It would be truly funny if it were not so serious. The economy is going downhill fast, millions are losing their jobs, unemployment, foreclosures, federal spending is all going up, way up and the new Obama administration is trying very hard to get a hold of the executive branch. They work long hours at getting organized to be fully functioning and take over the constitutional role of America. And yet, what have they been talking about for the past two weeks? Surprise, surprise, the main topic is….. are you ready? Rush Limbaugh! Yes, it’s a conservative radio talk show host who the White House and the Democrat Party have targeted to be the number One focal point, in essence, The Enemy! Does that make sense to you? To us it does not and so, let’s take a closer look and investigate this apparent ‘phenomenon’.
Rush Limbaugh has been a radio talk show host since 1988 and a very successful one at that. He has the most listeners (close to twenty million people) during his broadcasts – three hours Monday through Friday – on over 600 radio stations nationwide. He issues a monthly newsletter and he has published two books, each one selling millions of copies in the past seventeen years. He earns over thirty million dollars a year and has been doing so for some time. Being conservative, he has been a thorn in the side of liberals for twenty years. Yet even his critics admit, be it begrudgingly that he is good at what he is doing or he would not have succeeded for all these many years. They have tried to diminish and ridicule him but to no avail.
Having read this so far, is anyone surprised that he opposed candidate Barack Obama throughout the last election campaign and tried to dissuade voters to pull the lever for Obama. Once elected though and articulating his agenda and making cabinet appointments, Limbaugh continued to critique President-elect and now President Obama by identifying and calling his (Obama’s) plans socialism and following that conclusion by openly wanting Obama to fail in his efforts to change the country and implementing these changes. This was immediately taking up by liberals out of context: They now trumpeted that ‘Limbaugh wants the President to fail and therefore also the country’. Clearly a false statement when they excluded the connection to the prior analytical comments made by Limbaugh which lead him to the I want him to fail in his attempts towards socialism conclusion.
From February 26 to 28, the Conservative Political Action Conference – CPAC – took place in Washington D.C. and Rush Limbaugh was the keynote speaker at this three-day event. He spoke for nearly ninety minutes (full speech here, broken up into nine minute segments) to an overflow crowd of Republicans. It is not easy to summarize his speech in a sentence or two. He spoke on a great variety of things ranging from the constitution to past and current events and tried to differentiate between Democrats and Conservatives. Needless to say, he was critical of the newly-elected President and the Democrats running Congress, but he also criticized Republicans who in his opinion deviated from conservative principles. He also praised the President and lauded him as one of the most gifted politicians he had ever known, that Obama had extraordinary talents and immense communication skills. Yet Limbaugh bemoaned the fact that Obama did not use these extraordinary skills to inspire and motivate the American people. That he (Obama) instead pursued a path that punished achievers and earners (by taxing the ‘rich’). Limbaugh also spoke at length as to what it means to be a Conservative and we like to quote here:
Let me tell you who we conservatives are: We love people. When we look out over the United States of America, when we are anywhere, when we see a group of people, we see Americans. We see human beings. We don’t see groups. We don’t see victims. We don’t see people we want to exploit. What we see is potential. We want every American to be the best he or she chooses to be. We recognize that we are all individuals. We love and revere our founding documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. We believe that the preamble to the Constitution contains an inarguable truth that we are all endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
This is but a very small sample of his comments and we suggest – should you so desire – to find the speech and read it or watch it on youtube in full. Limbaugh was given several standing ovations during and at the end of his speech.
The very next day, Democrats and their ideological allies went on the offense by taking this address to CPAC as the launching point against not just Limbaugh but the entire Republican Party. They declared Rush Limbaugh now to be the official head of the Republican Party and railed against his comments where he was critical of liberals in general and several Democrats and the President in particular. The objective was twofold: They wanted to paint the Republican Party as being led by a right-wing fanatic (Limbaugh) while deflecting the nation’s focus away from the economy with all its elements. Their liberal partners and friends in the main-stream media played along wonderfully and that is why so much was said and heard about Rush Limbaugh during the past few weeks. But we think it did not work: The people in general are not interested in this type of stuff when their own lives are effected by economically worsening conditions with respect to losing ones job or trying to make ends meet financially. In fact, it sort of backfired when people began to wonder why the White House was spending so much time on this when they should instead be dealing exclusively with major current or potential disasters in the housing and job markets.
Common Sense University concludes that freedom of speech is still a constitutionally guaranteed right for everyone living in this country! What Rush Limbaugh did was exactly that: He exercised this right! He presented a powerful argument that conservatism is generally good and that he wanted to keep America the way it is instead of being changed into what he considers a transformation into a country of European socialisms. And we agree: Socialism did not built and make this country of ours what it was and is, Capitalism did!