Limbaugh: Reagan Lives On

America's leading conservative spokesman, Rush Limbaugh, paid tribute to Ronald Reagan during his Monday radio broadcast, saying that he felt as if part of him had died when he heard the news of the GOP icon's passing.

"Since Saturday afternoon at four o'clock Eastern time, I have felt like a part of me died as well," Limbaugh told his listeners. "But I know that Ronald Reagan lives on in my heart, as he will live on in all of your hearts as well."

"I never met Reagan," the top radio host said. "But it wasn't necessary to have met him in order to love him, which I do, and that's as great a measure of greatness as I know."

Limbaugh recalled that before Reagan was elected president, Washington's pundit class had begun to talk as if America's best days were in the past.

"Some forget that in the late seventies and early eighties the Washington establishment was talking about America's inevitable decline. Jimmy Carter's presidency was looked at by the American left, 'Well, gee, if our best and brightest can't make anything out of this, maybe there's something wrong with this.'"

The conservative talker recalled how little respect liberals had for Reagan, even after he won the Cold War.

At a dinner party for Lady Margaret Thatcher attended by many in New York's intelligentsia, Limbaugh remembered asking her to assess whether Reagan or Mikhail Gorbachev deserved the credit.

"She got stern as she could be at the notion that Gorbachev had anything substantively to do with it," he recalled. "She stood up and she just went down the list of what it was and why it happened, and again she focused on the fact that [it happened] because Reagan had the audacity, Reagan had the fortitude to propose SDI."

"There was no reaction," Limbaugh said. "The guests at this dinner sat stone faced because they knew it, but they didn't want to hear it."

"Liberals are still trying to reverse this impact of Reagan. They're still trying to reverse everything he did."

Reminding America of Reagan's character and courage, said Limbaugh, was a significant part of his broadcast mission.

"Throughout the early years of this program it was an objective of mine to keep the Reagan legacy alive. I was a product of it. It's not even enough to say I believed it. I felt like I was part of it, that I would not have had the life I have were it not for Reagan."

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