GO, RUSH, GO!

Posted at Limbaugh's site yeserday:

If McCain or Huckabee Gets the Nomination, It Will Destroy GOP

... CALLER: ... you had a woman call yesterday that just frosted me to no end that if either Huckabee or McCain won the nomination she was going to sit the election out.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: People like her, I coined a term, a call them TV Republicans, and it doesn't stand for television, it stands for tunnel vision.... If they sit out the general election, the Democrat wins it by default, whichever one of the Three Stooges wins it. Guess what? In the next four years, there's going to be probably one, maybe two Supreme Court vacancies come up. Do they really want one of the three bozos over there appointing the next two Supreme Court justices?...

RUSH: I understand what you're saying. I hate to tell you this, but she's not alone. I'm here to tell you, if either of these two guys get the nomination, it's going to destroy the Republican Party, it's going to change it forever, be the end of it. A lot of people aren't going to vote. You watch.

I love that -- I love the fact that he's trying to undermine the GOP's strongest candidate. As I've said, I still think McCain is the front-runner (check out his South Carolina numbers, including the latest poll). If he gets the nomination, he's the favorite to win. McCain skeptics like Limbaugh might be the only thing standing between America and a Chris Matthews-abetted, Maureen Dowd-abetted four more years of GOP rule. So go, Rush, go!

*****

Alas, I'm not sure Limbaugh remains the GOP Voice of God -- these days, some of the Dittoheads seem decidedly less ditto-ey. He posted another transcript yesterday, under the title "YOU MUST READ AND LISTEN TO THIS!!!" (emphasis his), and it's truly fascinating, because he's catching flak even from his own party mates, primarily on the economy, yet he refuses to bend:

... CALLER: ... for 20 years I lived by the Republican Party, and today you could hold a gun to my head and I'm not voting for a Republican. I've never in my life voted for a Democrat, and I don't want to begin, but the Republican Party betrayed people like me.

... When a man of your wealth -- yes, your wealth -- no matter what happens, you can afford it. What about guys like me out there? I've had years where I've made big six figure and years that I haven't, and, all in all, me and my wife are fairly financially stable, but do you know how expensive life is, or how much it costs to pay for health care, and why...?

RUSH: Yes, I damn well do because I do pay for it myself!

CALLER: Well, exactly.

RUSH: Let me tell you something.

CALLER: But when I talk about your wealth --

RUSH: No, no, no. Let me tell you something about this wealth business. I've been broke twice in my life. When I was 31 years old, I was making $17,000 a year. I have been fired I forgot how many times. Seven times! So I've been there. This constant refrain that I'm "out of touch," is just bogus.... What you need to hear is the truth of why it happened, so that you can make plans in the future. These are cycles, and everybody in every country and every society goes through them, and ours are not nearly as bad as people around the rest of the world are. I know health care is expensive. That's why I'm focused not on making it more expensive, but on making it cheaper, and how do you do that? You do it with conservatism! I'm by no means out of touch on this.

... You want to fix health care? You make it like buying a hotel room. We have all kinds of choices. You can go to a Motel 6 and you can go to a Ritz Carlton. Depends how much you want to pay. Why is health care any different? ...

In other words: I don't really give a crap that you're hurting -- just shut up and eat your capitalist vegetables.

I love Rush's solution to buying health care: make it like buying a hotel room. Never mind that a hotel room is a luxury, unlike survival -- nobody has to travel for pleasure, and plenty of people can't afford to. It works for Rush, so it's good enough for everyone else. Why can't the rest of you whiners become multimillionaires too, hunh?

Oh, but Rush gets it because Rush used to get fired a lot. Well, when was Rush last fired? A quarter-century ago? Nahhh, that couldn't possibly mean he's "out of touch," right? (Or is he counting the loss of his TV show, or his Monday Night Football gig, which occurred even though his very successful radio show was ongoing?)

And he was making $17K when he was 31? Well, that was 1982, and it's the equivalent of $36,526.57 in 2007 dollars -- not a lot to raise a family on, but Limbaugh was divorced and childless and living in Kansas City. As a single guy in my early twenties, I was able to buy my own insurance a year after that on even less income than Rush's -- in New York City. But that's because the price I was paying was a tiny fraction of what you'd have to pay now, even adjusting for inflation.

*****

In comments to one of my posts yesterday, Bulworth reminded me of parallel narratives in the Obama and Huckabee campaigns -- ordinary African-Americans and evangelicals, respectively, are flocking to the candidates, but old-guard leaders are resistant. I'm sensing something similar in the GOP -- rank-and-file voters in Michigan responded to a non-free-market economic message from Romney, voters there and in other states are responding to some of Huckabee's economic populism, and McCain, damned as a RINO, is getting a second look. All the while, wingnut mandarins like Limbaugh are harrumphing in disgust.

Hmmm. Even though we might get stuck with President McCain, is it possible that fundamentalist wingnuttism is really dying?