Hollow Men
This is how a movement ends… this is how a movement ends…. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.
(video via Yglesias)
Freddie
Freddie deBoer used to blog at lhote.blogspot.com, and may again someday. Now he blogs here.
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Balderdash, Freddie. As usual with your posts, you forward nothing but your fondest wishes. Limbaugh’s point is that conservatives must stand on conservative principles. You might disagree that that is what conservatives should do (but since you aren’t one, what impact would your opinion have?) or what liberals should do (if liberals had any concrete principles, that is, except being in power). But Limbaugh saying so is hardly “how a movement ends”. It is him basically saying “keep strong, don’t give up”.
That you don’t understand Limbaugh (and I’m assuming that you don’t listen to his radio show) is basically why you are a liberal, after all, right?Report
Explain Limbaugh to me. I listen to him from time to time, but listen to Sean Hannity more; I wouldn’t trust either guys as the vanguard of a movement. They are, in Derbyshire’s words, carnival barkers.
I think it is fairly established that a Limbaugh platform would look to skip the first time as tragedy and get straight to the farce:
http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=07&year=2008&base_name=limbaugh
But maybe that platform is more principled than the platforms I am used to seeing.Report
Limbaugh is a joke. That the conservative movement doesn’t realize this proves that it, too, is a joke. Just another nail in the coffin. I hope they ride his coattails to the brink and over it…Report
Kain, you are a lot like Freddie: boil things down, you write wishful thinking, and nothing more. I see you read Andrew Sullivan, too, for your talking points.
Rortybomb, I’m sorry but there is nothing “to explain” that Limbaugh doesn’t explain himself. Read the speech he just gave, for example. The speech doesn’t reflect everything Limbaugh is — no one speech could do that for anybody — but it is all there: the politics of the self-made man, described by a self-made man, who lives in a country that was founded to allow “self-made people” to finally mean something.Report
To create a country where a free man can freely take prescription drugs illegally, and to show America’s foreign dominance by seeking underage Dominican boys for sex.
The GOP dream Matthew.Report
I think Ross Douthat said it best about Rush. He represents a certain kind of political philosophical purity. I actually respect that. I have no sense that his vision is anything other than one very small piece of a much larger more complicated puzzle, but there it is.
It’s good to have a guy like that on your side because he will draw some strong lines.
What you don’t want is to have such an ideologue setting the purity standard test for the actual running of your party. This is where the GOP triple down on their demographically shrinking base post the election is total folly. But if they want to dig their own grave, then the Democrats have to love handing Rush any number of shovels.Report
Actually right on cue, Douthat posts this today:
Rush is the Oprah of the right
“But if you accept the parallel with Oprah, then you also need to recognize that if American liberals treated someone like Ms. Winfrey the way the adoring CPAC-goers treated Rush – not just as a great communicator and entertainer, but as an arbiter of what their movement is and ought to be, and what their party should be standing for – they’d look like starstruck fools. And rightly so.”Report
David Frum on Rush at newmajority.com
“And for the leader of the Republicans? A man who is aggressive and bombastic, cutting and sarcastic, who dismisses the concerned citizens in network news focus groups as “losers.” With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence – exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix to our philosophy and our party. And we’re cooperating! Those images of crowds of CPACers cheering Rush’s every rancorous word – we’ll be seeing them rebroadcast for a long time.”Report
Seperately re: Donnie Darko – one of my favorite things to do at a hipster bar with an internet jukebox is to play the original Tears For Fears version of “Mad World”, and watch all the arty girls get pissed off that it isn’t the Gary Jules version.
If you haven’t heard the original, it is terrible in a great way.Report
Curses wrong thread!Report
Oh!
I lurved Donnie Darko abune a’ thing.
But the big problem with Rush is refusal to evolve.
Not really an option.Report