Limbaugh: Republican Party Making A Big, Big Mistake
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Pat Dollard | Young Americans
Prepare to have your opinion of this war changed forever.
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- January 22nd, 2009
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Really gained respect for Rush after hearing this. It’s about damn time I quit hearing people kissing Obama’s ass and start talking seriously about how this presidency is going to affect this country. I, too, wish failure on him if “success” means another doomed-to-fail socialist nation.
“Success is relative. It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things.” - T.S. Eliot
Once again, Rush is right. I’ve been taking the same tack all along. While there were some good pundits there at that meeting, there certainly was no William F. Buckley Jr. Krauthammer was the most conservative and he served as a Dem in Carter’s admin.
“Success is relative. It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things.†- T.S. Eliot
Profound and spot on infidoll.
Demoratic sabotage of our economy. But to their downfall, they cant handle it. Blood, sweat and tears makes America roll!
To continue………
I don’t agree with Rush’s explanation of why the 2008 election was lost and do not agree with grouping McCain with so-called Northeast Republicans who are supposedly pro-abortion, but I do strongly agree with Rush about the need to be confrontational with the Democrats and to chart a conservative course for the future.
Scapegoating, as Rush does some, does not help; 2008 was a tough year for Republicans. McCain had the only poll numbers among the GOP candidates that indicated he could win against Obama or Hillary, and in the end, there were “headwinds†that precluded any Republican from being elected President — (i) a financial meltdown that created economic anxieties that have historically favored the Democrats and did this year; (ii) a financial bailout that muddied the waters of what was a Reaganesque economic message delivered by McCain and Palin on the campaign trail; (iii) the unpopularity of Bush, which is unfair but which is the result of unceasing attack by the Left and Bush not using the bully pulpit to defend his Administration; (iv) money and more money, some of it illegal, that Obama had to spend on campaign advertising; and (v) media bias that was absurdly in the tank for Obama and that operated effectively day-in, day-out as a propaganda machine for Democrats. The “tailwinds†that should work for us of strong military and national security, strong values and strong economy based on freedom and opportunity did not blow for us ths year because of the unusual economic situation that arose. Before the financial meltdown, McCain was ahead in the polls; after the meltdown, the economic anxieties, the money and the media bias trumped all.
The 2008 GOP National Convention was a patriotic affair. The convention floor was full of veterans. It was not an event dominated by supposed pro-abortion Northeast Republicans. McCain from Arizona and Palin from Alaska were and are pro-life; indeed, of the GOP candidates in 2008, McCain had the best record on abortion of any.
So let’s focus on the future and save the hell for the Democrats.
I think we got beat in 2008, and Rush pointed this out at some point in time, that the media has been beating down President Bush since he was sworn into office. And, unfortunately, President Bush did not fight back. Since he did not refute the lies, the average American thought they must be true.
I no longer watch the MSM or read any of their newspapers. I depend on my news from sites such as this wonderful one. AND, I get to express my thoughts, and opionions.
is it me or is savage always omitted from the discussion/reference. it is as if he did not exist. won’t matter much longer fairness doctrine goes into effect, they are all gone.
Phil Byler,
With all due respect, you’re wrong. Rush’s analysis was completely correct.
A couple of points:
- McCain won because he encouraged Fred Thompson to join the race, which split the conservative vote between Thompson, Huckabee, and Romney, none of which were solidly conservative, but each of which had conservative aspects.
- Any true conservative could have easily beaten Hillary or Obama.
- The financial meltdown was created by Democrats, but because McCain (by his own admission) doesn’t understand economic matters, he couldn’t effectively argue the point.
- McCain “suspended” his campaign to rush to Washington to help resolve the financial crisis, but in the end he went along with the liberal solution. A Reaganesque position would have been to speak out against the bailout, which McCain didn’t.
- Bush, also a mushy moderate when it comes to domestic policy (don’t get me wrong, I hold high esteem for him with regard to foreign policy, but he’s as bad as his dad when it comes to domestic policy), dug his own approval ratings grave. Bush either didn’t understand or didn’t take seriously that his oath requires him to protect America against enemies foreign AND domestic; he was ineffective against America’s domestic enemies, i.e., the Democrats.
- McCain bumped ahead in the polls after the Palin pick, but was never consistently ahead in the race.
You are correct about the monetary and media aspects of the race; however, a candidate of substance could have easily cleaned Obama’s clock in spite of these disadvantages. Just look at the effect that a single question from “Joe the Plumber” had on the race.
What Rush was correct about was that many party leaders are saying that the Republican party is becoming too conservative, but the truth is that these complainers got the candidate they wanted and still lost. Recall that many of McCain’s policy positions differed little from Obama’s. And when did McCain’s numbers jump? When he selected Palin, someone with a proven record much more conservative than McCain’s, as his choice for VP.
SD
We were just about railroaded and we will suffer for at least 2 years maybe more.
Even if McCain himself is not a “blue blood”, and I think you can easily hold either view, he most certainly was their candidate, the closest to ideal they’ll ever get.
StevenD and David Ross, uderstand that I write what I do because I think we need to be realistic with what happened in 2008 and not comfort ourselves with simplistic notions that will cause us to lose in the future.
I disagree strongly that “any real or true conservative” would have beaten Obama or Hillary in 2008. Rush is presuming that, but I am sorry, I did enough election work and had enough contact with real voters to know differently adn why I could list the “headwinds” here. I also might ask who that “real or true conservative” was in 2008? Huckabee? Romney? Whoever it was, then I ask that you check what the polls for the general electorate showed about that person. What you will see is that with one exception, at no time did any GOP candidate come close to Hillary and Obama — Romney was always behind in double digits. The exception was McCain, who after first Obama’s grandstanding in Europe played up by the media and then the Democrat Convention, had pulled ahead in September. Had the campaign then been about foreign policy, McCain would have gone on and won. But the banking “crisis” instead happened.
I will grant you that McCain should have opposed the bank bailout; he flirted with the idea, but in the end, decided to be a team player with the Bush Administration. I wonder if McCain would do it differently now — he has since voted against the release of TARP funds and opposed the auto bailout. Historically, McCain’s voting record gets a 70% approval rating from the ACU. Meanwhile, the first debating point that Democrats use now when trillion dollar deficits are criticized by Republicans is that George Bush’s Administration is responsible for the bank bailout.
I understand your belief that it could have been explained that Democrats were responsible for the financial mess, which happens to be the truth. But the problem during the election cycle was: (i) that the leftist media was playing propaganda machine for the Obama campaign and understood it was important to deflect blame for the financial situation away from the Democrats; and (ii) that Obama’s money paid for campaign advertising blaming the Republicans for the situation. McCain was not effective on the issue, but he would not have been allowed to be in any event. If you htink otherwise, you underestimate how consciously partisan the media has become.
A couple of sobering demographic facts about the 2008 election should be noted. If the country had the same demographic make up in 2008 as it had in 1992 (whites with college degrees, whites without college degrees, Asians, Hispanics, Afro-Americans, other minorities), and if you keep the same voting percentage margin between McCain and Obama for each group as occurred in 2008, then McCain would have won by 4 million votes. Also, the split in the 19-29 age group in 2008 was 66 to 32 percent for Obama: do you want any more alarming fact demonstrating the leftist control of educational institutions and pop culture?
Remember the Saddleback Forum when McCain cleaned Obama’s clock? The soldily pro-life McCain you saw was and is no blueblood. Nor was the 2008 GOP Convention anything but a very traditional Republican event. Why do you think that we at the Convention went wild after Palin’s speech? We had a great combination of an experienced and knowledgeable hand in foreign policy and military matters with a dynamic figure for conservatism in the future.
Finally, StevenD and David Ross, as Pete Hegseth once put it, respect the man in McCain. He does love his country, and he is a genuine war hero. We don’t really get anywhere in rebuilding conservatsism in America by scapegoating; and we have plenty of fights ahead with the Democrats — and it is to those fights where our energies are needed, along with the political education we ned to do so that Americans understand what we stand for.