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| Understanding Obama's Budget | The Culture of Compulsion |
Why Presidents Fail
by Christopher Chantrill
March 02, 2009 at 12:27 pm
OUR LIBERALS friends are predictably annoyed by Rush Limbaugh’s hope that President Obama “fails.”
It was ok to wish the most frightful things on President Bush. But this is different.
On Saturday, Rush Limbaugh “doubled down” on the Obama failure meme. So let’s look at what he said at CPAC.
This notion that I want the President to fail, folks, this shows you a sign of the problem we’ve got. That’s nothing more than common sense and to not be able to say it, why in the world do I want what we just described, rampant government growth indebtedness, wealth that’s not even being created yet that is being spent, what is in this? What possibly is in this that anybody of us wants to succeed?
Rush Limbaugh looks at the program of President Obama, and says: I don’t want this to succeed.
The greatest power of all is not the power to run the government to to lead a great army. It is to define what can and cannot be said. It is to have the power to say: This is beyond the pale, and I cannot believe that you would say it.
The great contribution to American culture made by Rush Limbaugh is that he has pushed back against the liberal efforts to draw the line on what is acceptable speech. Back in the 1990s when Limbaugh was first building a national audience for the Rush Limbaugh Program, listeners would call in, agog, and say: But Rush, you’re not allowed to say that!
Of course, if Rush Limbaugh were running for political office, or the head of a foundation, or lobbying for government grants, he could not say the things he says.
This is something that Limbaugh’s liberal critics do not understand. Rush Limbaugh does not live or die by his political reputation. Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer who lives and dies by the ratings of his radio show. He is like any celebrity: all publicity is good publicity.
So if Rush Limbaugh has failed for several months to raise the outrage of the liberals, an alarm bell goes off in his head. It is telling him to serve up something outrageous, get into the news—and drive a few new listeners to his radio program.
The folk in the conservative rank-and-file appreciate the courage that Rush Limbaugh exhibits. They appreciate that someone at least has the guts to show their head above the parapet and say the things that liberals say you are not allowed to say in America.
Rush Limbaugh is only saying what every conservative is saying in his heart: Golly. I sure hope this guy fails to get all the new taxing and spending that he’s planning. If Obama succeeds we will look back and see that he really did change America—for the worse.
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
US Life in 1842
Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Society and State
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
Socialism equals Animism
Imagining that all order is the result of design, socialists
conclude that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Religion, Property, and Family
But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.
Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Postmodernism
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
Physics, Religion, and Psychology
Paul Dirac: “When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated
by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that
I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion.
However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and
inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he
suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.”
John Farrell, “The Creation Myth”
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Never Trust Experts
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”
Mutual Aid
In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society
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