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.”
It wasn't the RINOs. It was cause Republicans didn't show up in the polls and vote.
Yes, Santorum, Allen, Talant and Baucus all lost, El Rushbo. All were pretty good consrevatives.
Allen's mistakes went far beyond an epithet.
And yes, some conservatives went down last night, but so did liberal republicans like Chafee, Leach, etc.
What happened was that there was a general discontent with the Republican congress (which hasn't really been all that conservative), and it manifested itself in districts where the demographics made it possible to happen.
Here in NJ, the Kean for Senate signs contain no obvious references to the party that nominated him. His opponents signs proudly proclaimed "Democrat."
How can anyone possibly win if he is ashamed of his principal supporters?
ML/NJ
I am looking at it as a whole,and individuals races add up to the whole. The whole I see is an incoming House and Senate controlled by 'Rats. Abortion ban rejected in SD. Parental notification rejected. Stem cell research and cloning based on embryo destruction approved. Sure, a few gay marriage initiatives went down, but we're pretty much scraping bottom to find solace in that, kinda like saying, well, my kids still love me.
Look, we're not doing ourselves any favors by kidding ourselves. We did plenty of that leading up to this debacle, starting with the string of losses in the '05 elections. This was a blowout, and if we think it was anything other than that, we're setting ourselves up for a harder fall in '08, and we'll be back here writing each other posts about how "it ain't so bad" that we've got President Hillary or President Obama.
Conservatives now have two years to define themselves.
My guess is that he kooked himself out with that comment to the effect that homosexuals have the right to exist and move about freely in our society, as long as they don't actually have sex (not that there's anything wrong with that).
And what we threw out were some good conservatives who were trying to prevent all of that.
>>Plus, actions speak louder than words, and neither the Senate nor the House did anything to advance smaller government or cut spending.
I've seen a lot of young lefties (leaning left, not moonbat left) hammering the Republicans over spending.
We missed a lot of swing votes over this issue.
You have alot more faith than I do.....I see them defunding the war and we end up with Viet Nam all over again!!
The GOP has become a socialist party, next up, nationlaized healthcare and open borders and Bush will sign both bills.
I think I speak for most all of us here when I say that we can do without that kind of psychic cartography at this juncture.
Republicans lost because they didn't tie Iraq and Terrorism to Conservatism.
Values voters voted Conservative. They just didn't vote for the candidates. What no one is mentioning here is the numbers who went to the polls and the disparity of how many went to the polls compared to how many actually voted for a candidate..
I voted and if there was a candidate I wasn't happy with or didn't know, I didn't vote for them. None were Republicans. However, how many did the same thing I did, voted for the issues, but not the candidate.
There was a protest. It was a no-vote, not a vote for the Democrat. It has always been my contention that if Hitler was running as a Democrat, they would still pull the lever for him because of the "D" next to his name.
Conservative voters do not do this. We lost for the same reason we will lose in 08. If the candidate is not a Conservative, we just won't vote for them because those are our values. We abandoned the Republican party last night because that's what they did to us over the last 6 years.
Now is the time to regroup and start promoting conservative candidates for office over the next couple of cycles. Like Rush said, we are liberated.
Word!
Word!
"The root of the problem, Rush said, is that "our side hungers for ideological leadership"
Yep, there was Newt G., but I guess he was booted out, after HE got the House majority for the GOP!!!
Look at Hasters etc... with these guys you can only scare young voters.
Good points.
'bout sums it up.
And elephant being gored by a rhino, while a donkey looks on and says, "Thanks". (No puns on "gore", please.)
By the way, this is how Hillary wins in '08. She can't beat 40 per cent. That's her ceiling. She'll need a RINO to go the Independence route and siphon 11-12 per cent of the vote.
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