May 14, 2012
New Column: Obama Is the Extremist, Not Conservative Talkers
Some conservatives believe that other conservatives, on talk radio and Fox News Channel, are damaging the cause of conservatism by dishonestly overstating their case against President Obama to increase their ratings and profits.
More reasonable Republican politicians, they argue, would like to cooperate with Obama on bipartisan solutions but don't have the power to resist these extremists with the megaphones and so have buckled in lock step to their demands and become the party of "no" and the purveyors of gridlock.
The problem is that the presuppositions underlying those allegations are wrong. There may be some exceptions, but the large majority of leading conservative voices are doing their very best to save this nation from Obama's policies, which they believe are leading to the nation's financial, cultural and national security ruin. Obama is a leftist, very extreme by historical standards. To compromise with his positions would not be in the best interest of the nation but would advance the cause of leftism, so any pressure conservatives can bring to bear on Republican politicians to strongly oppose his agenda is laudable.
I can't conceive of too many situations in which splitting the difference with Obama has advanced or would advance the cause of conservatism or constitutional liberty. We wouldn't reduce our debt, for example, by agreeing to reduce the levels of increases in spending. We couldn't improve the quality, cost and availability of health care by agreeing to more government intervention when we believe in free market solutions. We couldn't prudently agree to a half-measure stimulus package when we believe stimulus spending not only doesn't stimulate the economy but does further increase the debt. We couldn't agree to some compromise reductions in our nuclear and conventional forces if we believe that even these lesser cuts would jeopardize our national security. We couldn't agree to meet Obama halfway on energy policy by signing on to policies that punish conventional energy only half as much and waste just half as many billions on quixotic green energy debacles.
We can get mired in a semantic argument over whether Obama is a card-carrying communist, a European socialist, an admirer of Hugo Chavez's and Daniel Ortega's or, as he says, a fierce advocate of the free market, but such quibbling is more misleading than the labels themselves.
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Posted by David Limbaugh at 10:33 PM | Printer Friendly
May 10, 2012
New Column: Time for Republicans To Take the Offensive
Two very important things happened in politics this week. First, the elections underscored just how fed up mainstream America is with extreme liberalism. Second, President Obama, with his formal endorsement of same-sex marriage, is openly casting his lot with his extremist base.
The question is: How will putative GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney interpret and respond to these events? Will he fall into the usual Republican trap of thinking he has to follow his Democratic opponent leftward to appear more moderate? Or will he show his confidence in the reasonableness of conservatism and in the American people to embrace him if he clearly articulates it?
To some extent, we are all products of our environments. We get our sense of what is "normal" from those with whom we most frequently associate, which at least partially explains liberal media figures believing that their minority views are mainstream.
They uniformly ridicule traditional American values on national TV as if they are held only by flyover throwbacks who haven't yet been exposed to the enlightened wisdom of the coasts. How else do you explain Chris Matthews' brazen characterization of the GOP as the "grand wizard" party and as flat-earthers and those who don't believe in science? Or candidate Obama's derisive portrayal of small-town Americans as bitter clingers, apparently clueless that the statement would reveal him, not those he described, as extreme?
There are countless other examples, including liberals and ex-liberals who've said that until they reached a certain age, they'd never met a Republican or conservative in their lives. And we've all seen the statistics on the staggeringly high percentage of atheism among Beltway journalists and media figures compared with the rest of the American people.
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Posted by David Limbaugh at 09:55 PM | Printer Friendly
May 07, 2012
New Column: Truth Is Major Obstacle to Obama's Re-election
President Obama formally kicked off his re-election campaign in Richmond, Va., and Columbus, Ohio, Saturday, and his theme was certainly not, shall we say, "it's morning again in America" -- President Ronald Reagan's optimistic re-election slogan in 1984.
Obama's central message was more like: "Hey, I realize things look bad, and I'm not going to pretend you want four more years of this. But just think how much worse it would have been without me and how much worse it's going to get if you get rid of me."
Interestingly, mainstream media journalists Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake were certain enough that Obama wasn't sufficiently forthcoming in his speech that they co-wrote a piece for The Washington Post "parsing" it. Without a whiff of disapproval, they said, "This being politics, Obama said less than what he meant. But, that's where we come in." The two then set out Obama's "most quotable lines" and followed each with their "translation of the message he was trying to send."
The writers are obviously sympathetic to Obama's agenda and, as fellow liberals, share his end-justifies-the-means sleight of hand -- whatever it takes to keep this federal juggernaut barreling along. Let's look at just a few of the quotes they highlighted.
Obama said: "I don't care how many ways you try to explain it: Corporations aren't people. People are people." The writers said Obama was responding to Mitt Romney's earlier remark that "corporations are people," and they said Obama intended to send this message: "Romney is the business candidate. I am the people's candidate."
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Posted by David Limbaugh at 07:21 PM | Printer Friendly
May 03, 2012
New Column: Piers Morgan Slays Himself in Goldberg Interview
There was a silver lining for Jonah Goldberg in Piers Morgan's ambush interview of him allegedly concerning his new book, "The Tyranny of Cliches." Jonah couldn't have written a better script to illustrate his book's theme.
Someone really should explain to Morgan that when a host invites a guest to discuss the guest's book, the host ought to at least make a good-faith effort to pretend he has the slightest interest in allowing the author to expound on the book's contents -- as opposed to using the author as a prop to indulge the interviewer's own arguments against conservatives and their toxic opinions.
That someone might also inform Morgan that it's a perversion of the Socratic method for an interviewer to badger a guest into admitting the rhetorical premises of the interviewer's opinions rather than lead him through carefully constructed logical arguments to those conclusions -- never allowing the guest fully to answer his questions, never listening to his responses, making every one of his follow-up questions a classic non sequitur and putting words in the guest's mouth for the purpose of constructing and then demolishing various straw men.
The central theme of Jonah's book, which he explained in response to the only germane question Morgan posed in the interview, is that though pretty much everyone is ideological, conservatives are honest about it, and liberals are not. Liberals lie about their own ideological proclivities, mostly to themselves but also to others.
Let me briefly unpack the interview to illustrate precisely how accurate Goldberg is and how, during the interview, Morgan became a personification of the book's theme -- all without having the slightest clue he was doing so.
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Posted by David Limbaugh at 06:55 PM | Printer Friendly
April 30, 2012
New Column: Obama Is Headed Anywhere but Forward
You have to hand it to President Obama and his cabal of re-election strategists; they are masters of illusion. Their newly released Web video and its accompanying campaign slogan, "Forward," are science fiction-level fantastical.
We're all familiar with Obama's penchant for deflecting responsibility and blaming his policy failures on George W. Bush, but after more than three years in office for Obama, it has gone from childish mischief to juvenile delinquency. This is a question for Guinness: Has any other president run for re-election against the record of his retired predecessor?
Indeed, Obama is still feeding us this dodge years beyond its spoil date, apparently hoping we won't realize we have salmonella until he's safely voted in to his second term.
Watch the video. In the words of The Hill's John Easley, "it blames GOP policies for the still-sluggish economy."
It attempts to draw a clear dichotomy between the dark days of the last year of Bush's term and the glorious remedial reign of President Obama, which began in January 2009.
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Posted by David Limbaugh at 06:36 PM | Printer Friendly
April 26, 2012
New Column: Obama Administration's Repeated Abuses Are Extension of Extreme Liberalism
Every day, we get a new kick in the gut from the Obama administration. Most recently, Environmental Protection Agency Region 6 Administrator Al Armendariz was caught on video articulating his view of the agency's role in enforcing its regulations.
Aremendariz said: "It was kind of like how the Romans used to, you know, conquer villages in the Mediterranean. They'd go into a little Turkish town somewhere; they'd find the first five guys they saw, and they'd crucify them. Then, you know, that town was really easy to manage for the next few years. ... It's a deterrent factor."
This man should be fired -- yesterday. White House press secretary Jay Carney risibly says Aremendariz wasn't articulating the attitude of the administration. Sadly, that's precisely what he was articulating.
Indeed, we've seen this attitude by the administration in countless examples, from Obama's handling of the Obamacare legislation and restructuring of the GM loans to the administration's New Black Panther voter intimidation case to Solyndra to Fast and Furious to -- oh, never mind; I have to keep this to less than 20,000 words.
None of this should surprise us. Obama is the quintessential liberal, and his administration's recurring abuses are simply the logical extension of liberal hubris born of a self-righteous certainty of the superiority of leftist ideas. This inevitably leads to dictatorial usurpations and lawlessness from the liberal ruling class.
Posted by David Limbaugh at 03:50 PM | Printer Friendly
April 23, 2012
New Column: Romney Should Choose Bold Colors, Not Pale Pastels
Mitt Romney's presidential run could turn out to be a test case to resolve the long-running debate inside the Republican Party as to whether the GOP presidential nominee should run as a conservative or more of a centrist.
How often have we heard both Democratic and Republican political "experts" reciting the conventional wisdom that during primary contests, candidates of both parties must play to their respective base voters and then shift toward the center during the general election campaign? Does anyone even challenge this edict?
The first problem with this is that it implicitly suggests that all presidential candidates are first and foremost politicians who will cater their policy agenda to whatever extent necessary to win their party's nomination and the general election. Perhaps I'm somewhat Pollyannaish, but I reject the cynical view that all politicians are, in the end, political prostitutes.
I am not saying that candidates shouldn't do their best to package their messages in the most palatable and attractive form to voters; that goes without saying. But what about their substantive message -- what they really stand for?
Well, that depends on what they stand for.
Exit polling consistently shows that nearly twice as many Americans identify themselves as conservative than as liberal. Even without that data, we know that Democrats must be convinced this is true, because most of them run as moderates in national elections.
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Posted by David Limbaugh at 05:23 PM | Printer Friendly
April 16, 2012
New Column: Katie Pavlich's 'Fast and Furious'
Of all the myriad scandals of the Obama administration, there is one, largely ignored by the mainstream media, that could actually be its worst.
That scandal is the operation run from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, under the Justice Department, known as "Fast and Furious," through which the federal government actually encouraged and even ordered American gun shops to sell guns -- against the store owners' better judgment -- to "straw" purchasers who were funneling guns to Mexican drug gangs while the ATF sat back and watched and did nothing.
As Katie Pavlich shows in her remarkable and eye-opening new book, "Fast and Furious: Barack Obama's Bloodiest Scandal and Its Shameless Cover-Up," the whole scheme was either absolutely harebrained or, as some have more ominously theorized, intentionally designed to manufacture "evidence" for tightening gun control legislation.
Pavlich exposes how extreme gun control measures have been a top political goal for President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and other important leaders within the administration -- and she draws the lines that link this goal directly to the implementation of Fast and Furious. Just as importantly, she shows how the administration has shamelessly tried to obscure those links.
The operation resulted in the murder of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and the murder or wounding of some 200 Mexican citizens.
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Posted by David Limbaugh at 06:10 PM | Printer Friendly
