I used to get excited about tuning Rush in everyday, but as of late, I almost cringe listening to him. He seems more animated about his freakin' Iced Tea than he does the country. I'm so glad I'm not the only person who feels this way.
I'm going to repost all my arguments to Limbaugh from May 25, 2011, the day that Limbaugh said he totally missed that there was a special election in New York. We ended up having a battle over the air vs. posts here.
The relevant posts from the thread are below:
If Limbaugh endorsed a candidate on his show, it would clear up all the phony, Democrat-stooge, candidate confusion in key races.Then...Griping about it after the election is wearing thin.
In 2008, Limbaugh refused to endorse primary candidates, and then griped about how the MSM selected our candidates for us.
Same problem then, same problem now.
Destroying candidates you don't like is one thing, but putting your reputation behind a single candidate with an endorsement is something that Limbaugh has steadfastly refused to do during primaries.Then...If you search my Limbaugh postings in election cycles, you'll see that I mention this time and time again.
Limbaugh is right about not doing it alone.Then...The Democrats align their talking points with the MSM, with Pelosi in the House and Reid in the Senate, Schumer said he was given words to use each week, etc.
The Republicans do not unify across bodies like this. Boehner and McConnell do not seem to coordinate in a way that creates a greater strategy the way that Pelosi and Reid did.
Limbaugh is right.
Boehner should have coordinated with McConnell so that when the House passed their budget, McConnell was all ready to go to put Reid on the defensive about where the Democrat plan is. Each time the Democrats say that Republicans want to throw grandma off the cliff because of the House Budget, McConnell should have been saying "Where's the Democrat budget? All you can do is criticize Republicans for leading?"
Then, all the Senators deflect all questions during MSM appearances into "Why won't the Democrats show leadership? Where is their plan?"
That's how the Republicans should force the agenda with the MSM.
It's good that Limbaugh is advising candidates to have a conservative message, but he just finished saying how Republicans better get used to the MSM distorting the Republican message.Then...Having a message is not good enough. They also need the friendly media to help shape and get that message out, because that's what the MSM does for Democrats.
Limbaugh is the closest thing we have to the New York Times' relationsip within the MSM and Democrats.Then...The NYT sets the daily agenda and the rest of the MSM run with it.
It used to be that Limbaugh set the the talk-radio agenda and the others followed-up on the message.
Lately, with the shake-up in conservative talk-radio (see the threads on Citadel/Fareed Suleman), the medium is disorganized, too.
It's not necessarily a bad thing that the different segments of conservative talk-radio focus on different issues. That helps to focus on the many different issues. But there isn't the tight alignment in messaging like with the DNC-NYT-WaPo-CNN-NBC-CBS-ABC-Congressional Democrats-President.
We have Limbaugh-Hannity-Levin-Savage-Beck, and to a lesser degree Ingraham-Batchelor-Boortz-Hewitt-Medved-local hosts. Occasionally, Congressional Republicans will appear as guests. They don't coordinate around a daily theme, as each is strongly motivated to maintain their own distinctive persona and market.
The difference between liberal/conservative media is stark: Democrats are aligned with news gathering orgs with the legacy mission to report (distort?). Conservatives are aligned with entertainment outlets that inform.
The liberal MSM will never go away or change (one day, the NYT will be demed too big to fail). The conservative outlets have been subjected to radio market forces and manipulation (see again Farid Suleman).
As long as people like Limbaugh say their first priority is to be entertaining, the Republicans with conservative messages to get out will always be underserved when compared to their Democrat counterparts.
While Repulbicans are playing catch-up on organizing their MSM message to be more like the Democrats, the Democrats are already moving onto the next frontier of messaging, social media.Then, to another poster...Sarah Palin has already figured out how bypass the MSM via the internet social networks, and the MSM are attacking her there as being less serious because the nature of the outlet, while at the same time building up their own presence there.
What people like Limbaugh can do, if they he genuinely believes in the "Golden EIB Microphone" and "Excellence In Broadcasting," then he should back-channel a series of seminars with Congressional Republicans to teach them how to be as effective as he is in messaging.
Who else besides him is seen as the guru of this subject for conservatives? If not him, then who CAN teach our candidates how to do this?
With all due respect, that sounds like echo chamber thinking.Then...Like you, I am aware of the issues and don't need to hear it from someone else to keep me informed.
But I do believe that people like us are far less a population than we may think.
I do believe that the mass of voters do wait to be told what to think. The numbers are too large to suggest otherwise. There were almost 120 million votes cast for president in 2008, one-third of the US population.
Even if the MSM ratings suggest that only a few million households watch those shows, combined with newspapers, magazines, and comedy shows, people are waiting to be told what to think.
I see Limbaugh's success in two parts: 1) reward for taking the vanguard in conservativism and influencing politics and leadership in our direction, and 2) an investment in ensuring the sustainability of this.Then, to another poster...There is no doubt that Limbaugh has been successful in mobilizing Republicans by pioneering the AM radio medium to counter the MSM.
But people invested in Limbaugh by supporting his show, supporting his sponsors, supporting his charities, and supporting the knock-offs that Limbaugh inspired.
Now they're looking to him to make due on that investment, and that means sometimes putting aside the stories of golf trips on private jets, smoking cigars with world leaders, and other fruits of his success, and sometimes getting dirty again and paying back the hard returns on that investment to those who expected it when necessary.
We see in hindsight how necessary a time the 2008 election was. The 2010 election was a necessary time. The 2012 election is too consequential to be cavalier about it now.
The NY-26 special election should be a wake-up call on how serious the Democrats are taking all the elections, now including state judicial elections. We need to mobilize all our forces, too, to close the gaps for 2012 that are being shown to us now.
We don't have many leaders who are today in a position to do this now. We only have the few people that we invested in to be in place now to do this.
I'm not saying that Limbaugh is doing it wrong, I'm saying there are key gaps that he's uniquely in a position to address, and that he's in that position because we put him there.Then, to another poster...Let's also look at the 2006 election. The Democrats took over because of a few key messages:
1. Republicans losing their way, no doubt about that.
2. Democrats hammering on the Mark Foley race in Florida, having held back incriminating, offensive (but not illegal) texts to former House pages, until just 10 weeks before the election. Then, using the Mark Foley incident, they tainted the entire House GOP leadership as being enablers of child molesters. How was the voting public not led to use a single House race in Florida to throw out the entire GOP and put Nancy Pelosi in charge? One example was the "Don't Vote" ads by the AARP to subliminally suggest that people stay home and not bother to vote.
3. Democrats running faux conservatives in conservative districts, and then getting Republicans to vote for them.
I'll agree with you that today, people have come to see what they did wrong in 2006, and the wave threw out the faux conservative Democrats that they installed in 2006. It took more than clear messages to do that in 2010, though. It also took those faux conservative Democrats to side with the majority over their stated principles in ramming through the health care legislation against the population's wishes.
But I'm not convinced yet that the public has grown past being led by slick messages.
Using your analogy, I see it as we're playing baseball while the Democrats are playing football.PJYou can argue over how to get more base hits, while I argue about how not to get tackled anymore.
You are NOT the only one that feels this way. Rush was my initiation into understanding conservatism, not very many years ago, like alot of the others here. But this last year I have begun to notice he is just phoning it in... and when he was hinting about 2ifbytea before he actually announced it, I felt sure it was going to be a real conservative cable network with some of his rich buddies and real conservatives... since he often says this is the most important election of our lifetime and in America’s history. His answer to the most important election in America’s history was to open a tea company trading off a true patriot’s namesake, and make his wife CEO. He did that with his other wives, also.
Only I think I have figured it out: Rush supports Romney, he endorsed him in 08, and he may fight with the media because it gets his name mentioned, but he won’t go against his rich friends and support Newt, he won’t risk getting kicked of some dinner-party-invite list of the rich and famous.
If someone convincingly knows why my summary isn’t correct, I would appreciate if they would post it here, as it makes me very very sad.