March 5, 2009

Earth to GOP: Don’t Give Limbaugh the Bum’s Rush

There you go again. Dragging me kicking and screaming into a subject I didn’t want to write about. But this “Rush is the leader of the Republican Party” versus “Limbaugh is bad for the GOP” thing is getting tiresome.

Which means – sigh – I’m going to have to straighten it out, once and for all. So listen and listen tight.

Let’s start where GOP Chairman Michael Steele appropriately began before he wandered off into the Land of No Return. Rush – and Ann Coulter, for that matter – are entertainers!

Ms. Coulter’s appearance at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was equal parts comedy monologue and burlesque routine. Sample line: She loves to go on The View because “being around all those gals always makes me feel so young and pretty.”

Deep.

Listen, if the Divine Ms. C had tossed those flowing golden locks once more in that skin-tight top, the frat boys constituting half the audience might have stormed the stage.

Ms. Coulter reminds the world that she has authored seven – count ‘em – seven best-selling books because her main interest in life is to sell more books – all of them extended tracts, not treatises, and several with covers that feature the University of Michigan Law School graduate provocatively posed in the proverbial little black dress. She’ll get more fawning marriage proposals than Pulitzer Prizes by a factor of several thousand to zero. And love every minute of it.

Meanwhile, Rush’s cable-broadcast, CPAC-closing “first address to the nation” before a rapturous, adoring, overflow throng wasn’t exactly the State of the Union. A bombastic and amusing apologia for conservatism, yes. But also a smug, sweaty, side-splitting, 85-minute(!) mashup of polemic, pep rally and Big Love – the crowd’s for Rush and Rush’s for himself.

Of course Democrats are pronouncing Limbaugh “the bloated face and drug-addled voice of the Republican Party,” in the sensitive stylings of Paul Begala (a Clintonista who knows “bloated and addled” when he sees it). Sure, they’re hanging on the GOP Rush’s deliberately over-the-top call for the Sun King to fail in order to prompt that classic political ploy: “Let’s you and him fight.”

But hello. Let’s get real here. Limbaugh’s CPAC bio anoints him “(t)he self-proclaimed ‘Doctor of Democracy,’ ‘America’s Real Anchorman,’ ‘America’s Truth Detector,’ ‘Maha Rushie,’ ‘El Rushbo,’ and ‘The Last Man Standing.’” If he is the leader of anything, it’s his own fan club.

While excessively diverting and prolific pundits, Rush and Ms. Coulter are not political honchos or progenitors of Republican policies – any more than Alfred E. Neuman is the architect of The One’s economic strategies, however similar their philosophies. (“What me worry about a plunging Dow and pending hyperinflation?”)

Meanwhile, the pair performs a valuable service for the GOP, contrary to some claims. Just as napalm once cleared out the dense jungle that concealed Viet Cong ambushes, Rush and Ms. Coulter flame through the politically correct inanities that characterize liberal and Big Media thought – and open the way for Republicans and others to promote a return to simple common sense. (I love the smell of talk radio in the morning, afternoon and evening.)

I was digging out my ears the other day as African-American National Public Radio commentator Juan Williams took on single motherhood on Fox News. You think he might have felt emboldened to do so after Ms. Coulter took the hit on the subject in several controversial appearances a short while back? Duh.

Earth to GOP: Don’t take the Democrats’ bait – and split your party – by giving Limbaugh the Bum’s Rush. Laugh off his antics as “just an act.” And thank heaven that, in reality, it’s much more than that.