Here is a little of what Rush Limbaugh had to say yesterday talking about this article, “The Flight 93 Election.” I’ll excerpt directly from the article tomorrow. Some of what Rush said and the article contains are things I’ve been saying for years:
I have here a column that I would love to read to you in entirety and I can’t because it is 10 pages long.
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It is shot between the eyes of conservative intellectuals who say that Trump is beneath them. They can’t stomach Trump. They can’t possibly vote for Trump. It would be distastefully, personally unacceptable and so forth. And the reason this piece appeals to me is because it validates so many of the instincts that I have had over the years, in recent months particularly, and that I’ve shared with you about what is happening to the conservative movement and how conservatism’s being defined, and who seeks to define it and what it means going forward.
And there’s even a term used for the conservative Never Trumpers. He calls them “the Washington Generals.” I wonder where he got that? That happens to be my term for our side. Specifically, the Republicans in Congress. I think I named them the Washington Generals, happy to be on the field, happy to wear the uniform, but supposed to lose and happy to do so. And that’s just a flavor.
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[W]e’ve got a lot of conservative intellectuals at the tanks writing policy papers, position papers, as though everything’s the same, as though everything’s normal. “We’re just through a normal election cycle. We win some; we lose some. We gotta keep plugging away. Eventually we’re gonna win,” with no acknowledgment of the reality of what we face. They’re in it for themselves. They want their pet ideas adopted. They want their paychecks.
They want their paychecks to be cashed. They want to stay in the game. They want to be part of whatever the movement is in Washington, DC. But here’s the thing: “If conservatives are right…” This is a key ‘graph here, folks. “If conservatives are right about the importance of virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, character and so on in the individual; if [conservatives] are right about sexual morality or what came to be termed ‘family values’; if they are right about the importance of education to inculcate good character and to teach the fundamentals that have defined knowledge in the West for millennia; if they are right…”
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Now, let me give another hint where this is headed. What this column is really about is a shaming of Never Trumpers who proudly and loudly proclaim — conservative intellectuals — it’s a infinite audience that’s being targeted here. It’s not you, folks. It’s conservative intellectuals, the think tankers, the people that rely on fundraising and donations and the magazine types. I’m not naming any names and he doesn’t do so, either, but he’s written for that audience, and he’s basically calling them out for their holier-than-thou attitude about Donald Trump.
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[I]n a nutshell the message and theme — and there are a couple of them here, but if I had to whittle it down, conservatism can’t just be an academic exercise when the country is hanging in the balance.
And the focus within the conservative movement on who is and who isn’t a genuine conservative misses the entire point and is a waste of time when the country is hanging in the balance. There’s only one possible way to stop the downward trend we’re on, and that’s to beat Hillary Clinton, and the only way to do that is to vote for Donald Trump. And it’s a plea to intellectual conservatives who refuse to do so.
Can you separate your vote from support? If you can’t bring yourself to support Trump, can you at least vote for him to stop the downward trend that you all acknowledge is occurring? This is one of the big themes of the piece: How can you sit there and agree how rotten things are, how we’re in a downward spiral, how everything we believe in is being transformed and torn apart and not react as though we’re in a big crisis, as though we can just continue to do what we’re doing, writing our same old policy papers, enunciating our same old principles to an audience that is further and further removed by virtue of immigration and other tricks the Democrats are using to totally change the face of the electorate in this country.
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Here’s another excerpt. “More to the point, what has conservatism achieved lately? In the last 20 years?” Take over the House is about it, when you get right down to it, 1994. That’s my interpretation. The writer here says that, well, practically nothing has been achieved in the last 20 years. But then if you go tell conservatives that, they’ll say, “Well, our ideas haven’t even been tried.”
“Except that the same conservatives who generate those ideas are in charge of selling them to the broader public. If their ideas ‘haven’t been tried,’ who is ultimately at fault?” This gets to the point. You can sit there and you can enunciate conservatism all day, you can write conservatism all day, but you can’t sit there and say, “Our ideas haven’t had a chance,” because if you’re not trying to get them implemented, if you’re not actually trying to persuade people, if you’re not out there fighting for hearts and minds, if you’re just pontificating, then you can’t sit back and say, “Our ideas haven’t been tried.”
“The whole enterprise of Conservatism, Inc., reeks of failure. Its sole recent and ongoing success is its own self-preservation. Conservative intellectuals never tire of praising ‘entrepreneurs’ and ‘creative destruction.’ Dare to fail! they exhort businessmen. Let the market decide! Except, um, not with respect to us. Or is their true market not the political arena, but the fundraising circuit?”
Now, if you are a conservative intellectual and you’re reading this, that is a deep cut. That is a deep wound. That is an allegation that you’re only in it for the money and that you don’t want to upset anything that might interrupt your fundraising.
Read more: RushLimbaugh.com
Image credit: www.rushlimbaugh.com.
