Like a Violin

Watch the Republicans dance to the jiggy-jig-jig of Rush Limbaugh, as the Obama Administration plays the violin. Per Rahm:



Newly elected Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele tries to distance the mainstream of his party from Limbaugh and, like every single other Republican who has done so before him, gets slapped down by Rush and crawls back in on his knees begging His Corpulence's forgiveness. Grown men.

What's worse, other recent GOP screw-ups feel obliged to jump on the bandwagon:

The most recent offering of support came from Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal who on Monday night said that he was glad to see RNC Chairman Michael Steele apologize to Limbaugh after Steele had called the conservative talk show host's program "incendiary" and "ugly."

"I'm glad he apologized," said Jindal, appearing on CNN's Larry King Live. "I think the chairman is a breath of fresh air for the party. As I said before I think Rush is a leader for many conservatives and says things that people are concerned about."

I don't give Steele a year in the job, and by a year I mean June.

Everything is magnified right now because, as E.J. Dionne nails it:

The central issue in American politics now is whether the country should reverse a three-decade long trend of rising inequality in incomes and wealth.

So David Frum, however misguided his political affiliation might be, has how Limbaugh fits in right:

On the one side, the president of the United States: soft-spoken and conciliatory, never angry, always invoking the recession and its victims. This president invokes the language of “responsibility,” and in his own life seems to epitomize that ideal: He is physically honed and disciplined, his worst vice an occasional cigarette. He is at the same time an apparently devoted husband and father. Unsurprisingly, women voters trust and admire him.

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.

The Republican Party is in a state of civil war. I'm not sure how long it will last if Limbaugh, Palin and the like continue to define the core party, because it already feels like the moderates and giving up, past a fight or aging out of their roles. Maybe, like the Whig Party, the GOP splits up, with the most rightwing keeping the trademark.

They're promising tactics while Obama is running the long game. Unlike with Democrats of recent vintage, being on the high wire at all times is a key component of his plan. And he's shown he can handle risk -- unlike his current adversaries.

All they do is whine whenever the truth comes out.