President Obama warned Republicans on Capitol Hill today that they need to quit listening to radio king Rush Limbaugh if they want to get along with Democrats and the new administration.
“You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done,” he told top GOP leaders, whom he had invited to the White House to discuss his nearly $1 trillion stimulus package.
One White House official confirmed the comment but said he was simply trying to make a larger point about bipartisan efforts.
I’m reminded, now, about that incident early on in Obama’s campaign where he took a reporter to task for daring to mention his rather large ears – I wonder if our President is one of those really sad political specimens who is kept awake at night with anger over a hostile media mention? The best way to thwart someone is to rattle them – get under their skin and get them concentrating on fighting you, rather than carrying out their plan.
In a battle between Obama and Limbaugh, you have to go with El Rushbo – because Rush doesn’t care what Obama thinks about him…but Obama seems to care about what Rush thinks.
UPDATE: Byron York over at NRO got comments from Rush on this:
To make the argument about me instead of his plan makes sense from his perspective. Obama’s plan would buy votes for the Democrat Party, in the same way FDR’s New Deal established majority power for 50 years of Democrat rule, and it would also simultaneously seriously damage any hope of future tax cuts. It would allow a majority of American voters to guarantee no taxes for themselves going forward. It would burden the private sector and put the public sector in permanent and firm control of the economy. Put simply, I believe his stimulus is aimed at re-establishing “eternal” power for the Democrat Party rather than stimulating the economy because anyone with a brain knows this is NOT how you stimulate the economy. If I can be made to serve as a distraction, then there is that much less time debating the merits of this TRILLION dollar debacle.
Obama was angry that Merrill Lynch used $1.2 million of TARP money to remodel an executive suite. Excuse me, but didn’t Merrill have to hire a decorator and contractor? Didn’t they have to buy the new furnishings? What’s the difference in that and Merrill loaning that money to a decorator, contractor and goods supplier to remodel Warren Buffet’s office? Either way, stimulus in the private sector occurs. Are we really at the point where the bad PR of Merrill getting a redecorated office in the process is reason to smear them? How much money will the Obamas spend redecorating the White House residence? Whose money will be spent? I have no problem with the Obamas redoing the place. It is tradition. 600 private jets flown by rich Democrats flew into the Inauguration. That’s fine but the auto execs using theirs is a crime? In both instances, the people on those jets arrived in Washington wanting something from Washington, not just good will.
As I’ve said, the whole thing here is power – Democrats want it and never want to surrender it. The desire for power is bound up in a lot of things but it goes at bottom to a desire to work the socio-economic levers of society by people who genuinely believe they are smarter than everyone else. Our Democrats fixate on college degrees and presume that a person who has one is inherently smarter than the person who doesn’t. There is a belief that a person is a plumber because he isn’t smart enough to become a lawyer or a tenured college professor. It doesn’t enter their heads that some people are just not interested in the sort of things Democrats are interested in – and when you really believe you are smarter than those sad, downtrodden individuals who bitterly cling to God and guns you get really, really ticked off when they fail to pay court to you. Limbaugh gets under liberals’ skin for the same reason President Bush did – because he doesn’t give a darn what liberals think.
It is bad enough that Limbaugh disagrees; much worse is the fact that Limbaugh never once, not even when he was knocked flat by personal failings, sought the good will of liberalism. Limbaugh can’t be bought and he can’t be intimidated and with millions of listeners day after day, he has a larger overall effect on public attitudes than anyone in politics, including the President of the United States. And therein lies the battle with Rush – Democrats from Obama on down remember that on that glad morn 16 years ago, Democrats thought they had it all. After a 12 year interregnum, Democrats were back in full control of all branches of government and they believed they’d never be out of power again – America had changed, there had been demographic shifts, religious right types were turning off moderates, the people had woken up from their GOP-noise-machine-induced slumber and realized that investing in America via government spending was better than the newly-discredited free market. And then there was Rush – and he was not at all coincidentally identified by National Review magazine as the leader of the opposition in 1993. And what a leader – in 1994, the Democrats’ 40 year grip on the Congress was broken largely as a result of Limbaugh relentlessly hammering away at the failures of the Democrat Congress and President Clinton.
Democrats don’t want a replay of this – so, they want to break the GOP Congressional leadership away from the GOP base and they want to marginalize Rush Limbaugh. If they can do that, then by 2013 (presumptively at the start of Obama’s second term and with a continuing Democrat Congressional majority), Democrats will be able to get more than half the population relieved of any taxation at all and also get half the population in some way dependent upon government spending for their living – voila!, we’re a socialist State with a permanent liberal/left majority no longer having to worry itself about those troublesome conservatives.
It won’t work, of course – because where the GOP is being led is outside of Washington, DC. We hope that the GOP leadership in DC wakes up to the fact that uniform opposition to Obama is the name of the game for a resurgence in GOP power…but if they prefer to listing to the dying MSM and decide to cooperate with Obama, then we’ll just have to flatten the entire governing establishment from the outside, just like we’ve done it before.
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