Crimes Against Liberty (20 page)

“NOT THE KIND OF CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN”

Unsurprisingly, the Democrats’ bête noir, my brother Rush Limbaugh, was singled out for especially harsh criticism. The
New York Post
reported, “President Obama warned Republicans on Capitol Hill today that they need to quit listening to radio king Rush Limbaugh if they want to get along with Democrats and the new administration. ‘You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done,’ he told top GOP leaders, whom he had invited to the White House to discuss his nearly $1 trillion stimulus package.”
⁴⁸

Obama’s activist supporters, such as
MoveOn.org
and Americans United for Change, launched radio and TV ads expressing false outrage at Limbaugh’s condemnation of Obama’s profligate spending. In the spirit of street agitator Saul Alinsky, Limbaugh was the target to be frozen and demonized, and then Republican lawmakers as well, by association with Limbaugh.
⁴⁹
Politico
took notice, observing that “liberal groups are dispensing with the niceties and seeking to drive a wedge between Republicans and one of the right’s most influential leaders.”
Politico
reported that Americans United for Change was about to air radio ads in three states asking Republican senators, “Will you side with Obama or Rush Limbaugh?” The ad referred to Limbaugh as an “extreme partisan” who “wants President Obama’s Jobs program to fail.... Will our Senator... side with Rush Limbaugh too?”
⁵⁰

The administration’s campaign against Limbaugh provoked a
Time
magazine story titled, “Team Obama’s Petty Limbaugh Strategy.”
Time
noted Obama won the presidency “promising to be a different, more substantive, less gimmicky leader” who would not engage in “phony outrage,” but would work on solving problems. Instead, the subject of Limbaugh and his influence on the Republican Party was dominating the news.
Time
quoted
Politico’s
Jonathan Martin saying the entire Limbaugh “controversy” had “been cooked up and force fed to the American people by Obama’s advisers.” In other words, said
Time
, “it’s not the kind of change you can believe in.”
⁵¹

Time
discovered the Democrats’ anti-Limbaugh campaign was hatched following a poll taken by Bill Clinton’s pollster Stanley Greenberg—who just happens to own the house where Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel stays while in Washington. The poll allegedly found “Limbaugh was deeply unpopular among wide swaths of the American electorate.” So Greenberg and Clinton henchmen James Carville and Paul Begala devised a strategy to taint the Republican Party by connecting it to Limbaugh.
⁵²

The White House set the strategy in motion when Limbaugh announced he hoped Obama would fail, by which he meant—as he clearly explained—that he hoped his agenda failed because otherwise the nation would fail. Rooting for the failure of Obama’s agenda was tantamount, in Limbaugh’s expressly articulated view, to championing the nation’s success and well being. Yet Gibbs and other Democratic operatives colluded to paint Limbaugh as an anti-patriot who wished for America’s failure for crass partisan purposes.

But the distortion of Limbaugh’s statement was too blatant even for some members of the mainstream media.
Time
’s David Von Drehle quoted Teddy Roosevelt saying, “To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
⁵³
The inherent virtue of even the most outrageous expressions of “dissent,” of course, was an ever-present Democratic talking point throughout the entire presidency of George W. Bush. As Hillary Clinton declared back then, “I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration somehow you’re not patriotic. And we should stand up and say we are Americans and we have a right to debate and disagree with any administration.”
⁵⁴
Under Obama, however, critics of the president have suddenly degenerated from brave dissidents into unpatriotic and divisive demagogues.

Despite the protests of some rebels like Von Drehle, much of the mainstream media predictably parroted the White House’s allegations against Limbaugh and even attributed to him racist comments and other outlandish statements he’d never made.
National Review’
s editors observed that journalists had incorporated into their reporting, “without substantiation,” “a rash of manufactured quotes attributed to Limbaugh,” doing “collectively what Dan Rather did individually: allow themselves to be duped by phony documents.” It was a part of the “Democratic media’s recent campaign to prevent Rush from becoming part-owner of a professional football team, but the lies reached a level that is remarkable even by the standards of the corrupt and incompetent American media.”

The attribution of these false quotes to Limbaugh, observed
National Review
, was “to lie—viciously.” But, what made the partisan and dishonest assault “disturbing” was “that the White House [was] a participant in it.... There may be some precedent for a modern White House’s attempting to use the machinery of the presidency to destroy a critic in this fashion, but Barack Obama did not run as the Second Coming of Richard Nixon.”
⁵⁵

Aside from Limbaugh, Obama attacked other conservative media figures as well, such as Sean Hannity. Obama repeatedly denounced the radio and FOX News host, once implying Hannity promoted hatred against him after Sean got under his skin for connecting the dots between Obama and his radical friends such as his pastor Jeremiah Wright, the unrepentant terrorist William Ayers, and Ayers’s wife, the former FBI fugitive Bernardine Dohrn.
⁵⁶

Columnist Paul Ibrahim rejected the White House’s efforts to distance and sanitize Obama from the administration’s war against its opponents. He wrote, “The fact that this systematic operation to intimidate and demonize Obama’s opponents was launched so soon after his inauguration is tremendously perturbing. What is even more alarming is that Obama is not only a member of this campaign—he is the driving force behind it.” Ibrahim identified why this pattern of behavior, coming from the president of the United States, is inimical to freedom. “Within 100 hours of taking office, the president of the United States proceeded to single out a private citizen for his mere dissent, effectively expelling him from the government’s marketplace of ideas, and with him the millions of listeners of the same political stripe.... Welcome to the politics of hope ’n’ change. Obama’s startling attempt to hang Limbaugh’s scalp on the wall is a warning that the new ruler does not want unity—he demands it.”
⁵⁷

The crusade against Limbaugh was nothing new for Obama; it simply resurrected a strategy he had employed as a presidential candidate in attempting to smear his opponent, John McCain, by tying him to Limbaugh, whom they had slandered with a manufactured racial slur against Mexicans by taking some of his radio comments grossly out of context. Limbaugh himself, in an op-ed in the
Wall Street Journal
a few months before Ibrahim’s piece, chastised Obama for stoking the flames of racial antagonism on Limbaugh’s back. “What kind of potential president,” he asked, “would let his campaign knowingly extract two incomplete, out-of-context lines from two radio parodies and build a framework of hate around them in order to exploit racial tensions? The segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s were famous for such vile fear-mongering.”
⁵⁸
This was the candidate not only claiming to be above dirty politics, but who held himself out as post-racial. “We’ve made such racial progress in this country. Any candidate who employs the tactic of the old segregationists is unworthy of the presidency.”
⁵⁹

No one should operate under the misapprehension that Obama’s White House didn’t have its hands all over the effort to demonize Limbaugh and other political opponents. His relationship with his supporters is symbiotic.
Newsbusters
reported, for example, that Obama confidantes such as his discredited, radical, former green jobs czar Van Jones were tied to
StopTheWitchHunt.org
—a group specifically formed to “call out” so-called “mischaracterizations and hate speech” of Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, Pat Buchanan, and Paul Brown.
⁶⁰

Obama is also intolerant of criticism of his wife, but it wasn’t as if the criticism was gratuitous. He had encouraged her to speak out on policy issues, and when she did and called America “downright mean,” she earned the righteous indignation of patriots everywhere. Yet Obama lashed out at
National Review
and FOX News (again), as well as the rest of the “conservative press,” for going “fairly deliberately at her in a pretty systematic way.” He added, “I think that it is an example of the erosion of civility in our political culture that she’s been subjected to these attacks.”
⁶¹

SARAH PALIN AND CARVILLE’S “LIMBAUGH STRATEGY”

Sarah Palin is a close second to Rush Limbaugh in the Left’s roster of most hated conservatives. The attacks on Palin began almost from the moment McCain picked her as his running mate. Obama derided the McCain-Palin reform rhetoric with, “You can’t put lipstick on a pig. It’s still a pig.” Obama also disparagingly referred to Palin as a “moose shooter”
⁶²
and all but called her a liar in portraying herself as an earmark watchdog. “Come on!” said Obama. “I mean, words mean something, you can’t just make stuff up.”
⁶³

The demonization of Palin did not abate with Obama’s election. The UK
Telegraph’s
Toby Harnden pointed out in November 2009 that “Barack Obama’s Organizing for America” sent out “pleas for cash” citing Palin’s book
Going Rogue
as an incentive to donate “to oppose ‘Sarah Palin and her allies.’” The e-mail from these Obama surrogates bitterly denounced Palin for claiming ObamaCare would institute “death panels” and for “opening the flood gates for months of false attacks by special interests and partisan extremists.” It suggested Palin is “dangerous” and called her a liar, referring to “whatever lie comes next [from her],”and declaring, “We can’t afford more deception and delay.”
⁶⁴
A few months earlier Gibbs had named Palin as one of “the biggest purveyors of disinformation.”
⁶⁵

Those who believe the Left’s negative reaction to Palin is merely visceral fail to see that Obama leftists smeared Palin for the same strategic purpose they vilified Limbaugh: to taint all conservatives and the Republican Party by association. The
Washington Post
’s The Plum Line blog reported that James Carville, the architect of “the Limbaugh strategy,” said Democrats would seek to elevate Palin more and more and turn her into the new Rush Limbaugh. “Her name conjures up all kinds of reactions in people’s minds,” said Carville, who conceded he was attempting to alienate moderates from the GOP by focusing on Palin. “She’s an uncomfortable figure for a lot of Republicans. They want to move beyond her.
We
like her.” Another Democratic strategist said, “Luckily, she seems to present us with an opportunity every few days. You could say it’s a turkey shoot.”
⁶⁶

The White House was obviously knee-deep in this “Carville strategy” to demonize Limbaugh, Palin, FOX News, and other conservatives. In an off-the-record briefing at the White House with leftist commentators including Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, Frank Rich, and Bob Herbert, Obama “gave vent to sentiments about the network [FOX], according to people briefed on the conversation.” Michael Clemente, a FOX News executive, suggested the targeting of FOX “was part of a larger White House strategy to marginalize critics,” citing a report in
Politico
about a White House strategy session to “move more aggressively against opponents.”
⁶⁷
Clemente’s analysis is certainly consistent with
Time
magazine’s citing of
Politico
’s report that the Limbaugh “controversy” had “been cooked up and force fed to the American people by Obama’s advisers.”
⁶⁸

While Palin, Limbaugh, and others were certainly special targets of the White House, anyone who opposed Obama’s priorities could find themselves subject to personal attack. For example, Obama’s team became incensed when Republican senator Jim Bunning blocked their move to extend unemployment and health benefits. Bunning’s opposition was based on a simple, commonsense proposition: “Before we expand a program, let’s make sure we can pay for it.” Bunning was not even opposed to extending the benefits per se; he just wanted them paid out of unspent “stimulus” funds, which seemed exceedingly reasonable, since the “stimulus” funds that had already been spent had not created the jobs Obama promised they would. Bunning was also intent on forcing Obama and lawmakers to honor their “paygo” legislation, which mandated that new government spending be funded through other spending reductions, funds allocated elsewhere, or from new taxes. But Gibbs made it personal, stating, “I don’t know how you negotiate with the irrational” and even admitted using his position of influence to “shame” Bunning. “Sometimes,” bemoaned Gibbs, “even using their names doesn’t create the shame you would think it would.”
⁶⁹