David Frum's feeble war against Rush Limbaugh

A March 2nd column at today's hub of conservative thought -- some website I've never heard of called New Majority -- pilloried Rush Limbaugh with inflammatory descriptions and tawdry allusions. The column's author, David Frum (yes, the David Frum... heh), asserts that Limbaugh's cigar-smoking, golfing visage is precisely the image that Republicans should spurn.

Frum describes Limbaugh as the ostensible leader of the GOP burdened with unappealing and stereotypical characteristics:

A man who is aggressive and bombastic, cutting and sarcastic, who dismisses the concerned citizens in network news focus groups as “losers.” With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence – exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix to our philosophy and our party. And we’re cooperating! Those images of crowds of CPACers cheering Rush’s every rancorous word – we’ll be seeing them rebroadcast for a long time.

We get it -- Rush is rich. Filthy rich. He's a swaggering, cocky, overweight, cigar-smoking rich guy worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He has his own jet. Tens of millions of listeners. Best-selling books. His website gets more hits in a day than Frum gets in a month.

As for Barack Obama?

On the [other] side, the president of the United States: soft-spoken and conciliatory, never angry, always invoking the recession and its victims. This president invokes the language of “responsibility,” and in his own life seems to epitomize that ideal: He is physically honed and disciplined, his worst vice an occasional cigarette. He is at the same time an apparently devoted husband and father. Unsurprisingly, women voters trust and admire him.

Discipline? Obama's admitted use of marijuana, cocaine and perhaps other illegal drugs must have slipped Frum's mind. Or, more likely, Frum pegged the needle on the intellectual dishonesty meter. Care for a Nicorette?

Obama has indeed invoked the recession: his unceasing song of crisis, catastrophe and despair have turned a run-of-the-mill recession into an economic debacle of the first order. His ideological policy prescriptions have scorched the world's greatest prediction engine -- the stock market -- and melted trillions in value.

Victims? Obama has, in many respects, created the victims from whole cloth.

Rush, in Frum's view, is a relic, a useless fossil of the Reagan-urassic Era.

Rush knows what he is doing. The worse conservatives do, the more important Rush becomes as leader of the ardent remnant. The better conservatives succeed, the more we become a broad national governing coalition, the more Rush will be sidelined.

How will conservatives succeed? Surely not through division; whether by appearance, by wealth, by race, by any segmentation strategy imaginable -- as Frum and most Democrats are wont to do.

Rush is to the Republicanism of the 2000s what Jesse Jackson was to the Democratic party in the 1980s... ...he cannot be allowed to be the public face of the enterprise – and we have to find ways of assuring the public that he is just one Republican voice among many, and very far from the most important.

And Frum is to conservatism what Pee Wee Herman is to the Academy Awards. A pathetic, peripheral figure more concerned with Letterman's opinion and The Daily Show's seven full-time writers than principles or ideals.

And what of principles? Of core values? On that topic, Frum does not confront Limbaugh. Is Obama's New Deal 2.0 constitutional? Who cares? Limbaugh is a filthy rich golfer who looks like -- in Letterman's words -- an eastern European gangster.

To that point, Frum ignores the elephant in the room.

Consider that a more honest version of the mainstream media -- or what passes for the media these days -- could have blown Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign to bits over a single long weekend. A series of network exposes featuring Rashid Khalidi, Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, Edward Said, Franklin Raines, Jim Johnson, Obama's subprime lawsuits and his lost years at Columbia, for starters, would have de-lubed Obama's well-oiled campaign, resulting in a thrown Axelrod.

Put simply, any of the big media outlets could've put a stake in the heart of Obama's campaign with a single 20-minute segment of John Stossel presents: Barack Obama's Communist Upbringing.

As for who really represents the Republican Party?

Could it be Ann Coulter? Or Mitt Romney? Or Bobby Jindal? Or Michael Steele? Or Sarah Palin?

Appearance, race and gender should matter not; for the principle is the heart of the thing.

The stock market is the ultimate tracking poll of economic confidence. Conservatives can rest comfortably knowing that Ronald Reagan -- put in the same position as Obama -- would have encouraged investors, entrepeneurship and steadied the market.

Because the principles are timeless. The appearances are meaningless. Which is why Frum chooses to focus on the latter.

And by focusing on appearances, Frum simply emphasizes his irrelevance to the fight between conservatism and socialism.