Steele Apologizes To Rush
It’s a testament to Rush’s influence and importance to the political movement that Steele apologized this quickly, and this completely.
“My intent was not to go after Rush – I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh,” Steele said in a telephone interview. “I was maybe a little bit inarticulate. … There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership.”
The dust-up comes at a time when top Democrats are trying to make Limbaugh the face of the Republican Party, in part by using ads funded by labor. Americans United for Change sent a fund-raising e-mail Monday that begins: “The Republican Party has turned into the Rush Limbaugh Party.”
Steele told CNN host D.L. Hughley in an interview aired Saturday night: “Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer. Rush Limbaugh — his whole thing is entertainment. He has this incendiary — yes, it’s ugly.”
Steele, who won a hard-fought chairman’s race on Jan. 30, told Politico he telephoned Limbaugh after his show on Monday afternoon and hoped that they would connect soon.
“I went back at that tape and I realized words that I said weren’t what I was thinking,” Steele said. “It was one of those things where I thinking I was saying one thing, and it came out differently. What I was trying to say was a lot of people … want to make Rush the scapegoat, the bogeyman, and he’s not.”
“I’m not going to engage these guys and sit back and provide them the popcorn for a fight between me and Rush Limbaugh,” Steele added. “No such thing is going to happen. … I wasn’t trying to slam him or anything.”
I noted in my post about this earlier today that this sort of in-fighting is exactly what the liberals hoped to engender when they set out to prop Rush up as their straw man. They know that a GOP that is moving back toward the conservative ideals espoused by Rush is a dangerous threat to their power. So by casting Rush as a bogeyman that no Republican dares defend they splinter Republicans. They keep Republicans from moving back to their conservative roots.
Trust me, the liberals and their mouthpieces in the media aren’t going after Rush because they’re concerned about the Republican party or the tone of political discourse in this country. They’re doing it because they perceive Rush as a threat, and they want to marginalize him. Because what they want are not independent minded, ideologically pure Republicans opposing them. They want limp-wristed Republicans like Arlen Specter and Olympia Snowe who will roll over for them if they push hard enough.
The worst thing Republicans could do right now is run away from Rush Limbaugh.
