Nerve Endings Firing Away

And for the leader of the Republicans? 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.

One conservative who gets it. Unfortunately for the country, he is a minority in his own party.

Update: Yet another one:

I don’t think Limbaugh is a less serious voice for conservatism than Keith Olbermann is for liberalism. But that’s because I don’t think either of them should be taken all that seriously – because they’re media personalities whose primary loyalty is to their image and their audience, and whose primary purpose is to provoke and get attention. And I think it should go without saying that American liberalism would be in serious, serious trouble if someone like Olbermann were occupying the kind of role on the left-of-center that Limbaugh seems to be shouldering his way into at the moment.

I wouldn’t want Olbermann to be the voice of the Democrats either. And he isn’t; or wasn’t during the Bush years the way Limbaugh is now to the Republicans.