Free Republic

Rush Limbaugh, the monumentally influential media icon who transformed talk radio and politics in his decades behind the microphone, helping shape the modern-day Republican Party, died Wednesday morning at the age of 70 after a battle with lung cancer, his family announced. Limbaugh's wife, Kathryn, made the announcement on his radio show. "Losing a loved one is terribly difficult, even more so when that loved one is larger than life," she said. "Rush will forever be the greatest of all time."

It doesn’t seem possible that we’ve weathered an entire year since that bleak day last Feb. 17 when at 12:06 p.m. Eastern the inevitable-yet-shocking announcement was broadcast to the world: Rush Limbaugh had passed away. The radio titan, having lived his threescore-and-10 to the absolute fullest, returned his borrowed talent to God. It was a devastating gut-punch to us, his "highly overrated" staff, and to his vast listening audience. Our beloved friend would no longer be providing his brilliant, inspiring, often-hilarious daily clarity and reassurance we had all come to cherish over more than three decades.