David Limbaugh is best known as the younger brother of the conservative radio host and putative head of the Republican Party, although this isn’t strictly true, since David’s birth was actually a result of parthenogenesis, causing him to spring full grown, like Athena, from the pilonidal cyst on Rush’s ass. But he’s carved out a distinguished career for himself, separate from his brother’s fame, in a field so new and bold it doesn’t even have a name yet; perhaps his role can best be described as that of the guy at the Suicide Hotline who, rather than enabling his crybaby callers with empathy, offers detailed instructions on tying a noose, or helpfully rates the relative toxicity of various household cleansers.
I see “pragmatists” everywhere I look in the Republican Party
Like the people glimpsed by Haley Joel Osment’s character in The Sixth Sense, these Republican pragmatists are also dead, but tragically don’t realize it. David’s here to straighten them out.
Most recently, of course, the Republican branch of the political correctness sect insists that we must not oppose Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination for the Supreme Court because her confirmation is inevitable and by opposing it, we’ll gratuitously alienate Hispanics and women — as if they haven’t already been conditioned by the liberal press to believe conservatives are ogres regardless.
Little known fact: Before moving on to bells and canine saliva, most of Ivan Pavlov’s early experiments in conditional reflexes involved exposing Hispanics to a copy of the New York Times Op-Ed page.
What’s missing from this analysis is that one of the main reasons Republicans have lost favor of late, reflected in their trouncing in the 2006 congressional elections and in shrinking GOP party identification percentages, is their alienation of the conservative base. The best-kept secret is that with 60 percent of Americans still considering themselves conservatives, Republicans only need to be true to their conservative principles to win again.
I think this is a brilliant plan, and cannot possibly fail. And I also think that David Limbaugh is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.
Beltway Republicans, with notable exceptions, spend half their time groveling to the forces of political correctness, conceding the ideological turf wars to liberal Democrats and agreeing to operate within the four corners of the liberal- and relativist-dominant media culture without a fight.
Is being dominated by relativists bad? It depends…
Take, for example, the Republicans’ approaches to Obama’s newly announced Draconian CAFE standards and his cap and trade proposal. In response to both, they virtually concede the cultish dogma that man-made global warming is destroying the Earth, rendering them powerless to battle to save capitalism.
David has a point. A battle to save capitalism just doesn’t get the old juices flowing — I mean, it’s not like a handful of doughty pilots going up against the Death Star, or the Rohirrim riding hell for leather to lift the siege of Helm’s Deep — but it’s an entirely different story if the battle to save capitalism is fought after the Apocalypse! Think about it — precious little oil, like in The Road Warrior, catastrophic flooding, like in Waterworld, a poisonous atmosphere like in Robot Holocaust — now that’s the kind of setting that can add danger and excitement to your whinging white papers about the flat tax; and if we add some mutants and a few neo-feudal flourishes to our quest, we’ll wind up with a summer tentpole franchise that’ll be more thrilling than an Invisible Handjob from Adam Smith.
Likewise, how many of them fight for nuclear energy instead of knuckling under to the left’s destructive fear-mongering on this no-brainer alternative energy source?
While nuclear energy does seem like a concession to the anti-CO2 treehuggers, it has the virtue of producing amazingly toxic waste that contaminates everything it touches for millennia, so at worst it’s like a waiter forced to placate a rude, demanding diner, who later takes a moment to season the soup course with a lung oyster.
Similarly, on Obama’s obsession with consummating the already-started process of socializing American medicine, many Republican leaders are talking about massaging his plan at the margins rather than challenging its inevitability and opposing it head-on. The only thing inevitable about nationalized health care is that it would destroy the best medical system in the world. Yet where are the GOP Paul Reveres?
GOP Paul fell off his horse, fracturing his skull, and at the moment he’s lying on a gurney in a corridor outside a crowded E.R., waiting to be seen by a nurse-practitioner. Did you want to leave a message in the unlikely event he regains consciousness?
Another example is the Guantanamo Bay prison. When President Bush said he’d like to close the prison if and when feasible, he opened the door for President Obama to press forward with this insanity. Republicans have boxed themselves in on the issue and have less credibility to challenge the anti-war leftist propaganda that we grossly abused prisoners there, when the evidence shows the opposite.
The prisoners abused us! Republicans should rise as one and demand that Obama release the photos showing incarcerated terrorists pulling a train on the warden.
Instead of leading, Republicans are allowing themselves to be led, lest they be singled out for special ridicule by liberals for telling the politically incorrect truth.
Yes, the biggest thing holding Republicans back from electoral dominance is their highly developed sense of shame.
Nor do many Republicans have the temerity to dispute the patently absurd leftist dogma that Gitmo is the terrorists’ greatest recruitment tool because otherwise-peaceful Muslims will be so outraged at mild mistreatment of war prisoners — in those exceptional cases in which mistreatment occurs — that they’ll join the beheading movement.
Photographs of naked, bloody Iraqis abused and ritually humiliated by laughing American soldiers clearly aren’t enough to inspire a co-religionist to pick up a gun. On the other hand, you have to admit that filing a writ of habeus corpus is so vile a provocation that Ralph Peters is emotionally justified in calling for the summary execution of all prisoners.
Now, with Obama’s nomination of Judge Sotomayor, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs tells us we have to tread lightly in daring to oppose her. You’d expect His Shillness to take that position
“His Shrillness?” Is he talking about Robert Gibbs, a man who sounds like John Henry Faulk after an overdose of cough syrup?
Why do we have to tread lightly at the prospect of the appointment of a radical leftist activist judge who believes in rewriting the Constitution on the fly to achieve the policy results that she and the Appointer in Chief desire?
“Appointer in Chief?” Isn’t that what the president is when it comes to, you know, appointments to the Supreme Court? Is that meant to imply that Obama usurped the legal right to appoint justices from, I don’t know, Newt Gingrich, or is it simply a placeholder left over from the first draft that Limbaugh the Lesser forgot to replace with an actual insult?
Just what would Obama have to do to warrant our criticism? Just how radical and in your face would he have to be before people quit falling for his empty bipartisan rhetoric?
This sentence suggests the author is deranged, until you remember that he’s writing about the President Obama from the Star Trek Mirror universe. It’s easy to get them confused, but remember, in the Mirror universe, Republicans can always be relied upon to set aside partisan advantage and seek compromise in order to promote the national interest. Oh, and they all have face mullets.
But the only chance we have for a Republican resurgence is if Republicans return to their conservative roots and offer a real, stark alternative to the unfolding Obama destruction.
Stark alternatives are the most appealing. I’ve always thought that, rather than “We try harder,” Avis’ slogan should have been, “We’re the stark alternative.” I sincerely hope the RNC will see the wisdom of adopting these words as part of their re-branding initiative.