David Limbaugh

New Column: Obama Is the Extremist, Not Conservative Talkers

Mon, 14 May 2012 22:33:11 -0500

Some conservatives believe that other conservatives, on talk radio and Fox News Channel, are damaging the cause of conservatism by dishonestly overstating their case against President Obama to increase their ratings and profits.

More reasonable Republican politicians, they argue, would like to cooperate with Obama on bipartisan solutions but don't have the power to resist these extremists with the megaphones and so have buckled in lock step to their demands and become the party of "no" and the purveyors of gridlock.

The problem is that the presuppositions underlying those allegations are wrong. There may be some exceptions, but the large majority of leading conservative voices are doing their very best to save this nation from Obama's policies, which they believe are leading to the nation's financial, cultural and national security ruin. Obama is a leftist, very extreme by historical standards. To compromise with his positions would not be in the best interest of the nation but would advance the cause of leftism, so any pressure conservatives can bring to bear on Republican politicians to strongly oppose his agenda is laudable.

I can't conceive of too many situations in which splitting the difference with Obama has advanced or would advance the cause of conservatism or constitutional liberty. We wouldn't reduce our debt, for example, by agreeing to reduce the levels of increases in spending. We couldn't improve the quality, cost and availability of health care by agreeing to more government intervention when we believe in free market solutions. We couldn't prudently agree to a half-measure stimulus package when we believe stimulus spending not only doesn't stimulate the economy but does further increase the debt. We couldn't agree to some compromise reductions in our nuclear and conventional forces if we believe that even these lesser cuts would jeopardize our national security. We couldn't agree to meet Obama halfway on energy policy by signing on to policies that punish conventional energy only half as much and waste just half as many billions on quixotic green energy debacles.

We can get mired in a semantic argument over whether Obama is a card-carrying communist, a European socialist, an admirer of Hugo Chavez's and Daniel Ortega's or, as he says, a fierce advocate of the free market, but such quibbling is more misleading than the labels themselves.

New Column: Time for Republicans To Take the Offensive

Thu, 10 May 2012 21:55:24 -0500

Two very important things happened in politics this week. First, the elections underscored just how fed up mainstream America is with extreme liberalism. Second, President Obama, with his formal endorsement of same-sex marriage, is openly casting his lot with his extremist base.

The question is: How will putative GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney interpret and respond to these events? Will he fall into the usual Republican trap of thinking he has to follow his Democratic opponent leftward to appear more moderate? Or will he show his confidence in the reasonableness of conservatism and in the American people to embrace him if he clearly articulates it?

To some extent, we are all products of our environments. We get our sense of what is "normal" from those with whom we most frequently associate, which at least partially explains liberal media figures believing that their minority views are mainstream.

They uniformly ridicule traditional American values on national TV as if they are held only by flyover throwbacks who haven't yet been exposed to the enlightened wisdom of the coasts. How else do you explain Chris Matthews' brazen characterization of the GOP as the "grand wizard" party and as flat-earthers and those who don't believe in science? Or candidate Obama's derisive portrayal of small-town Americans as bitter clingers, apparently clueless that the statement would reveal him, not those he described, as extreme?

There are countless other examples, including liberals and ex-liberals who've said that until they reached a certain age, they'd never met a Republican or conservative in their lives. And we've all seen the statistics on the staggeringly high percentage of atheism among Beltway journalists and media figures compared with the rest of the American people.

New Column: Truth Is Major Obstacle to Obama's Re-election

Mon, 07 May 2012 19:21:43 -0500

President Obama formally kicked off his re-election campaign in Richmond, Va., and Columbus, Ohio, Saturday, and his theme was certainly not, shall we say, "it's morning again in America" -- President Ronald Reagan's optimistic re-election slogan in 1984.

Obama's central message was more like: "Hey, I realize things look bad, and I'm not going to pretend you want four more years of this. But just think how much worse it would have been without me and how much worse it's going to get if you get rid of me."

Interestingly, mainstream media journalists Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake were certain enough that Obama wasn't sufficiently forthcoming in his speech that they co-wrote a piece for The Washington Post "parsing" it. Without a whiff of disapproval, they said, "This being politics, Obama said less than what he meant. But, that's where we come in." The two then set out Obama's "most quotable lines" and followed each with their "translation of the message he was trying to send."

The writers are obviously sympathetic to Obama's agenda and, as fellow liberals, share his end-justifies-the-means sleight of hand -- whatever it takes to keep this federal juggernaut barreling along. Let's look at just a few of the quotes they highlighted.

Obama said: "I don't care how many ways you try to explain it: Corporations aren't people. People are people." The writers said Obama was responding to Mitt Romney's earlier remark that "corporations are people," and they said Obama intended to send this message: "Romney is the business candidate. I am the people's candidate."

New Column: Piers Morgan Slays Himself in Goldberg Interview

Thu, 03 May 2012 18:55:11 -0500

There was a silver lining for Jonah Goldberg in Piers Morgan's ambush interview of him allegedly concerning his new book, "The Tyranny of Cliches." Jonah couldn't have written a better script to illustrate his book's theme.

Someone really should explain to Morgan that when a host invites a guest to discuss the guest's book, the host ought to at least make a good-faith effort to pretend he has the slightest interest in allowing the author to expound on the book's contents -- as opposed to using the author as a prop to indulge the interviewer's own arguments against conservatives and their toxic opinions.

That someone might also inform Morgan that it's a perversion of the Socratic method for an interviewer to badger a guest into admitting the rhetorical premises of the interviewer's opinions rather than lead him through carefully constructed logical arguments to those conclusions -- never allowing the guest fully to answer his questions, never listening to his responses, making every one of his follow-up questions a classic non sequitur and putting words in the guest's mouth for the purpose of constructing and then demolishing various straw men.

The central theme of Jonah's book, which he explained in response to the only germane question Morgan posed in the interview, is that though pretty much everyone is ideological, conservatives are honest about it, and liberals are not. Liberals lie about their own ideological proclivities, mostly to themselves but also to others.

Let me briefly unpack the interview to illustrate precisely how accurate Goldberg is and how, during the interview, Morgan became a personification of the book's theme -- all without having the slightest clue he was doing so.

New Column: Obama Is Headed Anywhere but Forward

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 18:36:22 -0500

You have to hand it to President Obama and his cabal of re-election strategists; they are masters of illusion. Their newly released Web video and its accompanying campaign slogan, "Forward," are science fiction-level fantastical.

We're all familiar with Obama's penchant for deflecting responsibility and blaming his policy failures on George W. Bush, but after more than three years in office for Obama, it has gone from childish mischief to juvenile delinquency. This is a question for Guinness: Has any other president run for re-election against the record of his retired predecessor?

Indeed, Obama is still feeding us this dodge years beyond its spoil date, apparently hoping we won't realize we have salmonella until he's safely voted in to his second term.

Watch the video. In the words of The Hill's John Easley, "it blames GOP policies for the still-sluggish economy."

It attempts to draw a clear dichotomy between the dark days of the last year of Bush's term and the glorious remedial reign of President Obama, which began in January 2009.

New Column: Obama Administration's Repeated Abuses Are Extension of Extreme Liberalism

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 15:50:10 -0500

Every day, we get a new kick in the gut from the Obama administration. Most recently, Environmental Protection Agency Region 6 Administrator Al Armendariz was caught on video articulating his view of the agency's role in enforcing its regulations.

Aremendariz said: "It was kind of like how the Romans used to, you know, conquer villages in the Mediterranean. They'd go into a little Turkish town somewhere; they'd find the first five guys they saw, and they'd crucify them. Then, you know, that town was really easy to manage for the next few years. ... It's a deterrent factor."

This man should be fired -- yesterday. White House press secretary Jay Carney risibly says Aremendariz wasn't articulating the attitude of the administration. Sadly, that's precisely what he was articulating.

Indeed, we've seen this attitude by the administration in countless examples, from Obama's handling of the Obamacare legislation and restructuring of the GM loans to the administration's New Black Panther voter intimidation case to Solyndra to Fast and Furious to -- oh, never mind; I have to keep this to less than 20,000 words.

None of this should surprise us. Obama is the quintessential liberal, and his administration's recurring abuses are simply the logical extension of liberal hubris born of a self-righteous certainty of the superiority of leftist ideas. This inevitably leads to dictatorial usurpations and lawlessness from the liberal ruling class.

New Column: Romney Should Choose Bold Colors, Not Pale Pastels

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 17:23:56 -0500

Mitt Romney's presidential run could turn out to be a test case to resolve the long-running debate inside the Republican Party as to whether the GOP presidential nominee should run as a conservative or more of a centrist.

How often have we heard both Democratic and Republican political "experts" reciting the conventional wisdom that during primary contests, candidates of both parties must play to their respective base voters and then shift toward the center during the general election campaign? Does anyone even challenge this edict?

The first problem with this is that it implicitly suggests that all presidential candidates are first and foremost politicians who will cater their policy agenda to whatever extent necessary to win their party's nomination and the general election. Perhaps I'm somewhat Pollyannaish, but I reject the cynical view that all politicians are, in the end, political prostitutes.

I am not saying that candidates shouldn't do their best to package their messages in the most palatable and attractive form to voters; that goes without saying. But what about their substantive message -- what they really stand for?

Well, that depends on what they stand for.

Exit polling consistently shows that nearly twice as many Americans identify themselves as conservative than as liberal. Even without that data, we know that Democrats must be convinced this is true, because most of them run as moderates in national elections.

New Column: Katie Pavlich's 'Fast and Furious'

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 18:10:52 -0500

Of all the myriad scandals of the Obama administration, there is one, largely ignored by the mainstream media, that could actually be its worst.

That scandal is the operation run from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, under the Justice Department, known as "Fast and Furious," through which the federal government actually encouraged and even ordered American gun shops to sell guns -- against the store owners' better judgment -- to "straw" purchasers who were funneling guns to Mexican drug gangs while the ATF sat back and watched and did nothing.

As Katie Pavlich shows in her remarkable and eye-opening new book, "Fast and Furious: Barack Obama's Bloodiest Scandal and Its Shameless Cover-Up," the whole scheme was either absolutely harebrained or, as some have more ominously theorized, intentionally designed to manufacture "evidence" for tightening gun control legislation.

Pavlich exposes how extreme gun control measures have been a top political goal for President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and other important leaders within the administration -- and she draws the lines that link this goal directly to the implementation of Fast and Furious. Just as importantly, she shows how the administration has shamelessly tried to obscure those links.

The operation resulted in the murder of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and the murder or wounding of some 200 Mexican citizens.

New Column: Thank You, Ms. Rosen

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 16:24:18 -0500

Though everyone is talking about Democratic strategist and Obama confidant Hilary Rosen's insolent remarks about Ann Romney, I want to discuss them, too, because they reveal her leftist mindset.

Rosen didn't misspeak; she spoke deliberately and with passion. And when given a chance to retract or soften her remarks, she doubled down -- at least initially.

Her comments came in a segment on CNN with Anderson Cooper. Cooper pointed out that in the current economy, "women are seeing jobs come back much more slowly than men are," and he asked Rosen, essentially, whether there was anything wrong with the Romney campaign's highlighting that fact and "reaching out to women on an issue that they care about, on the economy."

"Guess what?" asked Rosen. "His wife has actually never worked a day in her life. She's never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school and why we worry about their future."

Though Rosen's next comment hasn't received as much attention, it exposes liberal thinking. She said: "There's something much more fundamental about Mitt Romney, because he seems so old-fashioned when it comes to women. And I think that comes across. ... He just doesn't really see us as equal."

New Column: Holder's Corrupt Opposition to Voter ID Laws

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 17:53:06 -0500

Can anyone think of an innocuous reason that President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder oppose state voter ID laws?

Obama and Holder appear to view almost everything through the prism of race or, at the very least, use race as an excuse to justify otherwise very dubious policies, from immigration enforcement to voter intimidation actions to strong-arming banks to make loans via allegations of racism.

In December, along these lines, Holder criticized redistricting maps that had been drawn by the Texas Legislature and used the opportunity to call for an aggressive federal review of voter identification laws in not just Texas but other states.

But what does all this have to do with voter ID laws? Well, Republicans have been engaged in lobbying for state voter ID laws throughout the nation as an effort to enhance fair and lawful elections and prevent voter fraud. These laws are simple and transparent; they would require voters to present a government-issued form of identification as a condition to voting.

Predictably, Democrats -- led by Obama and Holder -- claim that the move is a GOP ruse to suppress minority voting. Holder called on the parties "to resist the temptation to suppress certain votes in the hope of attaining electoral success and, instead, achieve success by appealing to more voters."

New Column: Obama Has It Backward; Striking Down Obamacare Would Protect Our Republic

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 17:23:56 -0500

Is President Obama such a die-hard leftist ideologue that he can't get it right on judicial review, despite having time to reflect and regroup after his impertinent comments designed to intimidate the court?

As everyone knows, Obama said Monday, "Ultimately, I'm confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress." That, he said, would be "judicial activism."

For a man who promised to upgrade the dignity of the office and held himself out as a model of bipartisanship, this president manages to insinuate himself into every imaginable issue and incident on which he has a strong opinion, from the Cambridge police to Trayvon Martin to Las Vegas tourism. If he wants his administration to engage in Chicago-style political street fighting, couldn't he at least delegate the task to one of his surrogates?

What business does he have calling out the Supreme Court while a major case is pending before it (the Affordable Care Act) and issuing an implied threat that the justices had better not defy him?

Please don't protest that I'm making an unwarranted inference. It's not as if he hasn't done something like this before.

New Column: Obama Touts His Record

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 17:43:00 -0500

In his excellent daily Web news summary, "The Transom," Ben Domenech says that President Obama's speech at the Portland Museum of Art on Saturday "is likely to be Obama's campaign speech from here on out." He's probably correct, so let's take a look, with an eye to whether it's likely to work.

Obama's template is nothing new. He first repeats his claim as to the catastrophic conditions he inherited from President Bush. "It's hard to remember sometimes how perilous things were when I was sworn in."

So Obama took immediate action "to save the auto industry, to get the banks lending again" and to make sure state and local governments didn't lay off teachers and first responders. Indeed, he moved so fast that "people didn't fully appreciate the scope and magnitude of what got done in those first six months, that first year."

He acknowledged he destroyed millions of jobs and presided over the worst unemployment rates in modern times, which at their best are still more than 60 percent higher than the norm and much worse when you factor in people who have quit looking for work. I mean he said that he "created almost 4 million jobs" and that "we have seen the unemployment rate start ticking down." Companies, he said, "are hiring and investing again."

Obama related that after the inconvenient distraction of saving America from President Bush, he then got about the business of fulfilling his campaign promises. He noted that he unleashed his economy-destroying, pie-in-the-sky green energy projects and war on domestic energy, er, I mean he "followed through on commitments to invest in clean energy and doubled fuel efficiency standards on cars -- and trucks -- in an unprecedented fashion."

New Column: Obama Doubling Down on His Leftist Radicalism

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 17:40:19 -0500

You can't even casually surf the Internet on any given day without numerous reminders of just how radical President Obama is -- and this is during an election year, when it should be in his political interest to mask his radicalism.

Minding my own business, I happened on an article by Jacob Laksin on FrontPageMag.com, titled "Obama's Pick for World Bank Hates Capitalism." I'd heard a bit about this before but hadn't yet studied it. I'm so used to Obama's extremism that such revelations hardly move me, much less surprise me. I know where he stands; I just wish everyone else did.

Obama has nominated Dartmouth College President Jim Yong Kim to head the World Bank. In 2000, Kim edited a collection of studies under the title "Dying for Growth: Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor."

The "book's radical central premise," writes Laksin, is that "capitalism and economic growth (are) bad for the poor across the world." Kim co-wrote the introduction, which includes the claim that the book shows "that the quest for growth in GDP and corporate profits has in fact worsened the lives of millions of women and men." It says that even in those instances in which free trade and free markets have led to economic growth, they've done so without benefiting "those living in 'dire poverty,' one-fourth of the world's population." Can't you just hear Obama himself in those words?

One thing that helps the plight of the very poor, according to one chapter, is a socialized health care system, such as the one in Communist Cuba. The chapter's author touts that system because of the Cuban government's "commitment not only to health in the narrow sense but to social equality and social justice." As we opponents of Obamacare have said repeatedly, Obamacare is hardly just about making health care more affordable or more accessible, neither of which it will do in the end, but is a stealth vehicle to greatly expand governmental control over limitless aspects of our lives to enable the leftist central planners to effectuate "social equality and social justice" under the innocuous guise of providing health care.

New Column: Obamacare: Will the Court Vindicate Itself?

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 14:48:49 -0500

If there has ever been a case that could vindicate the Supreme Court as a guardian of liberty or incriminate it as freedom's thief, it is the court's present consideration of the Affordable Care Act.

At the founding of the republic, the Anti-Federalist opponents of the Constitution warned that to grant the power to declare laws unconstitutional to an unelected and life-tenured Supreme Court could subvert the democratic republic and threaten our liberties.

In the Anti-Federalist papers, "Brutus" argued that though there would be strong checks on the other two branches of government, the power of judicial review would give the court the final say in overturning laws enacted by the people's elected representatives in Congress and make the unaccountable judicial branch superior to the elected legislative branch.

Brutus wrote: "The supreme court under this constitution would be exalted above all other power in the government, and subject to no control. ... The judges in England are under the control of the legislature ... but the judges under this constitution will control the legislature, for the supreme court are authorised in the last resort, to determine what is the extent of the powers of the Congress. They are to give the constitution an explanation, and there is no power above them to set aside their judgment. ... (The authors of the constitution) have made the judges independent, in the fullest sense of the word. There is no power above them, to control any of their decisions."

This was particularly dangerous, argued Brutus, because "when great and extraordinary powers are vested in any man, or body of men, which in their exercise, may operate to the oppression of the people, it is of high importance that powerful checks should be formed to prevent the abuse of it." And "this responsibility, he said, "should ultimately rest with the people."

New Column: Liberal Opposition to Ryan Plan Is Delusional Demagoguery

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 23:10:48 -0500

It's one thing for good-faith conservative Republicans to challenge the Ryan plan from the right if they believe its cuts are too small and too slow, but these liberal attacks are something else again.

How catastrophic would the nation's fiscal condition have to be before liberals recognized its urgency? Is there any scenario under which they'd consider setting aside their partisan populism to come to the nation's rescue? Are they capable of even temporarily setting aside their redistributionist myopia long enough meaningfully to address the main drivers of the national debt?

As we know, President Obama hasn't addressed and won't address our financial problems. He has never presented a budget plan that even pretends to rein in entitlement spending or comes anywhere close to reducing our annual deficits to less than shocking numbers, much less reversing the debt picture.

When Paul Ryan presented his plan in April 2011, Obama mocked, ridiculed and demonized him and Republicans as wanting to inflict pain on the elderly and autistic, among other sympathetic groups. Yet when Obama's treasury secretary appeared before the House and the Senate, he admitted the administration's plan wholly fails to address the long-term debt issue and said only that the administration doesn't like the way Ryan's plan approaches it.

We are witnessing the end results of liberal policies on a wide variety of issues -- from health care to the economy to the national debt -- yet liberals can't give them up. Instead of acknowledging that their utopian dreams haven't delivered, they are shaking their fists at Republicans and conservatives, as if it were our fault that reality doesn't conform to their fantasies. They'd be much better off reading Mark Levin's "Ameritopia," but I won't hold my breath.