Tag: Mark Steyn

On the Passing of Rush Limbaugh

Posted on by David Rodeback

I first heard Rush Limbaugh on the radio when I was a graduate student at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. The radio station I usually played in my car bored me one afternoon, on my way to campus, so I found another. He happened to be on it. I’d never heard of him — and was “Rush” even a name?

I had a degree in Political Science by then. I’d worked on several political campaigns and interned at the US Senate. I had even been the token conservative on the op/ed page of an off-campus weekly newspaper. So I wasn’t new to politics and government. More to the point, I had devoured Ronald Reagan’s daily radio spots in the 1970s. Morning after morning the future president talked political sense, and he was, of course, charming and well spoken.

Not Everyone’s Cup of Tea — But Usually Mine

By comparison, Rush was brazen, bombastic, and sometimes completely over the top. He held forth for hours at a time, not just minutes. He was also entertaining – outright funny – in a way I haven’t found in other talk radio personalities. I quickly appreciated that his overblown radio persona was a way of poking fun at Rush Limbaugh, a way of not taking life too seriously. This allowed me to enjoy it, rather than despise him for it.

Toward a Diagnosis of Our Politics

Posted on by David Rodeback

Trump Sanders Clinton

I’ve said for years that President Obama — the quasi-monarchical head of a selectively but systematically lawless regime — is more of a symptom than the disease. I think the same of Donald Trump. I don’t mean Donald Trump the person; I mean Donald Trump the Republican front runner. Donald Trump of reality television (pardon the oxymoron). Donald Trump the foul-mouthed verbal bully. Donald Trump, the least convincing conservative impersonator we’ve seen at the head of the pack in a long time. (Rabid right-wingers will insert their own snide Mitt Romney joke here, I suspect. But he would have been a great president, even if he’s not conservative enough for you and you and you and you and maybe me.)

Meanwhile, with a less partisan Department of Justice the Democratic front runner, Hillary Clinton, would probably be facing — and in fact may yet face — federal indictment on many counts of knowingly treating classified and secret materials with all the seriousness due to recipes published in the food section of last week’s Sunday Times. And she’s losing states to Bernie Sanders, an avowed socialist whose appeal crosses demographic lines, but is particularly strong among young adults who have not yet been required by curriculum or circumstances to learn how the world works.

The symmetry here is that millions of voters are so hostile to establishment candidates on both sides of the aisle that they are voting for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. It is a remarkable time in our politics, though not a particularly encouraging time.

There are some very smart people (among many others) thinking and writing about this. Here I’ll offer some highlights from the best recent explanations I’ve seen. Peggy Noonan looms large here; she’s a perennial favorite of mine. I’ll also throw in some George Will, some Charles Krauthammer, some (American-turned-Brit) Janey Daley, a bit of Mark Steyn (an Aussie), and even some David Brooks (who sometimes plays a conservative on television but must, in general, be embraced with particular caution).

In each case I am excerpting longer essays or columns which you should read in their entirety. I offer the excerpts as much to persuade you of that as to offer an explanation of the Trump/Sanders phenomenon here. (Note: The fact that I have called the phenomenon after its most prominent current symptoms does not mean they are the only symptoms, or that the disease is not rampant at other levels of government. We’ve been fighting it locally in my city, American Fork, Utah, for some time in our own quirky way.)