May 07, 2012
New Column: Truth Is Major Obstacle to Obama's Re-election
President Obama formally kicked off his re-election campaign in Richmond, Va., and Columbus, Ohio, Saturday, and his theme was certainly not, shall we say, "it's morning again in America" -- President Ronald Reagan's optimistic re-election slogan in 1984.
Obama's central message was more like: "Hey, I realize things look bad, and I'm not going to pretend you want four more years of this. But just think how much worse it would have been without me and how much worse it's going to get if you get rid of me."
Interestingly, mainstream media journalists Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake were certain enough that Obama wasn't sufficiently forthcoming in his speech that they co-wrote a piece for The Washington Post "parsing" it. Without a whiff of disapproval, they said, "This being politics, Obama said less than what he meant. But, that's where we come in." The two then set out Obama's "most quotable lines" and followed each with their "translation of the message he was trying to send."
The writers are obviously sympathetic to Obama's agenda and, as fellow liberals, share his end-justifies-the-means sleight of hand -- whatever it takes to keep this federal juggernaut barreling along. Let's look at just a few of the quotes they highlighted.
Obama said: "I don't care how many ways you try to explain it: Corporations aren't people. People are people." The writers said Obama was responding to Mitt Romney's earlier remark that "corporations are people," and they said Obama intended to send this message: "Romney is the business candidate. I am the people's candidate."
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Posted by David Limbaugh at 07:21 PM | Printer Friendly
May 03, 2012
New Column: Piers Morgan Slays Himself in Goldberg Interview
There was a silver lining for Jonah Goldberg in Piers Morgan's ambush interview of him allegedly concerning his new book, "The Tyranny of Cliches." Jonah couldn't have written a better script to illustrate his book's theme.
Someone really should explain to Morgan that when a host invites a guest to discuss the guest's book, the host ought to at least make a good-faith effort to pretend he has the slightest interest in allowing the author to expound on the book's contents -- as opposed to using the author as a prop to indulge the interviewer's own arguments against conservatives and their toxic opinions.
That someone might also inform Morgan that it's a perversion of the Socratic method for an interviewer to badger a guest into admitting the rhetorical premises of the interviewer's opinions rather than lead him through carefully constructed logical arguments to those conclusions -- never allowing the guest fully to answer his questions, never listening to his responses, making every one of his follow-up questions a classic non sequitur and putting words in the guest's mouth for the purpose of constructing and then demolishing various straw men.
The central theme of Jonah's book, which he explained in response to the only germane question Morgan posed in the interview, is that though pretty much everyone is ideological, conservatives are honest about it, and liberals are not. Liberals lie about their own ideological proclivities, mostly to themselves but also to others.
Let me briefly unpack the interview to illustrate precisely how accurate Goldberg is and how, during the interview, Morgan became a personification of the book's theme -- all without having the slightest clue he was doing so.
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Posted by David Limbaugh at 06:55 PM | Printer Friendly
April 30, 2012
New Column: Obama Is Headed Anywhere but Forward
You have to hand it to President Obama and his cabal of re-election strategists; they are masters of illusion. Their newly released Web video and its accompanying campaign slogan, "Forward," are science fiction-level fantastical.
We're all familiar with Obama's penchant for deflecting responsibility and blaming his policy failures on George W. Bush, but after more than three years in office for Obama, it has gone from childish mischief to juvenile delinquency. This is a question for Guinness: Has any other president run for re-election against the record of his retired predecessor?
Indeed, Obama is still feeding us this dodge years beyond its spoil date, apparently hoping we won't realize we have salmonella until he's safely voted in to his second term.
Watch the video. In the words of The Hill's John Easley, "it blames GOP policies for the still-sluggish economy."
It attempts to draw a clear dichotomy between the dark days of the last year of Bush's term and the glorious remedial reign of President Obama, which began in January 2009.
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Posted by David Limbaugh at 06:36 PM | Printer Friendly
April 26, 2012
New Column: Obama Administration's Repeated Abuses Are Extension of Extreme Liberalism
Every day, we get a new kick in the gut from the Obama administration. Most recently, Environmental Protection Agency Region 6 Administrator Al Armendariz was caught on video articulating his view of the agency's role in enforcing its regulations.
Aremendariz said: "It was kind of like how the Romans used to, you know, conquer villages in the Mediterranean. They'd go into a little Turkish town somewhere; they'd find the first five guys they saw, and they'd crucify them. Then, you know, that town was really easy to manage for the next few years. ... It's a deterrent factor."
This man should be fired -- yesterday. White House press secretary Jay Carney risibly says Aremendariz wasn't articulating the attitude of the administration. Sadly, that's precisely what he was articulating.
Indeed, we've seen this attitude by the administration in countless examples, from Obama's handling of the Obamacare legislation and restructuring of the GM loans to the administration's New Black Panther voter intimidation case to Solyndra to Fast and Furious to -- oh, never mind; I have to keep this to less than 20,000 words.
None of this should surprise us. Obama is the quintessential liberal, and his administration's recurring abuses are simply the logical extension of liberal hubris born of a self-righteous certainty of the superiority of leftist ideas. This inevitably leads to dictatorial usurpations and lawlessness from the liberal ruling class.
Posted by David Limbaugh at 03:50 PM | Printer Friendly
April 23, 2012
New Column: Romney Should Choose Bold Colors, Not Pale Pastels
Mitt Romney's presidential run could turn out to be a test case to resolve the long-running debate inside the Republican Party as to whether the GOP presidential nominee should run as a conservative or more of a centrist.
How often have we heard both Democratic and Republican political "experts" reciting the conventional wisdom that during primary contests, candidates of both parties must play to their respective base voters and then shift toward the center during the general election campaign? Does anyone even challenge this edict?
The first problem with this is that it implicitly suggests that all presidential candidates are first and foremost politicians who will cater their policy agenda to whatever extent necessary to win their party's nomination and the general election. Perhaps I'm somewhat Pollyannaish, but I reject the cynical view that all politicians are, in the end, political prostitutes.
I am not saying that candidates shouldn't do their best to package their messages in the most palatable and attractive form to voters; that goes without saying. But what about their substantive message -- what they really stand for?
Well, that depends on what they stand for.
Exit polling consistently shows that nearly twice as many Americans identify themselves as conservative than as liberal. Even without that data, we know that Democrats must be convinced this is true, because most of them run as moderates in national elections.
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Posted by David Limbaugh at 05:23 PM | Printer Friendly
April 16, 2012
New Column: Katie Pavlich's 'Fast and Furious'
Of all the myriad scandals of the Obama administration, there is one, largely ignored by the mainstream media, that could actually be its worst.
That scandal is the operation run from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, under the Justice Department, known as "Fast and Furious," through which the federal government actually encouraged and even ordered American gun shops to sell guns -- against the store owners' better judgment -- to "straw" purchasers who were funneling guns to Mexican drug gangs while the ATF sat back and watched and did nothing.
As Katie Pavlich shows in her remarkable and eye-opening new book, "Fast and Furious: Barack Obama's Bloodiest Scandal and Its Shameless Cover-Up," the whole scheme was either absolutely harebrained or, as some have more ominously theorized, intentionally designed to manufacture "evidence" for tightening gun control legislation.
Pavlich exposes how extreme gun control measures have been a top political goal for President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and other important leaders within the administration -- and she draws the lines that link this goal directly to the implementation of Fast and Furious. Just as importantly, she shows how the administration has shamelessly tried to obscure those links.
The operation resulted in the murder of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and the murder or wounding of some 200 Mexican citizens.
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Posted by David Limbaugh at 06:10 PM | Printer Friendly
April 12, 2012
New Column: Thank You, Ms. Rosen
Though everyone is talking about Democratic strategist and Obama confidant Hilary Rosen's insolent remarks about Ann Romney, I want to discuss them, too, because they reveal her leftist mindset.
Rosen didn't misspeak; she spoke deliberately and with passion. And when given a chance to retract or soften her remarks, she doubled down -- at least initially.
Her comments came in a segment on CNN with Anderson Cooper. Cooper pointed out that in the current economy, "women are seeing jobs come back much more slowly than men are," and he asked Rosen, essentially, whether there was anything wrong with the Romney campaign's highlighting that fact and "reaching out to women on an issue that they care about, on the economy."
"Guess what?" asked Rosen. "His wife has actually never worked a day in her life. She's never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school and why we worry about their future."
Though Rosen's next comment hasn't received as much attention, it exposes liberal thinking. She said: "There's something much more fundamental about Mitt Romney, because he seems so old-fashioned when it comes to women. And I think that comes across. ... He just doesn't really see us as equal."
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Posted by David Limbaugh at 04:24 PM | Printer Friendly
April 09, 2012
New Column: Holder's Corrupt Opposition to Voter ID Laws
Can anyone think of an innocuous reason that President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder oppose state voter ID laws?
Obama and Holder appear to view almost everything through the prism of race or, at the very least, use race as an excuse to justify otherwise very dubious policies, from immigration enforcement to voter intimidation actions to strong-arming banks to make loans via allegations of racism.
In December, along these lines, Holder criticized redistricting maps that had been drawn by the Texas Legislature and used the opportunity to call for an aggressive federal review of voter identification laws in not just Texas but other states.
But what does all this have to do with voter ID laws? Well, Republicans have been engaged in lobbying for state voter ID laws throughout the nation as an effort to enhance fair and lawful elections and prevent voter fraud. These laws are simple and transparent; they would require voters to present a government-issued form of identification as a condition to voting.
Predictably, Democrats -- led by Obama and Holder -- claim that the move is a GOP ruse to suppress minority voting. Holder called on the parties "to resist the temptation to suppress certain votes in the hope of attaining electoral success and, instead, achieve success by appealing to more voters."
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Posted by David Limbaugh at 05:53 PM | Printer Friendly
