Rush Limgaugh is Right: It's Worse Than Watergate

     Rush, you're free to gloat to your heart's content to be right. Hey, it's what he does best and seems to take inordinate pleasure from it. These days I feel pretty magnaminuous. If conservatives take heart that their political defeat proves they were right all along, then cool. Whatever does it for you-really.

    "If the political defeat of conservatives gives them vindication, more power to them. I think it vindicates liberals but hey, you say tomato I say... I have a hard time seeing how someone like Hannity who spent the last year predicting a Romney landslide is suddenly a seer because he was wrong and the Reagan Revolution is over but hey conservatives are sophisticated people. Way too much so for a simple minded liberal like me to understand."

  http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2013/01/birds-of-feather-sumner-limbaugh-and-aei.html

   Yesterday Rush had-what else is new?-another 'See I told you so" moment. He once wrote a book with the same name.

   "Look, folks, I really don't like being a "see, I told you so." I mean, I know I do it a lot 'cause it happens a lot, and I used to even have a little jingle with it. "Nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah! See, I Told You So," because it used to be somewhat unique. Now it's not difficult at all. It is important, however. I do, when relevant, like to remind you of things that you've heard in the past on this program that you may have forgotten, things that I've said. Here's a story that leads into my point."

   http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/02/05/resistance_to_obama_has_melted_away

    He then reads from an article about Republican Governor Jon Kasich's recent decision to accept the expansion of Medicaid for Ohio

    "There is a political reality: We lost the election. We lost the state of Ohio. Kasich is up for reelection, and he wants to win, and he is simply judging where the people of his state are. I think this is happening in a number of other places. The 2012 election is going to prove to be the most devastating election result in ways that we haven't even contemplated yet. Every week, there is new evidence of this. The See, I Told You So is not specifically that governors like this were going to cave, but that resistance to Obamacare was going to become practically nil."

     Practically nil. I like the sound of that.

    "There isn't any resistance to Obama anywhere, and it's going to get worse even from this point. There's no political impetus, there's no perceived upside on the part of Republicans standing in the way of Obama. The perception is that the people of this country love Obama. I mean, they cult-figure love this guy. This is the perception in the Republican Party and that there's nothing that's going to change that. So they have to bite the bullet, gnash their teeth, and go along with all this so as not to be hated."

    "It is a purely defensive posture, but it's also a concession to what they believe the political realities today are. This election result is causing a mind-set in the Republican Party that is as devastating... This is worse than the mind-set and the realities after Watergate, and it's not just because the Republicans thought they were gonna win. It's not just because they thought Romney was gonna win. It is because of who Obama is and what his policies are and the perception that the American people massively support it all." 

    Yep. It's the Kristol Premise: elections have consequences. I do think that he's right about most of it. I think the Watergate comparison is instructive. At the time it may have seemed like a terribly earth shattering event for the Republican party, but, in reality, there was very little blowback for the GOP.

    Maybe it gave the Democrats a one term presidency for Jimmy Carter for all the good it did them. Even that election was painstakingly close and you could argue that had Ford not pardoned Nixon he may have gotten back in.

    In just 6 years Reagan had his landslide and revolution. Watergate didn't hurt the GOP at all really as a party. It may have hurt the image of government in the American people's eyes further in the time they were already disillusioned. Of course, even that played more into the Republican narrative that 'government isn't the solution it's the problem.'

    Watergate wasn't an ideological or demographic defeat for the GOP the way 2012 was. So there's no comparison. If anything, it might be more like 1932 in it's effect on the party.

   There will indeed be new evidence every week of the GOP trying to deal with this new reality. Even Eric Cantor's speech yesterday is endemic of this.

    While he was-accurately- criticized for giving us old wine in new bottle, he also had to use the language of liberals in his speech.

     "Eric Cantor, the combative second-ranking Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives, launched a major rebranding of his party on Tuesday, saying he hoped Republicans and President Barack Obama could "set differences aside" in the interest of helping ordinary Americans.
While giving no ground on any of the outstanding differences between House Republicans and Obama in a speech prepared for delivery to the American Enterprise Institute, the change in tone from one of the most partisan leaders of the House was striking.

     http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/02/05/usa-congress-cantor-idUKL1N0B5BAX20130205?feedType=RSS&feedName=rbssEnergyNews

     Rush go ahead and 'see I told you so' to your heart's content. Here's more of Rush's crowing:

     "That's why Cantor is saying, "We're gonna have to do a better job of explaining who we are. We need to do a better job of explaining why we're doing what we're doing." Well, I think that epitomizes how lost they all feel -- and right now, folks, there is no fight. There's no desire for it. There's no fight mentality. There is no desire for any opposition of any kind at this point in time. That's what all of this means. It's a direct outcome of the 2012 election. It is Santa Claus trumping freedom. Santa Claus trumps everything. Santa Claus beats fiscal responsibility. Santa Claus beats individual liberty. Santa Claus beats individual responsibility. Santa Claus trumps all of this. It's no more complicated than that, but that's exactly what all of this means."