"The Hill" says Dems can't cope with Rush Limbaugh, how could they possibly handle insane Islamic jihadists?
Dems’ Limbaugh frustration
By Byron York
October 05, 2007
It’s payback time for Democrats still smarting over the MoveOn.org “General Betray Us?” controversy.
But so far, payback hasn’t been terribly sweet.
Congressional Democrats got it from both sides in the MoveOn brouhaha — from the left, with MoveOn’s over-the-top attack on Gen. David Petraeus, and from the right, from Republicans who cornered more than 20 Democrats into voting for the resolution condemning the ad.
That’s where Rush Limbaugh comes in.
His “phony soldiers” remark last week has stirred the left into spitting rage.
Of course, they’re mad at Limbaugh. But they’ve been mad at him for years.
The real question is how mad they are at Democrats. Surely Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) will organize their majorities to condemn Limbaugh, right?
Right?
Not so far.
“We don’t really expect it to be brought up in the Senate for a vote,” says one Senate source.
“I would be truly amazed [if a condemnation vote were held],” says another Senate insider. “The Democrats didn’t get quite the bang they thought they’d get. Major media largely yawned; conservative media surged.”
On Tuesday, 41 Senate Democrats signed a letter to Mark Mays, head of radio giant Clear Channel Communications, calling Limbaugh’s comments “unpatriotic and indefensible.”
“We call on you to publicly repudiate these comments,” the senators wrote, “and to ask Mr. Limbaugh to apologize for his comments.”
The signers included the Senate Democratic leadership, plus presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), Barack Obama (D-Ill.), Joseph Biden (D-Del.), and Chris Dodd (D-Conn.).
But that was just 41 senators. A resolution condemning Limbaugh would probably get more, but nothing like the 72 votes the condemnation of the MoveOn ad got.
But what about the House?
There’s been talk about a resolution — one has been drafted “condemning the attack by broadcaster Rush Limbaugh on the integrity and professionalism of some of [the U.S. military].”
But so far, it hasn’t come to the floor, and its chances don’t look good.
So why are these two controversies, MoveOn and Limbaugh, producing different results?
Because they are different.
The “General Betray Us?” ad was a single-page, big-type statement with the world’s most provocative headline. It said what it said. You could read the whole thing in a few seconds and judge for yourself.
Limbaugh’s comment wasn’t quite the same. It wasn’t just a two-word statement, despite what his critics say. To get what Limbaugh was saying, you had to listen to a full exchange — something that requires a few minutes’ investment, which is more than some of Limbaugh’s most determined adversaries have been willing to make.
And then you had to think about it all. Limbaugh says he had news reports of an actual phony soldier, Jesse Macbeth, in mind when he made his comments.
And sure enough, Limbaugh discussed Macbeth, unbidden, in the same exchange with a listener in which he used the “phony soldier” phrase.
A fair-minded reviewer would likely conclude that yes, Limbaugh was referring to Macbeth. After all, he said it at the time.
None of that has been enough, however, for Limbaugh’s critics, particularly in the blogosphere.
“It’s time to take him out,” says Jane Hamsher, guiding spirit of the popular Firedoglake blog.
What’s frustrating to Hamsher and others on the left is that congressional Democrats don’t have the same mad desire to “take him out” that she and her colleagues in the blogosphere do.
“The fact that the Democrats aren’t going after Rush hammer and tongs is largely due to their failure to see themselves as an opposition party involved in an ideological war,” Hamsher writes.
“The Republicans understand it, and that’s why they’ve been so successful at controlling the agenda as a minority party.”
So for now, at least, the blogosphere fumes and Democrats fret.
We’re probably looking at a few more days of controversy and posturing, and then … nothing. At least, until the next dust-up.
York is a White House correspondent for
National Review. His column appears in The Hill each week.<
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