If you were disappointed when the Republican National Committee chose Michael Steele as their chairman, a fellow whose conservative credentials were considerably less rock-ribbed than others and one who tended to retreat from certain controversial issues when faced down by, say, a pushy liberal TV pundit -- well, Steele's irresponsible dissing of Rush Limbaugh on CNN's D. L. Hughley show Saturday night ("Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer. Rush Limbaugh, the whole thing is entertainment. Yes, it's incendiary, yes, it's ugly") -- isn't going to improve your mood.
The RNC loves to talk like a conservative organization when it sends fund raising letters to your house but, in truth, it loves its big tent philosophy way too much to get serious about promoting those conservative ideals. And then they not only wonder why that big tent remains so boring, so irrelevant, so empty; they actually do what they can to drive those thorough-going conservatives (the ones who put up the yard signs, who write the letters to the editor, who organize their churches and civic groups, and, yes, who listen to Rush) out through the flaps.
Rush's response was, not surprisingly, spot on. And it included a review of how he had personally come to Steele's aid on a number of occasions, making Steele's slur seem particularly odious. Anyhow, the whole transcript is right here and it makes for invigorating reading. But, I'll print a couple of samples below.
...Michael Steele, you are head of the RNC. You are not head of the Republican Party. Tens of millions of conservatives and Republicans have nothing to do with the RNC and right now they want nothing to do with it, and when you call them asking them for money, they hang up on you. I hope that changes. I hope the RNC will get its act together. I hope the RNC chairman will realize he's not a talking head pundit, that he is supposed to be working on the grassroots and rebuilding it, and maybe doing something about our open primary system and fixing it so that Democrats do not nominate our candidates. It's time, Mr. Steele, for you to go behind the scenes and start doing the work that you were elected to do instead of trying to be some talking head media star, which you're having a tough time pulling off...
You are chairman of the Republican National Committee. That is your job. To run the Republican establishment bureaucracy and prove you can defeat Democrats and elect Republicans, to come up with a new primary system that eliminates Democrats participating in ours and choosing our candidates and getting the grassroots revved up again. This is how you're going to be measured, not by how entertaining or cute you are on talk shows. By the same token, I'm not in charge of the Republican Party, and I don't want to be. I would be embarrassed to say that I'm in charge of the Republican Party in the sad-sack state that it's in. If I were chairman of the Republican Party, given the state that it's in, I would quit. I might get out the hari-kari knife because I would have presided over a failure that is embarrassing to the Republicans and conservatives who have supported it and invested in it all these years...
