Rush Limbaugh has advanced lung cancer

[Tanuki]

88. Lee Atwater repented and apologized. Maybe he felt better,

and it was the right thing to do, but I don't think anything he said ever undid the damage of his earlier actions.

https://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/13/us/gravely-ill-atwater-offers-apology.html

"In a detailed and candid article about his career and his fight against an inoperable brain tumor, Lee Atwater has apologized to Michael S. Dukakis for the "naked cruelty" of a remark he made about the Democratic Presidential nominee in the 1988 campaign.

The apology by Mr. Atwater, who is now in his last month as chairman of the Republican National Committee, is included in an article in the February issue of Life magazine, where he also starkly describes his often-desperate attempts to deal with his illness and his fear on some nights that if he falls asleep, "I will never wake up again."

As manager of Mr. Bush's campaign, Mr. Atwater succeeded in making the case of Willie Horton, a convicted murderer, an issue against Mr. Dukakis.

Mr. Horton, who is black, raped a white woman and stabbed her husband while on a weekend furlough from a Massachusetts prison. The Bush campaign used the case to portray Mr. Dukakis, then Governor of Massachusetts, as a liberal who was soft on crime.
.... "After the election, when I would run into Ron Brown, I would say hello and then pass him off to one of my aides," he said. "I actually thought that talking to him would make me appear vulnerable.

"Since my illness, Ron has been enormously kind -- he sent a baby present to Sally T.," Mr. Atwater's third child, who was born only weeks after he was stricken. "He writes and calls regularly -- and I have learned a lesson: Politics and human relationships are separate. I may disagree with Ron Brown's message, but I can love him as a man."....(more)