This month's Limbaugh Letter came in the mail the other day, and a whole lot of pages are devoted to Rush's interview with a certain sinister foreign guest host. As Rush introduces the conversation:
I was delighted to speak with the inimitable wit, pundit, raconteur, musical aficionado, writer extraordinaire — and occasional EIB substitute host — who's out with a must-read new book, The Undocumented Mark Steyn: Don't Say You Weren't Warned...
Well, I was so thrilled by that I didn't want to risk spoiling it by reading the actual interview. So it took me a couple of days to venture beyond the intro, but it's actually a rollicking read, roaming wide and far across the big civilizational picture and the immediate political landscape, too. We even talked about serial litigant Michael E Mann, and my eagerness to get to trial. Rush enjoyed that:
RUSH: I followed what happened to you in Canada. I just think you're gutsy. I think you're as courageous as hell. You're one of the few that stand up to the left, and they're not used to it. They're used to people capitulating to them, and you don't.
STEYN: They don't want to win an argument, they want to make it unnecessary ever to have an argument. You were talking about that today when you were discussing Republicans getting characterized as racist, sexist, homophobic, or whatever. It's much easier, rather than actually having to debate any issue, just to say, "No, no, even to hold the debate would be a crime," which is what the left wants. It does it on campuses, it does it in courts, it does it through these human rights tribunals. What they all have in common — it doesn't matter whether you're talking about climate change, it doesn't matter whether you're talking about transgendered bathrooms — is they want to say, "This is beyond discussion." And eventually everything, in their perfect world, is beyond discussion. We've gone too far down that path already. Immigration is something that an overwhelming majority of the American people feel a certain way about, and yet it doesn't matter who you vote for: one party is committed to open borders, and the other party doesn't even want to oppose it lest they get called "racist." Again, it's the leftist genius that's always preventing the debate from ever being able to take place, or to take place honestly.
RUSH: Exactly. There is no debate. Everything is settled, and all we are faced with is a bunch of extremists. I've come to the conclusion recently — and it's hell, by the way, trying to convince people of this — that they're not interested in the arena of ideas. They're not interested in a debate. Their objective is to eliminate all opposition.
That's why Democrats spent the last few weeks shrieking about "racists" and the "war on women". Because their response to a policy difference is to delegitimize you. And if you're delegitimized your ideas are delegitimized, too, so nobody has to bother addressing them. The downside of that is that you do so much finger-pointing you lose the ability actually to mount an argument, as seems to have happened to Mark "Uterus" Udall and Michael "#KochMachine" Mann.
That urge to shut down debate - to enforce ruthless cultural conformity - has spread way beyond the left-wing college campuses:
STEYN: You're not usually there on the Monday after the Super Bowl, and I'm there sitting in for you [laughs], pretending to know stuff about a sport I'm entirely ignorant of.
RUSH: Well, let me say, it's trending as leftist as every other institution is.
STEYN: Exactly. So even something that is supposed to be kind of raw, and primal, and just about results, is now all tied up and ensnared by the most limp-wristed politically correct progressivism. So not even something as red-meat as sports actually has a conservative disposition anymore. So if you lose all this stuff, if you lose the TV shows, you lose the pop songs, you lose the movies, you lose the churches, you lose the universities, and even lose the locker room, then electing a guy with "R" after his name isn't going to be much use. So we have to be in the game on all these fronts...
I enjoyed the conversation immensely. You can find the whole thing here - and don't forget you can get The Limbaugh Letter delivered postally, digitally, or both.
~Rush evoked one of the images I used in the interview in his morning-after election analysis. This is bang on:
It is rare that a political party running for office in a midterm election not standing for anything ends up with a mandate, and they have one, and it is the biggest and perhaps the most important mandate a political party has had in the recent era, and it is very simple what that mandate is. It is to stop Barack Obama. It is to stop the Democrats. There is no other reason why Republicans were elected yesterday. Republicans were not elected to govern.
How can you govern with a president that disobeys the Constitution? How can you govern with a president that is demonstrably lawless when he thinks he has to be? The Republican Party was not elected to fix a broken system or to make it work. The Republican Party was not elected to compromise. The Republican Party was not elected to sit down and work together with the Democrats. The Republican Party was not elected to slow down the speed the country is headed to the cliff and go over it slowly.
The Republican Party was elected to stop before we get to the cliff.
Just so. On Tuesday Republicans were not elected to work with the President and "get things done". It's the "getting things done" that's killing America, and that's what voters voted against.
~As for what Rush calls my "must-read new book", The [Un]documented Mark Steyn is currently nuzzling the lower reaches of the New York Times bestsellers. You can buy it now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million in America, or Indigo-Chapters, Amazon and McNally-Robinson in Canada. Or, for instant gratification, get it in eBook - in Kindle, Kobo, Nook and iBooks. And, wherever you are on the planet, we're happy to ship you a personally autographed copy direct from the SteynOnline bookstore.
