Posted on 11/08/2006 4:50:12 PM PST by Aussie Dasher
Republicans lost control of the House, and perhaps the Senate, because they abandoned their conservative principles and in the end stood for nothing, Rush Limbaugh said today.
In his Wednesday broadcast, America’s top talker said that until Republicans begin asking themselves what’s wrong with themselves they are never going to fix their problems.
When things go wrong, Rush said, "you must look inward and ask first, ‘What did we do wrong? What could we have done better? What mistakes did we make?”
Commenting that although Republicans lost, "Conservatism did not lose, Republicanism lost last night. Republicanism, being a political party first, rather than an ideological movement, is what lost last night.”
The Democrats, he said "beat something last night with nothing. They advanced no agenda other than their usual anti-war position. They had no contract — they really never did get specific. Their message was one of ‘vote for us; the other guys have been in power too long.’”
Rush further admonished, "There was no dominating conservative message that came from the [Republican] top and filtered down throughout in this campaign.”
He added that if there was conservatism in the campaign, it was on the Democratic side: "There were conservative Democrats running for office in the House of Representatives and in a couple of Senate races won by Democrats yesterday.” He cited James Webb as an example.
He also said it was conservatism that won fairly big when it was tried yesterday, but it was Democrats who ran as conservatives and not their GOP rivals. He added that the Democratic leadership had gone out and recruited conservative candidates because they knew liberals could not win running against Republicans in red states.
Rush quoted Thomas Sowell as explaining that the latest example of election fraud is actually what the Democrats did — they nominated a bunch of moderate and conservative candidates for the express purpose of electing a far-left Democratic leadership.
"The Democrats could not have won the House, being liberals,” Rush said. "Liberalism didn’t win anything yesterday; Republicanism lost. Conservatism was nowhere to be found except on the Democratic side.”
The root of the problem, Rush said, is that "our side hungers for ideological leadership and we’re not getting it from the top. Conservatism was nowhere to be found in this campaign from the top. The Democrats beat something with nothing. They didn’t have to take a stand on anything other than their usual anti-war positions. They had no clear agenda and they didn’t dare offer one. Liberalism will still lose every time it’s offered.”
Republicans, Rush said, allowed themselves to be defined. "Without elected conservative leadership from the top Republicans in the House and Senate republicans are free to freelance and say the hell with party unity.”
That leads, Rush said, to the emergence of RINOs — Republicans in name only.
Republicans in Congress, Rush explained, were held captive by the party’s leadership in the White House. They were put into a position of having to endorse policies with which as conservatives they disagreed.
"The Democratic Party,” Rush went on to say, "is the party of entitlements; but the Republicans come up with this Medicare prescription drug plan that the polls said that the public didn’t want and was not interested in. That is not conservatism. Conservatives do not grow the government and offer entitlements as a means of buying votes. But that’s what the Republicans in Congress had to support in order to stay in line with the Party from the top.
"It is silly to blame the media; it is silly to blame the Democrats; it is silly to go out and try to find all these excuses,” Rush said. "We have proved that we can beat them … we have proved that we can withstand whatever we get from the drive-by media. Conservatism does that — conservatism properly applied, proudly, eagerly, with vigor and honesty will triumph over that nine times out of 10 in this current political and social environment. It just wasn’t utilized in this campaign.”
Rush also blamed the failure to embrace conservatism on Republican’s fear of being criticized from those in the so-called establishment. Republicans, he charged, go out of their way to avoid being criticized, fearing they will be characterized as extremists and kooks.
As a result conservatism gets watered down, and the GOP loses the support of the nation’s conservative majority Rush stated.
Anything can beat nothing, Rush concluded, "and it happened yesterday.”
He endorsed Specter over Twoomey.
Yep, voting record doesn't matter. Screw him if he went with the party once. We should get rid of all conservatives who do just one thing that we don't like. Oh... we did. Now we get no more conservative justices, no border fence, higher taxes, socialized (badly broken) medicine, etc.
We should simply go with communism and be done with it. That way "conservatives" will actually have something to complain about. I'm glad that I'm a conservative, not one of these whiny people who say that they are conservative but give us communism.
No. I mean an accurate picture of what was taking place in Iraq, insurgency, economy, Korea, Katrina, any issue.
They consistently allowed the media to get the jump on defining what was taking place, and they consistently were unable to get a positive perspective out over the message of the anti-Bush media.
Rush is part of the alternative media. He has a great audience. I love to listen to him.
But, they don't yet have the audience size or reach of the MSM.
Both of your analyses are exactly right. As for Rush, well, he used to be right. Now he's just morphined himself into compliance to that degree that he's even fooling himslef. Is it fair to judge if he's clean, maybe not. But I heard his voice change seven years ago. I kept telling my husband, Rush doesn't sound right! It may be a different, prescribed drug, but to me, he still doesn't sound right and I can't listen to him. As for fresh American blood being sacrificed. Let me tell you what was a moving moment for me. I had occasion to go to the West Point Website and I saw an area dedicated to the allen. The pictures I saw there of young boys and girls whose lives were lost shook me. Lost so that a nation of crazies could continue a religious slaughter that was begun shortly after Mohammed died. All the while our borders were open.
I had a chilling thing happen the night before 9/11. A Palestinian waiter at a restuarant told me that terror would be on our streets before we knew it. Then, he spent much of his evening huddling, smirking and laughing with two apparently Ecuadoran busboys. At the time, I thought, that guy is making negative comments about my country to those guys and corrupting them. Next day: 9/11. How many homebread terrorists do we have? And we are sending our boys and girls over there? V's wife.
The honeymoon is ALREADY OVER.
Yes and Guiliani and McCain do not fit the bill in any way shapte or form.
McCain is pro gun control and pro homosexual marriage (civil unions are homosexual marriage period)
Guiliani is pro gun control, pro homosexual marriage (civil unions are homosexual marriage period) AND has a NY liberal prosecutor mentality.
That is our best to go up agains a hitlary who has been faking to the right.
Hey, Howlin, I thought you were too busy "governing" to be worried about libertarians. Or don't you remember that that was your reply when several were pointing out strategies that could have won the election. Oh, that's right. You told us that libertarians and strict constructionists were too insignificant to worry about.
Doubtful there is anyone who could have withstood that type of abuse and remained as competitive.
The sheeple are alive and well all over the world.
The consequences seem invisible to them, until another 9/11 happens and then they run screaming trying to find someone to blame.
Nice job of cherry-picking one item of many. And in case you haven't noticed, Specter has stabbed Bush and conservatives in the back time and time again.
But go ahead. Don't learn from the mistakes. Blame the base, even though just about all of them showed up and voted anyway. That's a sure-fire way to have 2008 be a re-run of 2006.
It's a damn good thing the likes of Newt Gingrich didn't take your approach after the 1992 elections. We would never have had the resounding success in 1994. We lost in 2006 because the GOP drifted so far away from the Contract with America that it got tougher and tougher, especially on fiscal issues, to tell them apart from the Dems. They can only blame themselves for that, not the base.
I did not say he ran a bad campaign. I was responding to poster Truthseeker, who said Allen lost because of bad campaigning. My response was that the only thing I heard he did that was stupid was use a word that was portrayed as being racial in origin. I am not in VA, so I didn't follow his campaign all that closely, but I had an interest in it as it impacted our status in the Senate.
I think Allen lost because he portrayed himself as a "true conservative" and in many places last Tuesday "true conservatives" were rejected, for whatever reasons. My opinion, and it is just that, is that the overlay of an unpopular war and unpopular President on the national political scene hurt those candidates for national office who were aligned with the President. We've seen that before and it is nothing new. Johnson had it in '66, the Dems in general in '68, the 'Pubs in '74 because of Nixon and Watergate, the Dems again in '80 with Carter and the disastrous Iran hostage situation. Conservative candidates in this election were more naturally aligned with Bush and the pro-war position and paid a price for it. Those who tried to distance themselves were also rejected because they were still associated with it through the "R" next to their names, plus voters figured, well, if I want to vote against Bush and the war, why not go with the "real thing" (i.e., 'Rats) rather than an ersatz anti-Bush, anti-war candidate (the isolated 'Pub).
Oh, puh-leeze. If he can't stand a little bad press, he's in the wrong business. (Or was in the wrong business -- after p!$$ing away what should have been an easy re-election, he's through in politics.)
I understand. And yes, a strong third-party candidate who drains the natural strength of one candidate often tilts the election. Perot is the most recent example. Another would be George Wallace in '68, which is one campaign I remember well. He drew support from both Nixon (conservative voters) and Humphrey (southern Democrats, who were still somewhat common then). That made for a close election in what otherwise might have been more favorable, probably to Nixon because of the unpopularity of Johnson and Vietnam.
But this brings up a general point that has to be clear to anyone who follows the political trends. Given that the MSM is implacably hostile to any Republican/conservative candidate, they absolutely, positively have to know that anything even remotely construed as racial or insulting to the protected group de jour will be invariably amplified and broadcast from the rooftops by the MSM. It is a tremendous handicap because the other side is afforded no such scrutiny. As we learned from the Foley debacle, there are different standard for 'Pubs and 'Rats. Our candidates have to know that anything and everything they say will be combed and strained by the MSM for any possible dirt, or manner that it can be twisted and portrayed as "insensitive" or "racist". If there was any "stupidity" involved, it was not understanding this.
Essentially we have a third party here in the US. Talk radio hosts who criticize endlessly and know better how to be a general, a president, a senator, a congressman......just ask them.
Constructive advice, no way. Ratings first, good for America....not a chance. Just criticize criticize.
To say nothing of the fifth column here, the MSM. Combined they do a good job of destroying any chance of getting anything accomplished.
He kept the macaca mess alive by first being defiant, then being apologetic, while pursuing neither strategy effectively enough to bury the matter (the worst of both worlds).
His campaign came out with that silly stunt of scanning Webb's novels for the naughty bits, which just made people roll their eyes.
He tried to shift the campaign to the issues much too late (and then negated even that insufficient attempt with the aforementioned foray into literary critique).
Until then, they'll just have to be thumped repeatedly in the hope that the lesson will eventually sink in.
Remember the big flap about the one council member or bureaucrat who got clobbered for using the perfectly benign (from a racial viewpoint) word, niggardly? In a PC world gone mad like we live in, this kind of thing is all too common (although I am still waiting for mass protests by white people against food companies who label their product as "crackers").
Can you give me the exact issue that was in the Contract that the republicans drifted away from?
Condi '08!!
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