Last year, during the presidential campaign, John Kerry kept talking about Karl Rove—how Rove was the weaver of all evil, etc. This was four years after the ’04 election, mind you. And I heard someone say, “Karl’s still in his head.” Well, Rush Limbaugh seems to be in the “head” of many a person—including the president of the United States. Colin Powell and others have singled him out too.
If that’s not proof that Rush is the Leader of the Opposition (as National Review once dubbed him), nothing is.
“Don’t listen to Rush Limbaugh,” say the Obamas and the Powells and some other people. They are giving “free advice” to the Republicans. Well, since when has the GOP listened to Rush? If it did, we would not have nominated Senator McCain last year (for all his virtues, which are considerable). Moreover, Rush did not ask for many of the policies of the Bush administration, particularly in the domestic realm.
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Rush says what he regards as true, political consequences be damned. He is not a party strategist, or a party anything. He’s a man with opinions, and they are sound, and that’s why so many people are drawn to him, and them.
Keep it up, Rush—and stay “in their heads.”
A reader wrote me, citing the now-famous, or semi-famous, nugget from the new White House website: “President Obama will keep the broken promises made by President Bush to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. He and Vice President Biden will take steps to ensure that the federal government will never again allow such catastrophic failures in emergency planning and response to occur. President Obama swiftly responded to Hurricane Katrina [as a senator]. Citing the Bush Administration’s ‘unconscionable ineptitude’ in responding to Hurricane Katrina,” etc.
Then our reader commented, “Isn’t there a psychological term for people who have to promote their superiority by cutting down others?” I guess so, because there’s a psychological term for (nearly) everything. And that was what was chiefly wrong with Obama’s inaugural address, in my opinion: his apparent need to put down Bush, in order to puff himself and his supporters up. (I wrote about this at some length in the Corner, and will not repeat myself—too much—here.)
The question was raised in our office late last week, “How long will the Obama administration be able to blame George Bush for every problem under the sun?” And the answer is, Indefinitely—because the media will permit it, and abet it: participate in it (given that so many in the media share the worldview and attitudes and style of the new administration).
Is that too dark and cynical a view? Well, I hope so. Maybe we should revisit this subject at regular intervals.
I wonder if you saw this lead sentence of a Washington Post article—a sentence that should enter the annals of political-reporting history: “Just days after taking office vowing to end the political era of ‘petty grievances,’ President Obama ran into mounting GOP opposition yesterday to an economic stimulus plan that he had hoped would receive broad bipartisan support.”
Yep, that’s right: As a reader of ours put it, either bow—bow immediately—to a new New Deal, or be the harborer and inflicter of petty grievances. How nice! (To heck with this democracy business, and this republicanism business.)
