A legacy of betrayal
I don't know if it was finally being off the drugs that did the trick, but it's nice to see Rush Limbaugh has woken up to the fact that it doesn't really matter if you call yourself a conservative - compassionate, neo or paleo - if you embrace a progressive vision that revolves around the notion of giving ever more power to the federal government, you are a de facto left-liberal.
A new and metastasizing federal drug entitlement wasn't enough to convince Rush of this - neither was allowing a Republican Congress to go hog-wild with the national credit card. Blatantly ignoring the Constitution he was sworn to uphold as commander in chief didn't do it, nor did the de facto amnesty proposal, the proposed Mars boondoggle or having sex with an intern in the Oval Office. No, wait, that last one was Clinton, wasn't it. I'm having a tough time telling the difference.
But amped-up spending on the National Endowment for the Arts appears to have at last caused the scales to fall from Rush's eyes. Apparently, the notion of another chocolate-smeared lesbian, urine-soaked crucifix or embedded bullwhip being fraudulently passed off as art on the taxpayer's dime was finally too much Jonah for the Republican Party's great white whale to swallow.
Mr. Limbaugh wrote:
The Big Theory, softening people's view of conservatism by making Americans work more for government and less for themselves, isn't working. How can it? If you act like a liberal to get Democrat votes, you can't do something conservative when you win without losing those new voters ... You know, Republicans told us that we needed to give them control of the House, Senate and White House to get something done.
Well, they're getting it done, all right. They're sticking a fork right into America's back. I am no political strategist, and my daily audience is less than one-one hundredth the size of Mr. Limbaugh's. But I could have told Rush that the Republican Party had absolutely no intention of effecting any change in the long-term direction of the nation back when I left the party - disenchanted - in 1992.
Unlike most people my age, I had the chance to see the sausage-making up close and personal. Through family connections, I knew a few party players, though no one terribly major - they were mostly at the level of the third circle. But at one national convention, I got to know the Houston coterie much better than I would ever have expected through a girl I was dating at the time. It is very surreal experience to find yourself at a party with 30 people when two of them are Donald Trump and Henry Kissinger.
Even at the time, it was very obvious to me that these were not people who were interested in ideas or ethereal, abstract notions of human liberty. The language of small government and freedom was not an article of faith for them, but rather, a rhetorical device with which the power they craved could be wrested from the powers-that-were in the Democratic Party.
Like the vast majority of Republican politicians who have scrabbled their way to the top of the heap, George Delano Bush has a far greater commitment to his immediate power base - those who raised him to significance - than to the conservative voters who subsequently elected him. Unlike Ronald Reagan, who for all his amiable public persona was a private intellectual, George Delano has no strong ideological principles to counterbalance the massive political pressures on him.
Last week on Vox Popoli, I lampooned a cynical George Delano, who amuses himself by yanking the chain of conservative columnists and making bets with Karl Rove on their reactions. Although the poodle-like, tail-wagging reactions of some conservatives to even the president's most outrageous actions have surpassed my most skeptical expectations, it's a relief to see that Mr. Limbaugh has seen fit to declare that far too much is, at last, enough.
Power is useless - totally useless - if it is not wielded justly in the cause of the right and the true. Pragmatism in politics is nothing more than a means of cutting your own throat in the slowest and most excruciating manner. Do not listen to these assassins of principle when they tell you that a vote for a third party is a vote for a Democrat.
If the last three decades are any guide, it is a vote for a Republican that is a vote for a Democrat, and a vote against the Constitution of the United States of America at that.