Posted on 07/25/2009 4:36:42 PM PDT by fiodora
As Rush Limbaugh said — soon after the last U.S. election, and not without some attendant controversy — we should hope for President Obama to fail. The Republican party establishment were more appalled than the Democrats. The latter were actually gloating. The new Obama administration decided that the mouthy and obstreperous Limbaugh would make an ideal sparring partner, and the new president’s outriders slung a few choice epithets his way, to help Rush with his ratings. Grateful and generous, Limbaugh slung a few back. It was all good theatre.
At some point, it seems, Obama’s brain trust realized it wasn’t exactly wise to be giving the bird to Limbaugh’s vast and accumulating audience. After a couple of cursory digs of his own, the president himself also turned his attention. He began to assimilate the first lesson of high office: let sleeping dogs lie.
So far, all political fun and games, but of course, people get hurt playing them. In their eagerness to accuse their fellow Republican, the fat, vulgar, and extremely articulate Rush Limbaugh, of being “divisive” and scoring an own-goal, the respectables of the Republican establishment — the people with proper table manners who know how to sound their vowels — did themselves a serious injury. They created a division within the Republican party that now only people like Limbaugh can heal. And people like Limbaugh will only be doing that on their own terms.
Out of an understandable aesthetic revulsion for the speaker (I love Rush myself, and laugh with rather than at him, but then I have no taste), the respectables entirely missed his point. Limbaugh made clear, to those whose ears were working, exactly why he wanted Obama to fail. His argument was that everything the new president had promised — everything he had campaigned for, and everything his cronies represented — was against America’s best interests. Republicans should hardly want someone who is acting against America’s best interests to succeed.
I grant, that argument is a little subtle, and Limbaugh does not always slow himself down to the glacial intellectual pace of sound bites in the mainstream media. By not listening, one could easily misunderstand. Perhaps an example would be useful.
The stock markets soared in the middle of this week, immediately after Barack Obama turned in a rather dismal performance in a press conference aimed at rallying the troops behind his socialized medical scheme. As Lawrence Auster, and several other rude conservative commentators on the Internet asked, why would it do so?
They also answered their question: Wall Street rallied because investors began to think Obama-care will fail. The president will not be able to get that revolution through Congress. He looks as if he is beginning to realize this himself. Enough cosmetic measures may pass through to do some permanent damage, both economic and moral; but at the end of the day, it will be nothing on the scale that was feared.
There are innumerable other Obama failures for which one might wish devoutly: that he will fail to get out of Iraq, and Afghanistan; fail to pressure Israel into abandoning her frontiers; fail to negotiate with the mullahs in Iran; fail to make a missile deal with Putin’s Russia; fail to reach an international climate accord, while failing to fully cap, tax, and cripple the U.S. energy industry. Likewise, one might reasonably hope that he will fail to stack the Supreme Court with “culture of death” aficionadi, and fall “tragically” short of delivering any number of other domestic horrors.
My reader may not wish Obama to fail; but by now he should grasp why I would, along with all those horrid jingo Middle Americans in the “flyover country.” If, as the Economist suggested on a recent cover, the choice is between going the way of California, and going the way of Texas — and it is — they will choose prosperity and the American way, over bankruptcy and existential angst. It’s that simple, and the good of America requires Obama to fail, miserably.
From this view, the Republican role in Congress is to help him fail. On the hustings, it is to play as dramatically as possible on what was wrong with Obama’s agenda from the start. The mission is to wipe out the Democrat congressional majorities in the midterms of 2010, in the same way Newt Gingrich and company wiped out the Democrats in 1994, thereby gelding Bill Clinton.
“Nice” will not accomplish this. “Candour” is how it’s done.
David Warren’s column appears Sunday, Wednesday and Saturday.
Obama failures are victories for America. Rush was right
LOL. Great line
Because of this, any failure of obama or the obama agenda is good for America. I hope and pray obama fails in everything he tries. I cannot think of a single thing he has done right since taking office. I cannot think of one single thing he has done that has been a plus for Americans.
“I cannot think of one single thing he has done that has been a plus for Americans.”
Hear, hear, I hope Zero[-9] FAILS!!!
What do you expect for a connunist street agitator the America made the big mistake of electing. American citizens FAILED when they elected OBAMA. We have a failed citizenship.
wow a ‘paper guy’ that gets Rush. How wierd is that?
That hoping Obama should fail was contraversial is almost completely incomprehensible to me. I say almost becuase I know some people cannot escape the popular myth that we need strong leadership in times of trouble. Plus, I know all who support the current administration (whatever administration that may be) are by definition little more than “defenders of the faith” (at least in the early days).
Out of the leadership myth comes this notion that the president’s fate and the fate of the nation are one. Like the Fisher King, if Obama is sick, the very plants and animals must be dying. Doesn’t ever do much good to remind them that our most active and powerful executives—the ones who more than most saw themselves as integral to the survival of the Republic—ruled over the absolute worst periods of American history. I speak, of course, of Lincoln and FDR. All that matters is successful leader = successful nation.
Let’s assume that’s so. Why is it, then, that we have more than one party? Isn’t it a trivial fact, a fact clear to everyone and a fact that hardly needs repition, that the opposition wants the president to fail? That, indeed, the whole point of an opposition party is to have someone there who wants the party in power to fail?
“That hoping Obama should fail was contraversial is almost completely incomprehensible to me.”
It was incomprehensible for me too!!
The seeds of a conservative resurgence has been planted.
Obama’s failure will mean that the ideas of America are still alive.
“The mission is to wipe out the Democrat congressional majorities in the midterms of 2010”
At least this would rid us of the dreadful Mrs. Pelosi as speaker. It’s hard to think that Cindy Sheehan herself could have been any worse.
Yes. How pathetic have we become as a nation that those of us with any sense at all must hope and pray that the leader of our nation utterly fails, in order that we may preserve some semblance of The United States of America that we once knew? Sheesh.
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