberal's new detergent. But it also doesn't clean your dishes.

Rayner's it's like, well, my business is not clean. So what is it? Yeah, oh, no. Give me the police, give me the tieless and I love it. Well, good.

Well, I'm glad you called you. You made my day. I appreciate it. Have a great day yourself.

That doesn't make you a better person. Nancy, the red meat conservative versus add to the the organic libertarian, as I said, sometimes it doesn't have to be, you know, doing something about the deficit or talking about the the trichomes or whatever. Sometimes you just never know where this show is going to go. And that's what's kept it fresh for over three decades.

Markstein infamous remembering Rush through all the years. We will take your calls. Straight ahead.

This is the one and only Rush Limbaugh show across the fruited plain. Let's go to Chad in Syracuse, New York. Chad, you on America's number one radio? Thanks for taking my pleasure, Hallmark.

My pleasure. I wanted to tell this story. I always wanted to to Rush, but sadly, I wasn't able to. But I'm glad I can tell it to you. In 1989, I turned 16. I got my first automobile and I only had an A.M. radio. So trying to find something, I found Rush and it didn't take long. Listening to it, I got hooked. And the wisdom that he gave and the influence I remember my first election I was old enough to vote was George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

And his facts and wisdom steered me to vote for George H.W. Bush because I was graduate in high school. I was worried about Clinton's free trade policies and how could destroy American's working class.

And not just that through the years he made it fun. I enjoyed his little sayings like half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair. Oh, he was Paradies. I'm I'm a truck driver. I remember my favorite parody always was Barney Frank, the banking queen. I remember laughing so hard I went into debt.

Oh, good. By Gigli. Don't try that. Well, you don't try that while you're driving, Chad. I know that, that's for sure.

But I mean, through the years, the one thing you know, he would never endorse the candidate. He would give me the facts and let everybody else to decide what what was best that they wanted. And I'm 47 now and just thinking about it. Thirty of those forty seven years I had Rush and he I'm trying not to be emotional on it, but. I know one thing, he will deeply, deeply be missed. But I know for me, he'll never be forgotten.

There are millions like you, Chad, who discovered Rush, 1988, 1991, 1989, 1994, and as the years go by, he has just been a daily part of millions of people's lives.

And you were the perfect age to find him at 16 years old on a car which had only AM radio.

I'll tell you something scary, Chad. In continental Europe now, the new cars, they don't even come with AM radio because they've got nothing on him. AM Radio in the United States, you have Rush and all the people who labor in Russia's shadow.

But who knows if you if you, a 16 year old, get in your first car in Sweden or Finland or Slovenia, you wouldn't have the opportunities you had all those years ago when you bought your first car with just that lousy old AM radio and found something that changed your life on it.

Thank you so much for that call, Chad. There are millions of chads across this land.

We will close it out on the Rush Limbaugh Show and customer.

There will never be another radio show like The Rush Limbaugh Show.

And at the end of the most rotten week for this show and for America, I would like to thank Mr. Snidely and Ali and Mike and Craig and Crash the best team in radio. No doubt the news two days ago was stunning.

You know, Rush's beloved grandfather, the patriarch, the judge, Rush Limbaugh senior, lived to the age of 104.

And you know, when that happens, it's generally about genes and genetics. And I thought, you know, Rush must have some pretty fantastic genes. And who knows, it's entirely possible he could be on the air at 87, 93, 102.

And it wasn't to be. It wasn't to be. But but as this weekend goes, more rush.

But rejoice in a great American life. Well lived. And please join us on Monday when the love of Rush is too short life. Catherine is going to be here to take your calls and remember Rush in her own way.

That starts on Monday, midday Eastern.

Please be here with Catherine Lembo.