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Mar
4
If that doesn’t express the internal and external conflicts with which conservatives and Republicans are struggling, I don’t know what does.
Just check out BlogNetNews.com Rightysphere results for “The Messiah”
versus
A Google search on “apologize Limbaugh.”
Complete, total, utter, abject absence of looking in the mirror. (I know – so many opportunities to make jokes about what they’d see re: Limbaugh’s image at CPAC.)
Note: I changed the title of the post because “hypocrisy” isn’t quite the right word, even if it feels as though that’s part of what’s going on.
Update: Joan Walsh (the person former congressman Dick Armey said on “Hardball” he’d never want to marry?) has a great column today at Salon, Delay: Limbaugh’s a GOP role model,” that intersects with this post. An excerpt:
It’s Tom DeLay, not President Obama, who is now designating Limbaugh as his party’s “role model.” It’s irresistible to respond: Really? Limbaugh’s the “role model” for the party of family values? A thrice-divorced, drug-abusing, Parkinson’s-mocking, cigar-sucking egomaniac, a poster boy for meanness, overindulgence and excess? Some folks in my letters lately have objected to my discussing some of Limbaugh’s personal traits, particularly his physical appearance at CPAC, where he I said he looked “sweaty and hopped-up.” Facts are facts: He was sweaty and hopped-up. And with Tom DeLay saying he’s a Republican role model, I think we have to take in Limbaugh — all of him –to fully appreciate his outsize impact on the shrinking Republican Party.
And again, one of the oldest writer’s and debater’s ploys in the book – put the shoe on the other foot and imagine how it might feel:
Imagine if the Democrats had an unelected leader of Limbaugh’s stature, who in the wake of 9/11 wished for President Bush to fail — and who got other Democrats to join him. (I say “him” because it’s simply impossible to imagine a female Limbaugh, of similar unlovely temperament and appearance — a big, pasty, sweaty, nasty Ruth Limbaugh, let’s call her, railing against Bush — getting any kind of national podium, let alone the kind Limbaugh has. Just try that thought experiment for a minute, and then try telling me sexism is history.) Imagine him ranting and raving and sweating and hopping up and down at, say, a MoveOn conference. Imagine that when a few Democrats had the temerity to suggest that this unelected leader might be wrong, might be hurting the party, might even be hurting the country, they had to rush to apologize to said leader within minutes or hours.
Then imagine those same Democrats trying to insist that said leader is a “role model” but not, actually, in fact, technically, their party leader. If Democrats had done anything like any of this in 2001 and 2002, the mainstream media wouldn’t be debating whether Republicans were actually to blame for exaggerating said leader’s importance — as MSNBC has done all day Tuesday — they’d be denouncing Democrats as the party of treason. To be honest, imagining a Democratic Limbaugh getting away with his brand of demagoguery and treachery is about as impossible as imagining a female Limbaugh.
I continue to recall how well Byron York of NRO’s The Corner used this convention to make people realize the incredibly different way they were treating Bristol Palin’s teen, unmarried pregnancy versus how they might if it was an Obama daughter who was involved.
I actually just keep thinking about our kids. Limbaugh? Obama?
Go ahead and not choose Obama, whatever. But it’s the fact that people say that they see Limbaugh as an option that freaks me out the most.
Hattip to this tweet from John Hummel.
Updatex2: I should have also included a link to Belief.net’s Crunchy Con conservative columnist Rod Dreher’s “White Kids on Dope” – an excerpt of his scathing fisking of Limbaugh’s CPAC ramblings:
Any attempt to grapple in a public way with the sins and failings of America, the errors that got us into this ditch, is to be seen as unpatriotic. We must ever keep before us the America Idol, and the power of positive thinking.
…
Anybody who challenges Limbavian orthodoxy is, ipso facto, the Enemy. If you suggest reform, even from the Right, you are a useful idiot for the Media, which are the Enemy, and can never be anything but the Enemy. Limbaughism sounds a lot like Leninism.
…
I should say that there’s something to like in the Limbaugh speech; I share a degree of his skepticism over the expanding role of the state in American life under Obama, and his confidence that the greater responsibility for our own condition lies in individual and private-sector initiative. But good grief, is this what constitutes popular conservatism in 2009? This ideologically-driven right-wing Rousseauism, with Leninist overtones about the Enemies of the People? If so, then count me as an Enemy, because I want nothing to do with it, as I recognize it as simply a crudely politicized form of philosophical liberalism.
By Jill Miller Zimon at 7:24 am March 4th, 2009 in Barack Obama, conservatives, Politics, Republicans
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One Response to “One mouth, two sides: GOP genuflects to Limbaugh yet nicknames Obama “The Messiah””
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I think Walsh’s comments are really interesting and point out a different side. This whole time I have been thinking Democrats are hypocrites for criticizing Limbaugh’s negative remarks, when they most obviously made negative remarks about Bush for the last 8 years. But I see the difference here is the scale that Limbaugh is on- he is more than just a Republican, he is a national celebrity (whether we like it or not). Elevating him to the status of ‘role model’ is a risky one- the Republicans will be isolating many members of their party. This video has comments about this situation from people like Maddow, Steele, and Arianna Huffington that I find especially relevent-http://tinyurl.com/cfvzd9