Richard Whalen

When they talk among themselves, shoulders bent and voices low, senior Republican legislators, lobbyists and politicians sometimes chuckle over Rush Limbaugh’s latest blast. But they do not publicly admit listening to him. The granddaddy of right-wing talk radio ranters is not quite respectable or responsible, like a fast-talking salesman telling dirty stories behind the barn.

Rush Limbaugh is as modern as the streaming Internet and as shrewd as they come in knowing what his audience of 13.5 million “ditto-heads” want to hear daily. They want resounding affirmation for their way of seeing the world, their prejudices and, yes, their principles, as they define them.

But the leader and the inhabitants of Limbaugh-land are assuming special responsibility for the future of the Republican Party. If the GOP nominates frontrunner Senator John McCain, Limbaugh warns, it will be the end of conservatism and the Party will destroy itself.

I rise to remind Mr. Limbaugh that conservatism existed while Limbaugh was still driving a truck and ranting over his CB and that the maverick’s maverick McCain, a deeply principled libertarian conservative, is the finest exemplar of our philosophy we’ve had since the “Gipper.”

The Republican Party and I, in a 55-year rollercoaster ride, have experienced the peak triumphs of Eisenhower, the dips and twists of Nixon and the grand pinnacle of Reagan. In the lowest times, the Party‘s viability and life expectancy has never been in doubt.

In truth, the Party survives, not on its corporate moneybags or toe-the-line moralists, but on its new recruits among the best and the brightest of young libertarian and traditionalist conservatives who spar with each other to tune up for battling the lefties.

The long rise and descent of conservatism, now a half-century long, is at low ebb, casting up rock-hard reactionaries while we confront silky left-European-style socialists like Barack Obama. America’s potentially catastrophic economic and financial crisis threatens the unrepresented middle-class. Obama and the Kennedy Party are promoting security under leftist, big-government, state-supported capitalism.

Obama is the prophet of the new leftism, as Teddy Kennedy clearly sees. So wake up and smell the coffee, Rush. Stop beating up John McCain, an honest libertarian conservative, or you will help elect Hillary or the slick new Obama.