Thought of the day
Nicole Wallace, a senior advisor to the McCain-Palin campaign last year and former assistant to President Bush, makes a great point in response to all the back and forth drama going on over Rush Limbaugh’s Saturday CPAC speech:
The most important thing Rush Limbaugh said Saturday night has escaped notice by the mainstream media. The clip thatβs running in a constant loop on cable television includes Limbaughβs comment about wanting βany force, any person, any element of an overarching Big Government that would stop your success. . . to fail.β White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel made a clever attempt to distort those comments by suggesting that Republicans are rooting for the countryβs failure, but most people outside the beltway will simply be puzzled that the White House is engaged in a debate with Limbaugh at all. I canβt imagine George Bush or Andy Card in a debate with Keith Olberman, and I find the entire White House obsession with conservative media personalities like Limbaugh and Sean Hannity bizarre.
Indeed – and it’s a war the Obama administration started in full force last month with these comments from Obama himself.
This isn’t something new. Obama is one of the few presidents – and presidential candidates – I’ve known of in modern history to take on political pundits directly. A year and a half ago, there were a few prominent liberal bloggers upset over the fact that Obama had challenged NYT liberal columnist Paul Krugman on Obama’s healthcare plan, because Krugman was writing column after column criticizing him at one point. A rumor was also floating around about that same time about the possibility that the Obama campaign was gathering oppo research on “progressive bloggers” who were critical of him. That story was never confirmed, but knowing how Obama can’t stand on-the-mark criticisms, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that some of the handlers in his campaign were finding out all they could on liberal bloggers who opposed the then-candidate.
In any event, Wallace provides some food for thought into the strange obsessions of our new President. With everything we’ve got going on with our economy right now, and the war on terror issues that always remain on the table, Team Obama is taking potshots at … Rush Limbaugh – using the mainstream media to help spread the message, and they have oh-so-helpfully aided him by making the focus of so many of their broadcasts about “Rush vs. Obama” or “Rush vs. Steele.” Here’s one of the main reasons why.
It’s clear that when Obama talked back in January about how the GOP “couldn’t listen to Rush Limbaugh and expect to get things done” that the mainstream media were paying attention, because once again they’ve helped make Rush Limbaugh a focal point and have tried to pin prominent conservatives in a corner in an effort to get them to either defend, distance themselves from, or repudiate Rush altogether, which will get them in hot water no matter what they do. Hey, by keeping conservatives defensive over the issue, and by making the country believe that Rush (and the conservatives who don’t hate him) wants to see this country fail, they can keep the American people in the dark about the rightness of conservatism and via extension aid in keeping Democrats in power for at least the next few elections.
That’s not a conspiracy theory – it’s more like what author and media expert Bernard Goldberg classifies as being “just how the media is.” They don’t sit around in a room and cook this stuff up. It’s just that the desire to defeat conservatives and conservatism comes just as naturally to them as breathing.
Frustrating.