Never Thought I'd Say It: I Agree With Rush Limbaugh

A little background: I grew up the son of two hippie liberals who moved to a rural, conservative town. My family's ideas and values got me ostracised more than once. About the time I was most affected by this situation, when I was supporting the rights of gay people to teach in public schools, Rush started a short-lived TV show. I saw him mocking the liberal leaders like I was getting mocked: as a one sided rant (ahem) against anything that wasn't hardline conservative. And his radio program was filled with more vitriol.

Fast forward to today. I will never again back an initiative supporting gay rights. Why? Because that courageous act that I performed years ago only distanced me from people I most identify with, and because I have never seen a gay person act courageously on the behalf of a breeder. Further, I have only been greeted with contempt and disparagement when I told homosexual people, who I had considered friends, that I was without question straight. That's not to say I will actively campaign to take rights away from gays - I won't. And just to piss you off if you're gay: I don't support the redefinition of marriage - you have as much right to marry a member of the opposite sex as anyone else does. I do, tentatively, support the abolishment of marriage in the legal system, though, moving it to a private, cultural, and possibly religous affair ...

But that's not what this post is supposed to be about. This post is about Rush Limbaugh being a voice of sanity for conservatives by declaring that he hopes Obama fails. And I now agree with him.

I haven't written for a while, because I felt defeated, and I knew that anything I wrote would be tinged with bitterness. I wanted to give Obama a chance before I started complaining. I was even, initially, duped by the calls to wish Obama success, because that seemed to translate to success for the people of the US. But I am not bitter any more, and I do not wish him success in his goals.

I hope Obama fails, because I believe the actions he is proposing will be bad for our country. I hope he fails to create a welfare state of slaves by burdening us with debt, inflating our currency, and stealing workers from the private sector to labor on his pet projects. If he fails to do those things and we reduce our overseas spending (wars) and don't incur civil unrest, he may be president over a very prosperous time in American history; or at least a recovery. If not, he will likely go down in history as the worst demagogue ever.

If he were to fail in his goals so supremely - that increased (domestic) competition with monopolies and big business surfaced to the benefit of consumers, that he effectively taxes externalizations instead of speculating on green technologies, that the government decreased its size and cost, that banks and the auto industry become less nationalized and are no longer "too big to fail", and if he allowed producers to retain the fruits of their production (instead of redistributing it), then he might go down as one of the greatest presidents. Then I could only complain that America became strong again despite his presidency, not because of it; instead of complaining that he oversaw the downfall of the brightest nation ever to exist.