Well before the Trump candidacy, Putin envy on the right was already widespread.
For one thing, Mr. Putin is someone who doesn’t worry about little things like international law when he decides to invade a country. He’s “what you call a leader,” declared Rudy Giuliani after Russia invaded Ukraine.
.. And many on the right also seem to have a strange, rather creepy admiration for Mr. Putin’s personal style. Rush Limbaugh, for example, declared that while talking to President Obama, “Putin probably had his shirt off practicing tai chi.”
.. what would the news media be saying if major figures in the Democratic Party routinely praised leftist dictators?
.. We know from many reports about his stiffing of vendors, his history of profiting from enterprises even as they go bankrupt, that he sees contracts as suggestions, clear-cut financial obligations as starting points for negotiation. And we know that he sees fiscal policy as no different; he has already talked about renegotiating U.S. debt. So why should we be surprised that he sees diplomatic obligations the same way?
Rush Limbaugh: ‘We Are on Offense With Donald Trump’
.. My advisers are telling me exactly that, Rush, they’re telling me to ignore it. But I can’t. I’m not gonna sit here and let my family be dishonored. I’m not gonna let myself, my family be lied about and I’m not gonna let those lies take root and become established as truth. I don’t care. I don’t care what they say is the right way to do this, I’m not gonna let it happen. When people lie about me, when people wound me, when people attack me, I’m gonna fire right back at ’em, I don’t care. And my advisers are trying to get me to stop, and I just can’t.”
That’s why he continues to tweet, and his tweets are effectively going around a dishonest media to inform and connect with everyday Americans. He’s also conducting negotiations with his tweets by informing people what he’s doing. And by doing this, by tweeting in this unpresidential way, not seen anything like this, it’s just not how it’s done, Trump is also capturing the whole idea of unpredictability, which makes Trump a never ending top-line news story and has his adversaries always on defense.
.. “our side,” I mean, conservatives, some Republicans — admit it, folks, we’ve grown tired and weary of being on defense all the time. We’re tired of getting up every morning and looking at either a person or an idea, something that we hold dear under assault, like marriage, or who can use whatever bathrooms, we’re tired of being on defense, we’re tired having to defend things that shouldn’t need to be defended because they’re under assault.
.. And that’s one of the big invisible unspoken reasons why he has such loyalty is because people who support him are just like a lot of you in this audience, fed up with being on defense and being on a team that never fought back, much less went on offense. But these tweets and this erratic or unpredictable behavior keeps Trump’s opponents on defense, and, believe me, it is a delight to see it.
.. Another thing that Trump is doing with these tweets, he’s leading. And because he’s leading, he’s holding everybody’s attention. What will Trump do next? What will Trump do next? Nobody’s asking, what’s Pelosi gonna do next, what’s Harry Reid? You know, we’re not steeling ourselves for what assault is coming at us next. We’re all looking on eagerly: What’s Trump gonna do next? How’s he gonna bamboozle ’em next? How’s Trump gonna end-run ’em next? That’s what’s everybody excited about here.
The Conservative Intellectual Crisis
The conservative intellectual landscape has changed in three important ways since then, paving the way for the ruination of the Republican Party.
First, talk radio, cable TV and the internet have turned conservative opinion into a mass-market enterprise. Small magazines have been overwhelmed by Rush, O’Reilly and Breitbart.
Today’s dominant conservative voices try to appeal to people by the millions. You win attention in the mass media through perpetual hysteria and simple-minded polemics and by exploiting social resentment. In search of that mass right-wing audience that, say, Coulter enjoys, conservatism has done its best to make itself offensive to people who value education and disdain made-for-TV rage.
It’s ironic that an intellectual tendency that champions free markets was ruined by the forces of commercialism, but that is the essential truth. Conservatism went down-market in search of revenue. It got swallowed by its own anti-intellectual media-politico complex — from Beck to Palin to Trump. Hillary Clinton is therefore now winning among white college graduates by 52 to 36 percent.
Second, conservative opinion-meisters began to value politics over everything else. The very essence of conservatism is the belief that politics is a limited activity, and that the most important realms are pre-political: conscience, faith, culture, family and community.
.. Today, most white evangelicals are willing to put aside the Christian virtues of humility, charity and grace for the sake of a Trump political victory. According to a Public Religion Research Institute survey, 72 percent of white evangelicals believe that a person who is immoral in private life can be an effective national leader, a belief that is more Machiavelli than Matthew.
.. Blinkered by the Republican Party’s rigid anti-government rhetoric, conservatives were slow to acknowledge and even slower to address the central social problems of our time.
For years, middle- and working-class Americans have been suffering from stagnant wages, meager opportunity, social isolation and household fragmentation. Shrouded in obsolete ideas from the Reagan years, conservatism had nothing to offer these people because it didn’t believe in using government as a tool for social good. Trump demagogy filled the void.
.. But I confess I’m insanely optimistic about a conservative rebound. That’s because of an observation the writer Yuval Levin once made: That while most of the crazy progressives are young, most of the crazy conservatives are old.
Rush Limbaugh’s Ultimate Betrayal of His Audience
The talk-radio host claims that he never took Donald Trump seriously on immigration. He neglected to tell his immigration obsessed listeners.
over the years, parts of the conservative movement that ought to know better, like the Claremont Institute, have treated him like an honorable conservative intellectual rather than an intellectually dishonest entertainer.
.. “Rush Limbaugh, no matter his protestations otherwise, is one of the main reasons Donald Trump is the nominee for the GOP today,”
.. The caller was named Rick and lives in Los Angeles. The subject: various positions Trump has staked out on illegal immigration, particularly a recent reversal where he suggested he may not deport everyone. Why didn’t the conservative media inform voters about the unreliability of Trump, who had only recently criticized Mitt Romney for being too harsh on immigration,
.. The point is, look who they think the low-information voters are. Look who the inside-the-Beltway people think the LIVs are. You people! According to Arthur Brooks, you who support Trump are the mind-numbed, uneducated, uninformed low-information voters, and they are confident that you’re gonna see the light at some point.
.. It would be absurd for a listener to come away from the segment with any conclusion other than that Limbaugh believed Trump was taking an earnest, substantive position on deporting illegal immigrants; that other Republicans should follow suit; that Trump wouldn’t reverse himself; and that it is, in fact, an insult to Trump voters to even suggest they are being misled by the billionaire’s candidacy.
.. This is the man who now has the chutzpah to claim, “I never took him seriously on this!” And he says it’s not a flip-flop as Trump adopts the positions of his erstwhile opponents.
.. As a different caller even later in that August 2015 show said, raising questions about Trump’s reliability, “I don’t know how you can believe anything he says to begin with. He changed his position on every issue, including abortion, you know, even immigration, he was attacking Romney a few years ago. So trust is a big thing, but also I think his immigration policy would be a disaster, and I think it’s really un-American.”
To which Limbaugh replied, “Okay. Explain why his immigration policy, because that is policy by the way. His immigration stance is now codified as policy. It’s not just hyperbole or performance art or whatever you want to call it, but what is un-American about it?” The next day, August 18, 2015, Limbaugh noted that Trump praised his show on Twitter
.. The caller is right that millions of people absolutely did take Trump seriously. Earnestly. Fervently. And Rush, despite the mealy-mouthed protest he followed up with (more transcript below), is part of the reason... his listeners do think he’s there to tell the truth. If he never took Trump seriously on immigration, which everyone in possession of the slightest amount of political savvy knew was the issue making Trump’s candidacy, then the truth would be to tell the listener that he never took him seriously. Anything else, anything less, it just weaseling.
.. The poetic justice in all this is that some of the movement conservative intellectuals who surely feel angry at the consequences of the host’s inexcusable betrayal never took Limbaugh totally seriously, but never shared that publicly either. They empowered Rush Limbaugh just as Limbaugh empowered Donald Trump.
.. Will this do lasting damage to the talk radio host? I’ve certainly never seen Red State commenters go after him like this before:
.. When he lied every day, you co-signed the lies by focusing only on how brilliantly he was manipulating the media narrative. When he engaged in unscrupulous tactics that you’ve spent decades criticizing the Dems for, you cheered.”.. “There should be no amnesty for those messengers who have spend decades preaching conservative values, only to abandon us when we actually had viable candidates who represented all that Rush and Co. had long promoted. No forgiveness.”.. The Wall is also another Trump made up fantasy just like the deportation of 11 million illegals. You clowns made him and now you clowns own him.