Rush Limbaugh is a man with an ego larger than his girth, which is sizable enough. Twenty years of bloviating to the largest radio audience in America have made him certain that he can lead the GOP back to majority status, despite national approval ratings that rival George W. Bush's. No matter! The GOP is currently leaderless, so Limbaugh is stepping bravely into the breach.
Limbaugh attacks Gingrich. GOP chairman Michael Steele calls Limbaugh names. Limbaugh blasts back. How long do you think it will be before Steele has to apologize?
And meanwhile you've got the Obama team stoking the fires. They would love nothing more than for Limbaugh to become the de facto leader of the party, as Greg Sargent lays out nicely:
The Dems and the White House have launched a campaign to elevate Rush and to stamp his face on the entire Republican Party, in order to force individual Republicans to choose between endorsing Rush’s desire for failure and criticizing the powerful talk show host. Intriguingly, insofar as Rush wants to force individual Republicans to make precisely the same choice, Rush’s interests dovetail perfectly with those of the Democratic Party and the White House.
Rush Limbaugh, in pursuit of his own personal glorification, is actively killing the Republican party. Today he said this to Michael Steele on his radio show:
Why are you running the Republican Party? Why do you claim you lead the Republican Party when you seem obsessed with seeing to it that President Obama succeeds? I frankly am stunned that the chairman of the Republican National Committee endorses such an agenda…
If we don’t want Obama and Reid and Pelosi to fail, then why does the RNC exist, Mr. Steele? Why are you even raising money?
Meanwhile, Rod Dreher, one of my favorite conservatives, offers an excellent rebuttal to Limbaugh's speech at CPAC over the weekend. Here he responds to Rush's assertions that if government got out of the way people would automatically flourish:
This is a comforting lie. It is Rousseau conservatism: the idea that man is born innocent, but corrupted by society, or government. Remove the chains of government, and man will return to his natural, good state, which is one of limitless possibility. This denies two bedrock truths of philosophical conservatism, which are that 1) human nature is fallen, and 2) man must learn to live within limits. A conservatism that is not founded on a conscious recognition of those two truths is a false conservatism, and has a shaky foundation from which to criticize liberal utopianism.
The Rush Limbaugh wing of the country is no greater than 30%. If Obama can split the crazy conservatives off of the sane ones, we may actually be able to get some things done.
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