Rush, Like Buckley, is Right to Yell “Stop”

Yet another critic of has poked his head out of his MSM hole to scoff at Rush Limbaugh. This one’s name is John A. Farrell and he writes for U.S. News and World Report.

The country, if you haven’t noticed, is in a bit of a crisis. Even those of us who supported Audacity last fall have to wonder, from time to time, if he’s up to the challenge of dealing with so many serious problems, so soon, so fast.

It would be nice to have some GOP grown-ups pitching in for the old US of A. Let me ask, one American to another: Hey Republicans! You got any good ideas to add to the debate?

Other than “No.” Or “I hope he fails.”

Are you really content to have such relentlessly negative voices as Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge and Ann Coulter represent you in the national debate? They who have two proven attributes in life: Greed and Glib.

I could easily just call John Farrell an idiot who knows nothing at all about Rush Limbaugh nor what it’s taken him to build up an audience of tens of millions of people, but that would be way too easy. Oh, to be sure, he is a cocky little no-nothing with his very own wide streak of “Greed and Glib” going on, and it looks to me like he’s just stirring the pot to give himself a little publicity, but I think I’ll take the high road this time.

I’m going to assume that Farrell is actually arguing his point out of good, if not terribly well-informed, faith.

So, okay. Farrell’s point is that instead of trying to stop President Obama’s runaway economic freight train, Rush should try to sit quietly in one of the cars like a “grown-up” and see if he can’t find some other track the train can take that doesn’t actually involve in a “bridge out” sign.

Does that actually make sense to anyone?

Let’s put this in other terms. What parent would let his kid reach for a hot pot on the stove and say calmly, “Let’s consider an alternative”? Would you engage someone in Socratic dialogue who was about to step off the curb and walk into onrushing traffic? Of course you wouldn’t and neither would Farrell.

Yet that’s exactly what he wants Rush to do as President Obama bull-rushes his disastrous totalitarian government programs through Congress. He wants the GOP to sit down and reasonably plot out alternatives, gather allies, and make a structured and reasoned case to the American people. He wants “good ideas to add to the debate”

The problem with that theory, aside from the whole not stopping the train thing, is that there is no actual debate going on right now in Congress. The Democrats aren’t entertaining any alternatives. I don’t know if Farrell noticed, but the “Stimulus Bill” passed on almost perfectly partisan lines. Every success the President has had to this point has come not out of debate but from raw strength of numbers and a couple Quisling Republican Senators. Two Republican alternatives to the vote-buying plan were introduced and killed on a straight party-line vote. The $100 billion that Arlen Specter et. al. got stripped from the Senate version of the vote-buying bill got jammed right back in on the House side and passed as if he had done nothing at all. Virtually every thing the Democrats wanted — every stinking, corrupt payoff to every donor and activist group, every sop to the unions, every bribe to Federal bureaucrats — was passed before anyone even had time to even read the bill. Is that the atmosphere of debate into which Farrell believes the Republicans can introduce any serious alternative? If so, he’s more naive than anyone has any reason to be.

Now, there is a debate going on right now. It’s happening among Americans and the President is losing it badly. Not a single one of the President’s economic proposals right now enjoys majority support. It seems more and more clear that when we regular folks whose opinions Farrell seems to disdain see what the Democrats want to do to us, we very clearly say “no”.

Which is exactly what Rush Limbaugh has been saying the whole time.

But if that’s not enough to convince him, and the rest of the Rush critics on the right, perhaps Mr. Farrell should brush up on his conservative history. The entire modern conservative movement started with one man who stood up and said “no”. Let me quote from the founding editorial of National Review magazine.

It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.
…
“I happen to prefer champagne to ditchwater,” said the benign old wrecker of the ordered society, Oliver Wendell Holmes, “but there is no reason to suppose that the cosmos does.” We have come around to Mr. Holmes’ view, so much that we feel gentlemanly doubts when asserting the superiority of capitalism to socialism, of republicanism to centralism, of champagne to ditchwater — of anything to anything.

There is an antidote to those doubts – a firm and unequivocal defense of capitalism, republicanism, and champagne and the stubborn refusal to accept even the slightest hint of socialism, centralism, and Barack Obama’s foul ditchwater. William F. Buckley, Jr., hardly a “shabby” polemicist, knew that there is a time to simply plant your feet and say “no”. Rush Limbaugh believes this is one of those times. John Farrell doesn’t give me any reason to believe otherwise. In fact, he gives me every reason to believe he doesn’t have the foggiest idea what he’s talking about.

UPDATE: Linked by Stacy McCain!

Other Posts of Interest:

• Suddenly, the President Learns That Rush Is a Smart Man with Time on His Hands
• The Democrats’ Reckless Rush to Stimulate
• What Happened to the President’s Economic Emergency?

Tags: Democrats, Economic Stimulus, John A. Farrell, President Barack Obama, Rush Limbaugh

Category: Featured, Oh, THAT liberal media., President Barack Obama, The Economy and Your Money, The Rise of the Nanny State