Listenin' To The Radio

I was very impressed listening to Bill O'Reilly tonight. It's clear he understands - and accepts! - why the electorate voted for Obama in the recent election. In his view, faced with the choice between a Big Spender, and a Smaller Spender, the nation chose Big.

Further, declaiming that the merit of the big economic stimulus was in putting people to work, O'Reilly opined that was how the stimulus should be judged - simply its impact on jobs. Then O'Reilly went through a laundry list of what is in the stimulus bill and rejected many proposals, not because of the jobs they generate, but for other reasons: AMTRAK (should be privatized), NEA funding (wasteful), Global Warming initiatives (not urgent), and other ideas would get O'Reilly's axe, whether or not they generate jobs.

So, O'Reilly is a tightwad, and inconsistent, but basically he's on board. He's moving left, one step at a time.

Meanwhile, Rush Limbaugh has decided to personalize and polarize the debate. Today's rant was quite remarkable (reproduced below, with my comments in parentheses, and notable passages in bold). Rush settled on a slogan ("America wins if liberalism fails") and basically has started to scorch what earth he can reach:

CALLER: Well, here. Let the stimulus package speak to you. Ready? (snorting like a pig) Okay, thank you very much. Every time he speaks, I get a mad taste for bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich, Rush. You are perfectly right. Keep it up.

RUSH: Thank you very much, sir. I appreciate it. One of his points was he going to sort of chide me. He was going to say, "You knew! You knew when you said you hope Obama fails, you knew what was going to happen." Of course I knew! Of course I knew! Folks, I've been doing this 20 years. I know my enemy. I know the liberals like I know every square inch of my glorious naked body. (MV: I don't think he knows liberals) During that day, where I talked about a newspaper asking me for an op-ed, 400 words on my hopes for Obama, I went through the whole thing. I said, "It's more liberalism, it's more socialism. I don't want that. I don't want more liberalism. I want that not to work. I want it to fail. I hope he fails. I don't need 400 words, I need four," and I said, "I'm going to say this on purpose. I want the Drive-Bys putting this on television four times a day," and they've complied. They did it. (MV: Aha! Rush actually orders the MSM around!)

They're taking it out of context. I knew they would. But here's the thing. You see, ladies and gentlemen, I very seldom talk about my marketing strategy because my belief is: You execute it. You don't tell anybody about it. You don't prepare 'em for it. You just do it. You know, why tell people how you plan to separate them from their money, for example? You just do it. I'm talking about retail and public relations, marketing plans. Okay. Here's the circumstance. It's just a window into my fertile mind. Here we are. The new president is obviously running as fast as he can to the liberal left. I have known it since I first started studying him. I have known he's not a moderate. I have known he's not a centrist. I have known that he doesn't want to take anybody's ideas that are not his. (MV: this is a very cryptic paragraph, and it makes me think scorched earth is his marketing plan)

He'll say he does, but he is who he is. He's an extreme radical leftist who talks a conservative game to mask it. His demeanor belies the fact that he is who he is. From his demeanor, you'd never think this guy is a radical. You would never think he's an extremist unless you took seriously who his mentors are: Jeremiah Wright, Father Pfleger, Louis Farrakhan, the whole list of these people that we weren't allowed to talk about during the campaign. (MV: Louis Farrakhan was never Obama's mentor in any way, so why mention him at all, except to incite a racist reaction?) I mean, Obama's telling the Republicans not to listen to me, but it's okay for him to listen to Jeremiah Wright, for example. (MV: Except, after last spring, Obama no longer listens to Wright) So in my mind, I know who he is and I know what he's going to do. I have no doubt, zero doubt about where Obama wants to take this country and why.
He wants to move it far left. He wants the government to be as large as it can. He wants power. He wants to punish success. (MV: Obama has never shown any such ambition) He wants to try to make everybody as equal and the same as possible, 'cause that's "fair." There is nothing about him that has an adoration or respect for capitalism. Look at the stimulus bill and you can see. To me, anyway, there's no question about this. Now, when I gaze out across the country and I look at what is called the mass media, I see no person, entity, network -- I see no attitude, no similar attitude reflected. I see no skepticism. I see no curiosity. I see no informed knowledge. I see nothing but pure groupie idolatry, from a constitutionally charged business designed to be suspicious of people who want power and to vet them and to find out who they are. (MV: I don't know about you, Mr. Limbaugh, but I see right-wing media robots everywhere)

So the mass media is selling a version of Obama that he wants sold. They are helping to advance it, to promote it, and promulgate it. Now, what am I to do? I love my country. I was born at one of the best times in world history to be born. We all were. Look at the opportunity that we have had because of the diligent, hard work, and sacrifices of our forbears. Look at the abundance into which we were born. Now, I don't have kids, but I've got nieces and nephews, and I've got a lot of family that have kids, cousins and so forth. You have kids and grandkids. And part and parcel of responsibility as a human being, especially an American, when we are born and inherit such a wonderful place, it has to be incumbent on all of us to first and foremost want to pass that on to others. Why would we want...? (MV: Patriotic hogwash, cloaking the iron fist)

We always hear parents say, "I want my kids to have a better life than I had." It's natural. There's nothing wrong with that, and it's true. So I firmly believe that the policies of the left -- I don't care who runs 'em. I don't care who's implementing them, Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama. (MV: Rush, these folks aren't 'left' in any sense) I don't care who's implementing them, they're bad. They're destructive. They eliminate or damage individual freedom. They destroy lives in the sense that they destroy the quest for excellence. (MV: Liberalism is what brings the quest for excellence to the deprived, Rush - it doesn't kill it at all, but fosters it) They destroy the quest for individuality. They make everybody feel like they're victims. They make everybody feel like the world revolves around them. They bust up families with welfare programs. Liberalism is destructive, and it's a myth. It's a series of myths, and it's destructive, and it can destroy the country as we've known it, if unchecked.

Like it has destroyed New Orleans, or did, like it has destroyed Detroit, like it's on the verge of altering California in ways that people who are native to that state are crying about. (MV: look at any of these places and you find neglectful conservatives running the show or setting the rules - Prop. 13 anyone?) You go to any city that has been run by unchecked liberalism for years, and you will see a microcosm of what can happen to this country if they succeed to the degree they've succeeded in these cities. Forty-seven percent of graduates in Detroit cannot read, high school graduates. Now, to liberals that's an opportunity. To us, it's a crying shame. (MV: Rush, liberalism MADE my home state of NM. As the WSJ noted, for every $2 taxed by the feds, the state receives $3 from the feds. In 1900's America, NM was dead last in education. LIBERALS changed that!) So I'm being somewhat verbose here in explaining to you why I have this great fear and opposition to liberalism, socialism, collectivism, whatever you want to call it. The evidence is all around us to see; the effects of it, in Detroit, in New Orleans, prior to Hurricane Katrina or any other place where nobody but liberals run the show.

I don't care if it's a city or a ward or a neighborhood or a whole state or a whole city, you can see it. It's there -- and conversely, you can see the prosperity that exists when it is not dominate, when liberalism is not dominate. So, believing this to the bottom of my heart and to the depth of my fertile brain, what do I see when I gaze out across the country but a bunch of people who have given up, who have been told there is no hope for them. There is no chance either because of their gender, their skin color, their size, what have you. I look at a media which is promoting the very things and people I fear will cause great damage and destruction to the country. So I decide to say, "I hope it fails," and then I say, "I hope he fails."

To me, it is the most basic common sense, and what stuns me is that no one, apparently -- well, outside of our little world here of conservatism. No one is examining at all the effects of this plan, which is depressing! It's frustrating. It makes you mad. But I'm not one just to sit around and take it. So, okay. If it takes somebody dropping a little bomb to cause some people to wake up and at least start thinking, even if they're knee-jerk reacting, I'll gladly do it. So, damn well I intended to say it! I'm saying it again now: I hope he fails! Because, my friends, America wins if liberalism fails, and that's the bottom line. America wins if this plan fails, because it can only fail, this plan. This has never worked. What they're trying has never worked. This plan will fail.

And it's gonna cause pain and suffering, and it's going to be a long recovery from it, and I believe that the people in this didn't get what they want and get what they vote for, based on, you know, a whole bunch of factors that make them think and vote the way they do. I hope it fails. I hope liberalism fails every time it's tried because it has. I don't want it to succeed. America succeeding, and everyone talks about, "But we all want our new president to succeed!" No, we all want our new president to do the right thing. Big difference. We all want our president to do the right thing. If we're attacked by someone, we want him to do the right thing. We don't know if closing Guantanamo is the right thing. We do not know if turning these people loose and trying them in US courts is the right thing. Well, I don't think it's the right thing. I know it's not the right thing -- and I know this economic porkulus bill is not the right thing. I want America to succeed.

I love my country. I want it to remain the place with more freedom and more opportunity and more prosperity than anyplace on the planet and I want the rest of the planet to learn from us, and this ain't the way to do it. So I want America to succeed. My whole objective here is to maintain an America in the image of its Founders and founding, where individual liberty and freedom reward the human spirit and the yearning to be free, the entrepreneurial desire to excel at something. That's the greatest propellant this economy has ever had, and I'm all for it continuing. I don't want to starve this engine of fuel -- and the government is not fuel, and it's not an engine. The government is a giant roadblock. And the people trying to build the government are, in my mind, moving us forward toward America not being the best it could be. So that's what "I hope it fails" means.