Responding to a local editorial taking shots at Rush Limbaugh and spineless politicians afraid to say what they truly believe. . .
You are right in so many ways, especially in the way politicians are afraid to say what they really believe else they’ll never get elected, but wrong about Rush ‘shilling’ for republicans. But you can’t know that if you listen to Rush’s critics instead of Rush.
Rush has been a huge critic of Bush and republicans in Washington when they deserve it. But when push comes to shove, in the long run, you have to choose. Rush chooses free enterprise, freedom, capitalism, and competition, limited government, controlled spending, and the belief that, by and large, the American people know best what to do with their money than ‘the government.’ In that context, republicans have been his choice. Democrats, by and large, think that government is the solution to all our problems, and the American people are not smart enough to manage themselves and need government to be their parents. To call that shilling does more to attack the messenger instead of the message, which is another tenet of the democrat party that Rush brings to light. You’re proving his point on that one.
If you listen to Rush with some regularity, you would know that there wasn’t a bigger critic of Bush when it comes to Bush’s wandering from conservative principles. From constitutional matters such as the failed McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance ‘Reform’ bill, to energy matters, to out-of-control spending, to letting his judicial nominees rot on the vine. Rush makes the point that Bush is not conservative in some ways. Shills don’t do that.
And since when is being ‘rich’ a bad thing? I assume you feel that way by this paragraph. You write:
“Here’s a rich, powerful commentator who has been bashing Democrats and pushing Republicans like it was the last chance to save mankind — and now it turns out he really didn’t mean it.”
A big problem with the left in Washington and newsrooms in this country is how the successful become targets to be brought down, instead of examples of how people can be successful if they make the right choices in life and have the freedom to make the right choices in business. Remember how the Clinton administration wanted to sue the pants off of Bill Gates in the 90’s for being so successful that it was ‘unfair?’ They wanted to split his company up into smaller less successful entities. Ask AT&T what happened to them, and how that fiasco has finally ended up.
If you can take the selective success-envy out of the debate, you might be able to get down to what really matters. Are not commentators like Mike Papantonio and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also rich? The fact that they have not been successful (Air America Radio & The Ring of Fire) is because of the choices they make. The free-market speaks for itself.
