Rush Limbaugh Can't Remember My Name

But he knows that I'm destroying conservatism. (I'm in good company.)

Look, Rush has a serious and principled point: Maybe conservatives shouldn't try to reform the welfare state; maybe the lesson of the Bush years is that you just can't achieve conservative ends within the framework that FDR and company built; maybe Reihan and I are just government-loving quislings. But like Daniel Larison, it seems to me that if Rush really believes this, he shouldn't be wasting his time with the modern Reagan-Gingrich-Bush GOP at all - it's just a pack of quislings from start to finish. There's only one contemporary politician who would pass Limbaugh's stringent purity test, and his name is Ronald Paul.

But hey - maybe I'm wrong. And if Rush cares so much about the future of conservatism, I'm sure he'll be happy to have me and Reihan as guests on his high-rated radio program, so he can publicly set us straight.

Comments

Getting attacked by Rush Limbaugh is the first sign that your analysis is on the right track. Good work. I'll be purchasing the book soon.

Posted by Bobby | June 30, 2008 6:47 AM

Seems like a typical Rush rant -- generally misinformed about the issue at hand, with the goal of making himself appear as the uber-conservative, regardless of how ridiculous he sounds to someone who is intelligent and informed. Which seems pretty reasonable, since very little of his audience has both of these qualities and I daresay many have neither.

So I don't really think it is accurate to say that "Rush has a serious and principled point." Rather, Rush's rant could be turned into a serious and principled point.

Notice that he basically asserts that Republicans have been trying the ideas you promote for the last decade or so. You advocate government spending and the government has spent, so you must be rehashing the same idea, regardless of the specific ways in which money is spent. Yeah, so either Rush is for limited government conservatism to the extreme of Ron Paul, or he is just ignorant of what you propose and this is his most convenient line of grandstanding.

I've never really understood the respect or admiration of Rush on the right. To embrace him is to be satisfied with a movement that is dumbed down to knee-jerk attacks on anything that can be portrayed as "impure." You challenged the Limbaugh orthodoxy, so of course he is going to attack you. The key is to portray you as a liberal-in-disguise and thereby convince his audience not to listen to a competing voice. I mean, if people actually read your book, some of them might realize that there are conservatives way more intelligent and way more informed than Rush out there ... and that wouldn't be good for Rush.

Posted by Mike | June 30, 2008 7:35 AM

Rush is right about one key thing -- you and Reihan have definitely internalized the critique of the left, on a host of issues ranging from the legitimacy of using force against Communists during the Cold War to ultrasensitivity on race and affirmative action issues. Brooks is cut from the same cloth. Brooks -- like you and Reihan -- is the "soft opponent" who can be counted on to fold in order to gain strange new respect.

It's hard to be a vocal right-winger in the circles you travel in. Social ostracism is a powerful force, and can slowly bring you over to the dark side. You might want to write about that sometime.

Posted by blah | June 30, 2008 7:55 AM

Rush is right about one key thing -- you and Reihan have definitely internalized the critique of the left, on a host of issues ranging from the legitimacy of using force against Communists during the Cold War to ultrasensitivity on race and affirmative action issues. Brooks is cut from the same cloth. Brooks -- like you and Reihan -- is the "soft opponent" who can be counted on to fold in order to gain strange new respect.

It's hard to be a vocal right-winger in the circles you travel in. Social ostracism is a powerful force, and can slowly bring you over to the dark side. You might want to write about that sometime.

Posted by blah | June 30, 2008 7:56 AM

Anyone who believes that the Repubicans can out pander the Democratic Party is a fool. Also, how does pandering to middle class and blue collar whites keep the Republican Party relevant when less than 50% of the children in kindergarten are white? Also, how does a DC elitist reconcile the idea of pandering to middle class whites while trying to maintain open borders and unlimited immigration. At least Rush and others on the right realize that open borders will destroy any conservative party in the U.S.

Posted by superdestroyer | June 30, 2008 8:34 AM

Rush Limbaugh is a big, fat, race-baiting, core of the Republican Party, idiot. Merely an observation.

Posted by ed | June 30, 2008 9:52 AM

He won't have you on. Reihan is too brown and you is an ugly muthafucka.

Posted by Douwap | June 30, 2008 10:10 AM

Now, I haven't listened to Rush in years, but isn't it funny to hear him bitching and moaning about the Republicans not being "conservatives"? I mean this guy was so happy to be an "honorary member" of the freshmen Republicans from 1994, and was so enamored with Bush and the Republicans in 2004, and now all of a sudden the winds of change have carried him into the Republicans aren't conservative camp, just like all the others. Why is that? Why do the conservatives dislike the Republicans? They gave them everything they wanted.

Posted by freddiemac | June 30, 2008 10:17 AM

Rush and Ross are both GOP loyalists who eschew honest analysis in service to their party. Rush just makes more money doing it. The most hilarious moment of Rush's career came after the GOP got reamed in the 2006 elections, when Rush came out afterwards and admitted he'd been shoveling bullshit at his audience each and every day leading up to the election - and that things weren't really as hunky-dory in America as he'd been pretending.

Watching Repiglican after Repiglican abandon Dumbya these days is amusing but proves to me what I always guessed - that the rarest thing in the world is a Repiglican with genuine principles. "Rush has a serious and principled point" - seriously? Rush doesn't have a principle he wouldn't abandon in a fucking minute for a boatload of cash or for the ongoing good of his mob - not his country, just his mob.

How did a gluttonous thrice-divorced draft-dodging college drop-out with a criminal past and a serious drug history become the intellectual leader of the GOP and someone Ross wants to suck up to in order to sell his book? Rush is the Repiglican Ubermensch, living the Repiglican Dream. Judge for yourself how much that resembles the "American Dream" Ross's book is supposedly aimed at restoring.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | June 30, 2008 11:09 AM

"if Rush really believes this, he shouldn't be wasting his time with the modern Reagan-Gingrich-Bush GOP at all...There's only one contemporary politician who would pass Limbaugh's stringent purity test, and his name is Ronald Paul."

While I'm not quite sold on Ross, he usually has SOME kind of a point. This, however, is just absurd.

So, Ross, the only way Rush is going to prove himself to you is to ditch the GOP altogether and ally himself with an ineffectual and a little nutty Ron Paul??

First, Ron Paul isn't a conservative he's a Libertarian.
Second, he's almost totally ineffectual.
Third, he's a little nuts.

Please Ross. Rush want's to get things done and Ron Paul gets NOTHING done. He's often a sane(r) voice in the wilderness of Congress, however he has little to no influence. Sure, many of us wold love to have more people with his true small gov't outlook, but it ain't gonna happen. We have to take what we can get, and unfortunately, that's John McCain and today's GOP.

Posted by Mark B | June 30, 2008 11:38 AM

While Rush might have a principled point, he hardly understands the political reality that the Republicans have won since Eisenhower only when the socially conservative and patriotic working class supports their cause. The Douthat/Reihan book effectively throws cold water on the conservative illusion that American working people disfavor a large and strong central government. Our best presidents including Washington and Lincoln favored a strong and effective central government. If they think that a Republican candidate favors political and social policy that respects them and favors their interests that candidate has a good shot at winning.

What is clear from your book and common sense is that solid American working people are fed up with the hard left that favors loose forms of morality, government welfare programs that don't make moral distinctions, and a weak stance on issues of national defense. These people, also, understand they're a lot better off in a free as opposed to a planned economy.

I would pay scant attention to such ideological characters as Limbaugh who risk sending the Republican Party into the wilderness with their ideology of small government.

Posted by Peter Leavitt | June 30, 2008 12:50 PM

I find the comment threads on this book to be fascinating. Nearly everyone involved -- from Ross to Rush to Brooks to Larison to random commenters -- seems to cherish the conservative brand and all (except maybe Larison) cherish the Republican Party brand. They defend the brand against a nebulous assortment of nogoodniks who have sullied it. But the firing squad is arranged in a circle. And the only hint of a shared ideological principle is a partisan aversion to liberals and Democrats.

Rush Limbaugh is a pathological liar who doesn't know much of anything about the New Deal except that anything associated with it must be bad. But it's clear that he's primarily motivated by a pathological hatred of taxes, multiculturalism, and hippies. Like most right-wing Vietnam draft dodgers, he has a great enthusiasm for killing people he doesn't like by proxy (pro-war, pro-death penalty, etc.) At root, he's a standard issue white-flight Midwestern Baby Boomer libertarianish male who doesn't care much about family values except insofar as they're an effective election year whip. He's the sort of "conservative" who got drunk and chased skirts at parties with his fraternity brothers, who all still forward each other emails with sexist and racist jokes.

As such, he has basically nothing in common, culturally or ideologically, with Ross. Ross is a conservative Catholic intellectual who seems to be a single-issue abortion voter with varying levels of concern for other "family values" agenda items and the coarsening of the culture, but no particular animus against pre-1968 liberalism. He offers a policy agenda that's distinct from the Democrats, but this is a grab bag of philosophically unrelated items that are tactically designed to build a Republican majority. The 900-pound gorilla lurking between the lines of his book is abortion. The rest is expendable.

And on down the line... anti-war paleocons, defense industry shills, subsidy-loving farmers and oilmen, market fundamentalists, end-times pentecostals, Likudniks... all these culturally and philosophically distinct camps with virtually nothing in common except common enemies, vying to be the one true conservative faith and control the Republican Party in order to purchase political power for their own sacred cows.

Good luck with that.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | June 30, 2008 12:51 PM

Anyone who believes that the Repubicans can out pander the Democratic Party is a fool. Also, how does pandering to middle class and blue collar whites keep the Republican Party relevant when less than 50% of the children in kindergarten are white?

Pandering to the a sufficient number of the electorate is pretty much standard operating procedure for a politician who hopes to gain power in a democracy, no? If the Republicans are ever to regain power, they must out-pander the Democrats.

Posted by JA | June 30, 2008 1:36 PM

Anyone who believes that the Repubicans can out pander the Democratic Party is a fool. Also, how does pandering to middle class and blue collar whites keep the Republican Party relevant when less than 50% of the children in kindergarten are white?

Pandering to a sufficient number of the electorate is pretty much standard operating procedure for a politician who hopes to gain power in a democracy, no? If the Republicans are ever to regain power, they must out-pander the Democrats.

Posted by JA | June 30, 2008 1:37 PM

Rush's stock has gone down in my book the last few years, and I do spend more time these days reading Ross, Reihan, etc., but those of you on the right who cherish any recent GOP success owe Rush a lot more credit than you're giving, and how quickly you've forgotten that.

I'm not a fan of Rush's need to make an enemies list out of some of our clearest and brightest voices, but neither am I willing to completely abandon hope for smaller gov't. Guess that fight could last a while longer.

MoeLarry, you are a welfare duchess.

Posted by Ferrell | June 30, 2008 1:49 PM

Rush has got 20M+ listeners, had two top-selling books, had a top-rated late-night TV program, rakes in $20M+ per year...*should* he remember the name of a small blogger for the liberal Atlantic magazine?

Ross, you don't have to love Rush, but good God, what is it with conservative pointy-heads like you and Brooks, and Sullivan, and such? The only time y'all ever talk about him is derisively.

Love him or hate him, he's the biggest dog on the political stage outside of Barack and McCain. He's the biggest star on the GOP stage as well. He's done more for the GOP than y'all will do in your life. A little love, or at least respect is in order for the guy.

Posted by Mark B | June 30, 2008 2:07 PM

LFP writes: "And on down the line... anti-war paleocons, defense industry shills, subsidy-loving farmers and oilmen, market fundamentalists, end-times pentecostals, Likudniks... all these culturally and philosophically distinct camps with virtually nothing in common except common enemies, vying to be the one true conservative faith and control the Republican Party in order to purchase political power for their own sacred cows."

But what Rush and Ross and all of the above have in common is that they'll unite against any Democrat, anywhere, at any time. (Unless said Democrat becomes a Repiglican and performs public self-castration, as in Zell and Liberman.)

They are the modern Communists. Party Uber Alles.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | June 30, 2008 2:13 PM

Ferrell says: "MoeLarry, you are a welfare duchess."

Hey, Ferrell, grab a "Giuliani '08" bumper sticker and scrape off your chin. You've got 20 million would-be Limbaugh children dripping off of it.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | June 30, 2008 2:17 PM

Mark B writes: "Love him or hate him, he's the biggest dog on the political stage outside of Barack and McCain. He's the biggest star on the GOP stage as well. He's done more for the GOP than y'all will do in your life. A little love, or at least respect is in order for the guy."

Rush Limbaugh has never done anything in his life that should command respect or love. He's a malignant maggot and the GOP had become a perfect reflection of shitbags like him in 2006 - which is why your precious party is now a trainwreck. Keep on appreciating him and cretins like O'Reilly and Hannity and you'll help keep it that way.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | June 30, 2008 2:22 PM

And on down the line... anti-war paleocons, defense industry shills, subsidy-loving farmers and oilmen, market fundamentalists, end-times pentecostals, Likudniks... all these culturally and philosophically distinct camps with virtually nothing in common except common enemies, vying to be the one true conservative faith and control the Republican Party in order to purchase political power for their own sacred cows.

Posted by Jeff | June 30, 2008 3:06 PM

There was supposed to be a comment from me included in that post above that basically said "pretty spot on post, LP. You've got everyone pegged about right, in my opinion."

Not sure what happened.

Posted by Jeff | June 30, 2008 3:09 PM

Hey Ross --

You need to clean out your comment sections, dude. If I want to have to see the word "repiglican" in every comment section, I go to dKos.

Posted by vg | June 30, 2008 3:16 PM

He won't have you on. Reihan is too brown and you is an ugly muthafucka.

Posted by Douwap | June 30, 2008 10:10 AM

Bring along a couple of underage Dominican girls and a briefcase full of viagara, and Rush will basically turn the show over to anybody while he acts like a typical repiglican.

Posted by John | June 30, 2008 3:49 PM

Hey vg - before you start bitching about the comments section, try writing a comment worth reading. You haven't managed that trick yet - and even a few of the Repiglicans here have, so how hard can it be?

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | June 30, 2008 3:56 PM

"maybe the lesson of the Bush years is that you just can't achieve conservative ends within the framework that FDR and company built"

The fact that Republicans are still harping on the New Deal is a sign of how little they've accomplished over the years and how vapid and useless their "ideas" are. Further, every time the Republicans fail miserably, they claim its because they were trying to imitate Democrats. Just admit Republicans employ politically expedient policies over the long term interests of the country because as a party and as a movement, conservative Republicans have nothing substantial to offer other than blame-shifting, buck-passing and excuse making.

Posted by Nathan | June 30, 2008 4:17 PM

Look, Rush has a serious and principled point

Note to self: never take anything Ross says seriously ever again.

Posted by Mike | June 30, 2008 7:04 PM

I'm not sure I'm willing to trust a guy with this many Obama ads on his blog ...

Posted by John Schwenkler | June 30, 2008 7:37 PM

I find it interesting what Rush thinks we can and can't jettison while remaining True Conservatives.

Last year, he was enthusiastic about a possible Rudy Giuliani presidency, and talked as if Rudy were one of the only genuine conservatives in the race. Now, Giuliani was admirably tough on crime, and presumably would ahve been hawkish on foreign policy, but he stood well to the left of center on practically every other issue.

I have no problem with Rush criticizing any or all of Reihan and Ross' proposals, but one wonders why THEY'RE beyond the pale when Rudy apparently wasn't.

Posted by astorian | July 1, 2008 10:32 AM

Rush Limbaugh is a laughable blowhard. Folks who take his nonsense seriously are beyond the pale, so who really cares what he says?

Posted by edsbowlingshoe | July 3, 2008 11:12 AM