Thank you, Clark Stooksbury, for finding this magnificent piece o' moronocon wisdom from Rush Limbaugh:
Folks, I don't know what the price of gasoline is in China and I don't know to what extent, if any, it is subsidized -- okay, it is subsidized. See, the ChiComs need their economy growing. They need people driving around, moving around. They need people to be able to afford fuel, so they're subsidizing fuel. They're not bailing people out of stupid home mortgage messes. They're buying their gasoline for them, because they need an economy. Know what energy means to this, the whole subject of economic growth. So meanwhile, the ChiComs, a country certainly growing, certainly on the rise, but it ain't the United States of America. How does it make you feel that Zhang Linsen has a big Hummer with nine speakers blaring as he pulls out into a four-lane road with so much smog he basically can't see the car in front of him, and you are trading in all of your cars and trying to go out and find basically a lawn mower.
Gosh, I dunno, Rush. How should I feel that the Chinese government is subsidizing gas consumption and, with a manly grow, grow, grow! public ethic, are turning their cities into toxic waste zones for people who like to breathe oxygen? Nothing like nationalist socialism (ahem) to make a man feel like a man, I guess.
You just hang your head at this juvenile macho stupidity. As Clark puts it, "If rightwingers should ever wonder how they got into their current predicament, they should start by looking at their AM radio dials." Or, Larison, shooting a slow fish in a small barrel:
[A]bove all it is a declaration that egregiously conspicuous consumption has something to do with national status and power. Of course, if you were to suggest to a mainstream conservative that support for consumerism is a common or accepted view among them, you would be immediately denounced as a closet socialist who wants to impoverish everyone, unlike all those high-minded economic conservatives who just happen to defend all forms of consumption out of respect for freedom.
Can both the Democrats and the Republicans lose this fall? I'm just asking.
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**I'm saying that if people don't agree with the majority of signature social and economic positions championed by Rush/Ron Reagan/Hannity/Beck/Newt/Cheney/Romney and their ilk, then they probably are not "Conservatives".**
Russell Kirk not a conservative? Richard Weaver? Mel Bradford? Paul Gottfried? George Panichas? Thomas Fleming? Clyde Wilson? Almost everyone at ISI and the Rockford Institute?
Basically what you're saying is, if you're not a neo-conservative, you're not a conservative at all, which, I'm afraid is nonsense.
Trying to ejumacate the inejumacable, RG? Good luck with all *that*...
We now return you to Can a' Tea and Holmes, Already In Infantile Regress, where, as the thuggish "conservative" co-host, who looks more and more like Lou Costello every day, introduces for the 366th time the past year "Our good friend Ann C___er", all decent patriots head for the sink as though they had just swallowed a vat of rat poison...
"Basically what you're saying is, if you're not a neo-conservative, you're not a conservative at all, which, I'm afraid is nonsense."
Rob, just think for a moment. Neo, as you know, means new. So how can a new conservatism (neo conservatism) be the same thing as, for example, Ron Reagan's plain, old fashioned conservatism? And do you really consider Rush's conservatism a new (neo) conservatism?
Let's just agree to disagree, my friend. What's important is that neither of us is a liberal.
The 12:46 post is mine.
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