RUSH: Rush Limbaugh, on a roll. The Last Man Standing. Defending conservatism against the onslaught — happily, by the way.
I want to take a moment here and thank some people who this week have come to my defense in all of this back-and-forth with the White House on wanting the president to fail, who have come to my defense even against people supposedly on my side of the aisle who have taken shots at me. Bob Tyrrell of the American Spectator has a brilliant, brilliant piece today in which he just slices and dices Paul Begala and comes up with the perfect nickname for Begala, The Skull. Not The Forehead, but The Skull. He describes Begala, when he sees him in the green room at television shows, as so emaciate, that it takes so much makeup on Begala’s face to send him out on television, that you can’t tell whether he’s laughing or frowning because his face doesn’t move.
Bob Tyrrell of the American Spectator, thank you. Jay Nordlinger, National Review Online, with a blurb today that was highly supportive. My parents always told me, ‘You thank the people that come to your defense, stand up next to you, stand up with you,’ and a lot of have. Mark Levin on his radio show last night just savaged David Frum. I mean, he sliced David Frum up, chewed him up and spit him out. Frum knew it was bad, but didn’t know how bad. I got e-mails from people last night, ‘You ought to hear what Levin is doing to Frum.’ I’m not going to tell you what Frum wrote, because I’m not going to further it, but his criticism of me was entirely personal based on the CPAC speech.
It was beneath anybody who claims to be an intellectual, and Levin says, ‘Look, I’m getting tired of people on our side savaging all of us. It’s bad enough the left does. We’ve gotta bunch of pretenders out there.’ Frum went on with him. Sean Hannity, the last two or three days on both his radio and television show, has done a superb job of going back and showing video and audio of Algore and other Democrats spewing hatred and failure desires for George W. Bush. Greta Van Susteren at Fox has done the same thing. A lot of people at Fox have, a lot of the Fox hosts. I guess I should just thank the network in general. Erick Erickson as RedState.com, a blog. I met Erick backstage in the greenroom at the CPAC speech and he was there in the audience for it.
He has also written some amazing things about the reaction to all this, including the White House and their reaction to it. Look, the danger when you start this is that you leave some people out. Hugh Hewitt, who is on vacation this week, but he did take the time to post something. He’s a talk show host in Southern California. He took the time to post while he was on vacation a very complimentary description of the speech at CPAC, calling it ‘a speech for the decades.’ There are just a tremendous number of people. If I’ve left your name out, it’s not intentionally. I just jotted these down off the top of my head. Victor Davis Hanson at National Review, a classic intellectual. But he’s also a man of the soil. He’s a farmer. He is in agriculture. He lives in California.
He’s a fellow at the Hoover Institution on the campus of Stanford in Palo Alto. He’s not an Ivy League, ivy tower intellectual, just a standard, ordinary, brilliant man. Among many areas of his expertise is ancient Greek history, even going so far as to identify the Bill Clinton of the ancient Greek era. What was the name? Alcibiades. Alcibiades was the Bill Clinton of his era according to Victor Davis Hanson. I saw that on the History Channel once. Fascinating man. These people, I’m in their debt. I thank them very much. I’m in their debt and I thank them very much for this because it’s times like this where you find out where your friends are. It’s times like this where you find out who the cowards are, who either go underground, head to the tall grass or either go to the other side and say, ‘I think the other side is going to win this.’ (interruption)
Well, Snerdley, I’ll use my words here. Snerdley is adding to this. He wants me to add additional things to describe some of these people, but I don’t want to get into their motives. It’s just mystifying to me. In many cases, I know what their problem is. Some of these highbrow intellectual conservatives are the same people as the ones who dislike the pro-lifers. It’s all about abortion with them. It really is about the social issues. They’re just embarrassed to be at a party where the pro-life community resides. They’re embarrassed of the pro-life community because all of their friends are liberals and intellectuals and they get teased about it and so forth. That’s a large part. Their psychology is out of whack as well because of that. But that’s as much as I’m going to say about motives.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I remembered some more people during the break here. I was reminded by staff. I haven’t seen everything that has been written in defense or support of our side in all of this. Neal Boortz, who does a great show, a different kind of show, he was very supportive. Laura Ingraham on her show was. Bill O’Reilly the last two nights on the Fox News Channel. Charles Krauthammer on Special Report with Bret Baier last night actually said if it’s a contest between Jindal and Limbaugh, I’d take Limbaugh. But he’s handled this thing very well. The Power Line guys, the guys at Power Line blog have been stupendous, as have been the people at NewsBusters, and Hot Air, Ed Morrissey and some of the people at Hot Air. There’s some oddballs there, but Ed Morrissey, Michelle Malkin, they have been great on this. I’m going to leave some others out, but there have been a lot of people stepping up here, and I just want all of you who have to know I noted it and I appreciate it, and I thank you more than you could possibly ever know.