This is pure liberal mob tactic. It will backfire, IMO. There’s always this circular firing squad and idealogical purity test and he/she who claims to be the administrator of it first seems to be the one who can claim the higher moral ground. Trust in Rush versus trust in EE is, oh, 200:1.
Note very carefully that Rush and Levin have not >>endorsed<< Trump. No way. They are simply being open to him, and pointing out that Trump is in no way idealogically pure. And leaving it at that. Levin isn’t even endorsing Cruz, perhaps the most idealogically pure candidate, as well as a super intelligent man.
When someone tells me I am not allowed to think something that emanates from their mouth and is as shallow and self-serving as this EE rant, I react negatively. That’s MY conservative value.
Actually you are right about Levin, but Levin's treatment of Trump and Rush's are totally different. You're talking to someone who's been listening since day one of his national show literally - and has much closer ties to the show than you can ever imagine....and Rush has been very dismissive of criticism of Trump, even as he had admitted it is there. Trump has dominated Rush' air time, and that is not true of Levin at all.
This is not a legal document...talk radio's impact has little to do with whether they've technically endorsed or not, and a HELLUVA lot to do with the flavor of their air time. They charge by time and mentions, and by that count, Trump has gotten tens of millions of dollars of in kind donations while the man most like Rush philosohically - Cruz without a doubt - has gotten very little.
“This is pure liberal mob tactic. It will backfire, IMO.”
Agreed as to Erickson. The charlatans in the GOP used up all their credit for this kind of thing in 2012.
THE MOST conservative value is that "we the people" get to choose our leaders, whether or not they fit a litmus test. We get to choose boorish, thuggish people like Andrew Jackson, we get to choose people with very little national experience like Abraham Lincoln---a couple of congressional terms. We get to choose pompous, bombastic, egotistic bullies . . . like Theodore Roosevelt. We get to choose people with NO political experience at all, like Ike; and we get to choose an actor who signed a bill legalizing abortion in his state, Reagan.
It is utterly essential that once a generation the people rise up and say, No more! WE get to choose, not you elites." And that is precisely the Trump effect I've been seeing.
It is not an affirmation of "traditional" conservatism and beating us over the head with what values this or that candidate "should" hold just ain't gonna cut it.
This is an affirmation of THE conservative value that We the People ultimately get to choose our leaders.