On his Tuesday radio show, conservative radio show host Rush Limbaugh disputed a Politico story by Dylan Byers that he and Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer are embroiled in a feud.
Instead, Limbaugh argued it was a difference in how he and Krauthammer saw President Barack Obama in the lead up and immediately after his 2009 inauguration. According to Limbaugh, there is a difference in what the role of conservative opinion-makers is, whether it’s too actually play a role in defeat liberalism or just analyzing and commenting on it.
“I have to go back to yesterday,” Limbaugh said. “I knew this was going to happen. There was no way to keep it from happening. I got this Politico story here, Dylan Byers, ‘Limbaugh vs. Krauthammer.’ ‘Rush Limbaugh took aim at columnist Charles Krauthammer on Monday, sparking yet another intra-party debate among conservative pundits.’ I did not do that. I do not do feuds. I do not do intra-party debates and things like that. It was not the purpose. I was simply — let me go through this again. I didn’t even see it. Fox did a one-hour special on Krauthammer’s life in conjunction with his new book, and, by the way, he sent me a signed copy of it that I received Friday. The staff didn’t give it to me until yesterday after I had done this segment. But I was told and then I got the audio and heard it myself that Dr. Krauthammer said he didn’t get fully who Obama was until five weeks after he was inaugurated. And I was incredulous at that. I still am. I spent the first hour of the program yesterday trying to explain what I sense is a — actually, that illustrated a great problem that we have.”
Limbaugh, author of “Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims: Time-Travel Adventures with Exceptional American,” contended that unlike Krauthammer and his fellow Washington Post columnist George Will, he knew Obama was more leftist than centrist long before his election.
“Now, of course I knew who [Obama] was without knowing him,” Limbaugh explained. “He’s a liberal. That’s all I need, and that’s not a simplification. Liberals are who they are. Socialists are who they are. They have techniques. They have behavioral patterns. You can type them. They can’t be honest about what they intend or they would never get elected. You think Obama would have been elected if he’d had told people what’s happening now with Obamacare was the design? You think he would have been elected if he’d told people the unemployment rate would be what it is now and 90 million Americans wouldn’t be working, and that the economy would be floundering for five years. If Obama had told people that’s what was going to happen, do you think he’d have been elected? No way.”
Limbaugh went back to his point saying the difference between he and Beltway conservative pundits like Krauthammer and Will is that he thought the goal was to defeat Obama and not just analyze him.
“So I was surprised, and it was a learning experience for me,” he continued. “Because I just make too many assumptions. I assume that we’re all on the same page and that we’re all starting on the same page, and I was wrong. Now, The Politico says here, ‘Limbaugh accused Krauthammer and fellow columnist George Will of being “fooled” into believing that President Obama was a centrist when he took office, which seemed to leave the right-wing talk show host flabbergasted.’ And then they quote me: ‘I intellectually don’t know how you cannot figure out Barack Obama — a liberal is a liberal. I know Obama, for the low-information crowd, could be whatever you wanted him to be, a blank canvas. But for crying out loud, we’re not talking about low-information people here.’”
Going forward, Limbaugh said he won’t make those same assumptions when it comes to the inevitable presidential run for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“I guess now it would be a mistake for me to assume that everybody on our side gets Hillary [Clinton], too,” Limbaugh added. “Just like I assumed that everybody on our side — the opinion makers — understood from the get-go who Obama was and what we were in store for, I guess that would be a mistake to assume that about Hillary. Because I’m listening to them say, ‘Oh, yeah! She’s more pragmatic than Obama. She has White House experience.’ I’m listening to this, and it’s the same all over again. We have people on our side who are going to give Hillary the benefit of the doubt, despite everything they know and despite the fact that she’s just as radical as Obama is. Oh, well. It just never ends.”