Ever so slowly, sane Republicans and conservatives are finally marshaling the courage to confront the unhinged broadcasters in their midst — and not a moment too soon, given the fact that these loons now seem to be running the asylum.
The GOP has lately made gains with its anti-Obama incantations, but the fact remains that the party has no affirmative unifying message and no national leader.
As a result, various warlords — Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Michael Savage, and other marketers of venom — continue to fill the breach, in ways that are profoundly unhelpful to the Republican image.
Most prominent Republicans are still too cowed to call out Beck for what he truly is — a demagogue who is nurturing paranoia — because they confuse microphone power with political power. (Can the talk jocks deliver votes? They probably can’t deliver a pizza.)
Nevertheless, some are speaking out. They don’t want the conservative cause to be hijacked by tinfoil-hatted broadcasters who believe, for instance, that the symbol on the back of the dime was a fascist plot hatched by Democrat Woodrow Wilson in 1916.
David Frum, the ex-Bush speechwriter who helped coin the term “Axis of Evil,” got fed up with Beck not long ago when the Fox News superstar sought to defame an Obama nominee by insisting on the air that this nominee — in real life, a free-market economist — favors the execution of retarded children and wants to give monkeys the right to sue. (I kid you not.)
Frum assailed Beck for “recklessness and political cowardice,” but he was only warming up.
“We conservatives are submitting our movement to some of the most unscrupulous people in American life,” Frum wrote on his blog. “... It’s beyond time for conservatives who know better to ... emancipate ourselves from leadership by the most stupid, the most cynical, and the most truthless.”
Peter Wehner, another ex-Bush speechwriter, seconded Frum earlier this fall: “... At a time when we should aim for intellectual depth, for tough-minded and reasoned arguments, for good cheer and calm purpose, rather than erratic behavior, he is not the kind of figure conservatives should embrace or cheer on.”
Former Bush strategist Mark McKinnon recently denounced radio host Mark Levin for “spewing streams of hate-filled venom at Obama that were jaw-dropping.”
Charles Murray, an eminent conservative author and scholar, lamented recently that these broadcasters have become “far too much of the public face of the right today — crudely sarcastic when they are not being angry, mean-spirited, and often embarrassingly ignorant.”
But it’s not just the tone that worries these conservative critics.
Far worse is the fact that Beck and some of his brethren are just as capable of skewering the GOP, and inspiring fans to do the same. A few weeks back, he stunned many Republicans by declaring in an interview, “I think John McCain would have been worse for the country than Barack Obama.” Why? Because “I think McCain is a weird progressive, like Theodore Roosevelt was.”
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