Rush Limbaugh is a good person.

I've been following the saga of Ed Morrissey (Captain Ed) over at his blog. He ruptured a disk and therefore has been in pain and it gives me hope to follow his story. He just got out of the hospital following fusion operation.

Anyway, in today's Captains Quarters in a post he calls A Correspondent to Thank, he speaks of a personal letter of support from an unlikely source:

I wrote last week about the excruciating pain that the disc rupture caused and the painkillers that doctors prescribed to ease the situation. Some of you wrote to caution me about Vicodin and Percocet and their addictive qualities. One person in particular wrote to me about his own addiction, and in particular gave me solid advice on physiological conditions that would indicate an addictive response from my body. Given the very public nature of his addiction, his note had one hell of a lot of impact on the decisions I have made this week.

That man is Rush Limbaugh.

I know that some people think that conservatives all take orders from Rush, but we're really not that lucky. I have corresponded with Rush' staff on a couple of occasions where they wanted to quote my blog -- they are extremely scrupulous about asking permission -- but other than that, I have never written directly to Rush nor him to me. He read my post and wanted to make sure that I took precautions with pain medication in order to avoid the problems that he faced in very public (and very overblown) fashion.

It takes a special kind of person to reach out in those circumstances to a man unknown to him just to help protect that man from a danger he might not see. That correspondence informed my decisions in the hospital to hold down my pain medication and to transfer to Ibuprofen as soon as possible. I've been fortunate; my pain since the surgery has allowed me to rely on the over-the-counter analgesic instead of the Vicodin and Percocet. Had I never heard from Rush, I might not have had the discipline to make that decision.

Our politics has gotten to personally vile. We demonize and dehumanize people rather than discuss the issues. Everybody shares some blame in that. My personal philosophy is to see the good in people, to ignore personal insults and deal with the issues, but it would be great if you could publish an opinion without those who disagree resorting to namecalling and character assassination.

My point being, even Rush Limbaugh is a human being who cares for others around him, and whom he reads on the internet.