On Monday, Rush Limbaugh closed his daily three-hour radio show with an announcement that shocked his millions of fans: he has Stage IV lung cancer.

For many conservatives (and even some Leftists), Rush has been a regular radio experience for all or part of the last thirty-plus years.  Day in and day out, five days a week, Rush talks for three hours at a time.  He's never boring, he never loses focus, and he never fails to offer some interesting insight or analysis that helps people make sense of the deluge of (usually biased) information the mainstream media put out daily.

(You can read the full transcript here.)

In all those years, Rush has never deviated from his principled conservatism.  He doesn't pander, and he doesn't have situational ethics.  He's always guided by a rock-solid belief in the Constitution, in the American people, and in the free market, whether the free market of ideas or the free market of capitalism.

As is the case for anyone who stands head and shoulder above others in his field, Rush makes it all look so easy.  It's not.  Thanks to podcasting, a lot of people are able to share their thoughts with the world, and it's easy to find people who do interesting podcasts, even interesting daily podcasts.  But none is like Rush with his effortless three-hour riffs on the news of the day.

The above is an appreciation, not a eulogy.  One of the wonders and miracles of the 21st century is how far the First World has traveled when it comes to treating cancer.  The treatments are invariably awful, so Rush needs everyone's thoughts and prayers as he grapples with recovering from surgery and with feeling terribly sick and tired from chemo and radiation.  Fighting cancer is not for the faint of heart.

But Rush is not faint-hearted.  He's a fighter, as all of us know from watching him beat his prescription drug addiction and face down his hearing loss.  Many of us know friends and family members who have fought cancer — even Stage IV cancer — and won.  There's no reason why Rush shouldn't be one of those winners.

Many years ago, I wrote at my blog an appreciation of Rush, which he was kind enough to read on the air.  It was then and remains the single most exciting day I ever had as a blogger.  In it, I related a conversation I had with someone who was afraid to listen to Rush lest Rush change his Leftist point of view.  I closed with these words, which are as true now as they were a decade ago when I wrote them:

It's quite a high compliment to Rush that ordinary liberals believe he has extraordinary powers.  It isn't every conservative radio or talk show host who is perceived as so compelling and seductive that he can destroy people's world view in an instant.

It's also very frustrating to me because, in a funny way, I agree with my liberal friends that Rush can rejigger their world view very quickly.  The only thing is that I don't believe Rush works his magic through hypnotism and trickery.  Instead, I think Rush's real magic lies in his ability to view the political world as a vast chess board, one on which he can see multiple future moves; his prodigious memory; his well-informed mind; his logical analyses; and his funny persona.  He convinces by appealing to our rational mind, our sense of humor, and our knowledge of the world as it is, and not as some Ivory Tower liberal tells us it should be.

I know I speak for everyone here at American Thinker when I tell Rush that he is in our thoughts and our prayers and that we wish him a safe, speedy, and complete recovery.