The Rush Limbaugh Wars

Commentator Rush Limbaugh delivered a superb speech this weekend that not only was the highlight of the CPAC conference in DC but was the absolute king of the ratings on cable news this weekend.

So, faced with an inspiring moment for Republicans and conservatives nation wide, what does Michael Steele, the head of the Republican National Committee do? Trash him, of course.

Steele went ballistic on Rush Limbaugh calling him an “entertainer” and saying his show is “incendiary” and “ugly.”

In just the last month in an unprecedented attack on a private citizen, President Obama suggested that Republicans were run by Rush Limbaugh and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has anointed him the `GOP's leader'.

After Steele's remarks, Rush fired back:

"Okay, so I am an entertainer, and I have 20 million listeners, 22 million listeners because of my great song-and-dance routines here. Yes, said Michael Steele, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, I'm incendiary, and yes, it's ugly. Michael Steele, you are head of the RNC. You are not head of the Republican Party. Tens of millions of conservatives and Republicans have nothing to do with the RNC and right now they want nothing to do with it, and when you call them asking them for money, they hang up on you. I hope that changes. I hope the RNC will get its act together. I hope the RNC chairman will realize he's not a talking head pundit, that he is supposed to be working on the grassroots and rebuilding it, and maybe doing something about our open primary system and fixing it so that Democrats do not nominate our candidates. It's time, Mr. Steele, for you to go behind the scenes and start doing the work that you were elected to do instead of trying to be some talking head media star, which you're having a tough time pulling off." {..}

Limbaugh then went on to detail how much assistance he and his show had personally given to Steele, which but the head of the RNC's spiteful little betrayal in context.
Then he continued:

Now, Mr. Steele, if it is your position as the chairman of the Republican National Committee that you want a left wing Democrat president and a left wing Democrat Congress to succeed in advancing their agenda, if it's your position that you want President Obama and Speaker Pelosi and Senate Leader Harry Reid to succeed with their massive spending and taxing and nationalization plans, I think you have some explaining to do. 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. I have to conclude that he does because he attacks me for wanting it to fail. {...}

Where does the Republican Party go if you, who are supposed to be redesigning our primary system and helping reestablish our grassroots movement, how are we going to retake elective office if you want this agenda of Obama's and Pelosi's and Reid's to succeed? {...}

And I don't understand why you're asking Republicans to donate to the Republican National Committee if their money is going to be spent furthering the agenda of Barack Obama. 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? What do you want from us?{..}

I'm going further and telling you today it's not that I want Obama to fail; that's not it anymore. The president is presiding over economic failure. The president is watching it, doing nothing about it. He's watching unemployment grow; he's watching the stock market plummet; he is watching people sign up for unemployment. The president of the United States is doing nothing to stop the downward spiral of this economy. He has no economic recovery plan. The truth is, the president of the United States and Rahm Emanuel, who, remember, said, "Crisis is too great a thing to waste." What does that mean? They want you suffering, they want you miserable, they want it worse, they want you rejecting conservatism. They want you rejecting capitalism. They want you turning to them in fear and desperation and angst for an immediate fix to the problem. They want you thinking you have no ability to fix your own problems. They think you have and they want you to have no ability to take care of yourself. So as the stock market now approaches minus 2,800 since Obama was elected, the statement today is to speed up the economic recovery, we're going to focus on health care. Ask yourself how that is going to get you your next job.

One other thing. Mr. Steele, if you want to lead the Republican Party, as you say you do, then you need to run for and win the presidency. You are chairman of the Republican National Committee. That is your job. To run the Republican establishment bureaucracy and prove you can defeat Democrats and elect Republicans, to come up with a new primary system that eliminates Democrats participating in ours and choosing our candidates and getting the grassroots revved up again. This is how you're going to be measured, not by how entertaining or cute you are on talk shows.

By the same token, I'm not in charge of the Republican Party, and I don't want to be. I would be embarrassed to say that I'm in charge of the Republican Party in the sad-sack state that it's in. If I were chairman of the Republican Party, given the state that it's in, I would quit. I might get out the hari-kari knife because I would have presided over a failure that is embarrassing to the Republicans and conservatives who have supported it and invested in it all these years. I certainly couldn't say I am proud of the Republican Party, as I am leading the Republican Party. Right now the Republican Party needs to be led, and it will be. The next Republican president is going to be the head of the party. Last time I checked, I don't think Mr. Steele is running.

And finally, Mr. Steele, we do like to entertain people here. The audience is very smart, sir. They know the difference between entertainment, and they know the difference between deadly serious issues that affect their country. Don't underestimate the intelligence of this audience or Republicans and conservatives generally. The biggest problem with all of you who live inside the Beltway is you look out over America and you think you see idiocy and unsophisticated people, ignorant people, and when you're looking at liberal Democrats, largely you're correct, but your own voters are every bit as informed, involved, engaged, and caring, if not more so than you are. We don't care, first and foremost, about the success of the Republican Party. We care about the United States of America and its future, because we cherish it and love it, and we know what it is that made it the greatest nation on earth, and we don't hear you articulating that you understand that, not just you, Mr. Steele, but hardly anybody else in Washington, DC. So send those fundraising requests out, and, by the way, when you send those fundraising requests out, Mr. Steele, make sure you say, "We want Obama to succeed." So people understand your compassion. Republicans, conservatives, are sick and tired of being talked down to, sick and tired of being lectured to, and until you show some understanding and respect for who they are, you're going to have a tough time rebuilding your party."

Heh! I could have hardly said it better myself.

Steele, of course apologized:

"My intent was not to go after Rush – I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh,” Steele said in a telephone interview. “I was maybe a little bit inarticulate. … There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership.”

He certainly could have fooled me.

I hate to say it, having long had a good opinion of Michael Steele but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a certain racial quotient built in to his criticism of Limbaugh..which took place on DL Hughley's CNN show, which draws a predominantly black audience. When Steele was running for senate in his home state of Maryland, the local NAACP actually threw oreo cookies at him onstage. Did he simply go with the flow to help demonize a white man who criticized the Chosen One, a person that went out of his way to help him just to be down with the brothers and sisters?

I haven't heard anyone else mention that aspect..bt let's just say I wouldn't be surprised. We all like to be appreciated and accepted, and this might have been Steele's way of looking for racial bonifides, and reassuring his fellow blacks that just because he's a Republican doesn't mean he doesn't have the requisite race consciousness. Or perhaps it was just ego on Steele's part.

In any event, aside from being a pretty despicable act of ingratitude, it just made Steele look foolish.

Needless to say, the Democrats were quick to seize on this. Tim Kaine, the head of the DNC said "I was briefly encouraged by the courageous comments made my counterpart in the Republican Party over the weekend challenging Rush Limbaugh as the leader of the Republican Party and referring to his show as ‘incendiary’ and ‘ugly,’" Kaine said in a statement. "However, Chairman Steele’s reversal this evening and his apology to Limbaugh proves the unfortunate point that Limbaugh is the leading force behind the Republican Party, its politics and its obstruction of President Obama’s agenda in Washington."

If Steele's job is to reconstruct the GOP, get the party's base excited and unite the party, he's off to a flying start.

As for the Democrats, their demonizing Rush Limbaugh is something that must make El Rushbo absolutely chortle in glee. I first started listening to him back when Bil Clinton and his cohorts were trashing him out of sheer curiousity to see what all the fuss was about. Now that he's once again the subject of a concerted attack by the Left, so will a lot of other people.