Townhall Cartoon by Gary McCoy
Click on the political cartoon to get to NRO’s Obama’s Lincoln
And Lincoln’s Obama: What the new president should do if he’s serious about learning from Lincoln.
I have been watching some of the media coverage of the Obama Inauguration and have felt somewhat dismayed by the lack of polical debate and dialog. It has felt as though the media is much more interested in proping him up as a Messiah, than in holding him accountable for his rhetoric.
Rush Limbaugh articulated most of what I have been feeling in his opening monologue this morning, and I thought I’d share the link with my readers because he says it so much better than I could.
The Last Man Standing Refuses to Join the Cult of Barack Obama
Jenny Hatch

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Here was the telling quote for me:

…I’m speaking to you personally, from the heart. I don’t see black people when I look at people. I don’t see women. I don’t see groups of people. I see Americans. When I look at Obama, I see my president. I see a man who’s in charge of this country for the next four years. I care very deeply what he intends to do. I care what his policies are. I’m not going to give him a pass because he represents some sordid past of our country and as such he gets free rein to do what he wants while we say nothing because we “owe” this to him, based on our original sin of slavery. Sorry, it doesn’t work that way here behind the Golden EIB Microphone or in a lot of other places.

He’s the president. He has policies. I know what they are. I’ve studied ’em. I have every bit of understanding I can on where he wants to take this country. I don’t want to go there! I don’t want this to become a western European socialist country, and it’s going to. If we get socialized medicine, if we get national health care — as my friend Pete Wehner wrote last week in the Wall Street Journal with Paul Ryan — it’s over. That’s the end of the country as we know it. Do you realize…? Here’s the point they made. We get national health care. From that point on, there’s no reversing it. You create that kind of dependency in people, and there will be no reversing that. There will be calls for adding more to the whole concept of the government should do everything. Why should we get behind Obama, especially if he urges policies that we reject? Why should we do this? What is the point?

What do we gain by this? All we gain is what the left has been trying to do to us for years and that’s silence ourselves. Okay, so we shut ourselves up. Do you think we’re going to get praised for this? Do you think we’re going to be credited, you think we’re going to be brought into the tent, you think we’re going to be brought into the, quote, unquote, “big clique”? Hell no. If they can’t shut us up, the best thing they can do is intimidate us into shutting ourselves up, and I, frankly, am not interested. They say everybody wants him to succeed. Why’s that? Did everybody want Bush or Clinton or Reagan to succeed? Can somebody go back in American history and tell me when we had a president that everybody wanted to succeed? I’m not even sure every American wanted George Washington to succeed. There are a lot of people that were not quite happy about the way that was all going down.

The idea that all of a sudden just from… What reason? You tell me. What reason must we all shut up and hope Obama succeeds, especially when he has policy ideas that I reject? He’s not a “black” president. He’s not “the first black president” to me. That’s done. That’s the past. Well, it will be after tomorrow. That’s no justification for engaging in errors and making mistakes and doing the wrong things while people shut up simply because of the historic nature here. We want him to succeed because he’s the first black president? If that’s the case, then who’s suspending reason and acting out their own racism? The racism here is on the left! (Man, am I making a mess today.) But it is. Everything we’re doing here, we’re supposed to do because of race. He’s the first black president, so we’re to shut up and we’re to root for him? We’re going to say we hope he has a successful presidency.

“Well, everybody wants him to succeed.” Well, no. And it isn’t based on race! As it always is, the racial element or component in all of this is being injected by the Drive-By Media. A president is to be supported or opposed, whichever is the case, based on what he stands for, what his policies are and so forth. Not his race. Why should anyone want a president to succeed if his positions are considered damaging to the economy and national security? And, by the way, who are the true classical liberals now? Who is it that’s obsessed with race, as opposed to being colorblind and addressing issues based on their substance? We’re not getting any substance in terms of reporting about Barack Obama at all because the left and the media are obsessed with the racial component, while they claim they’re the ones who are colorblind.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Look, another point of hypocrisy that I wish to add here as a means of illustrating what’s going on. Remember when Justice Thomas, Clarence Thomas, was nominated as only the second black man to the Supreme Court, he was trashed. They tried to kill him. They tried to destroy him simply because his views did not comport with those of the liberals. Did you ever hear the media say, “We need to get behind Clarence Thomas; we all want Clarence Thomas to succeed because of the symbolism behind his appointment?” No. You heard that he was unqualified, that he was over his head, that he hadn’t accomplished much in his life, and then they sent out the character assassins to try and derail his nomination, and this guy had a record of performance. But now we’re supposed to set all this aside and just blindly say, “Oh, yes, I hope he succeeds.” So it clearly is only historic when the minority is a liberal, and we should only unite behind the person if it advances the liberal agenda.”

Amen and Amen Rush!
Gotta go watch 24
JMH