It’s been almost five months since the Republican Party won a landslide midterm election and took control of the House of Representatives. Has its message been lost?
That GOP message wasn’t about achieving goals under the banner of bipartisanship, as some in the media have reported as a potential government shutdown looms. On Friday’s “The Rush Limbaugh Show,” fill-in host Mark Steyn called such reporting dishonest.
“There’s a dishonesty — there’s a level of dishonesty about the reporting of these stories,” Steyn said. “I always love the way that people say, ‘Oh you know, Americans want the parties to work together to get things done.’ No, that’s actually not want Americans want. The message from November was that you’ve done too much. Stop doing stuff. You did all this stuff – you passed Obamacare and nobody knew what was in it.”
“America’s undocumented anchorman,” as the Canadian-born columnist labels himself when filling in on Limbaugh’s program, explained what bipartisanship has achieved and said that was embarrassing for a “republic of free citizens.”
“The idea that somehow out there is a vast mass of Americans panting for the parties to work together to do more – no, they’ve done too much,” he said. “We need to throw this stuff out. There shouldn’t be a 1099. Small business shouldn’t know the name of stupid government forms like that. It’s embarrassing that in a republic of free citizens there are millions of us marching around with all this meaningless government mumbo-jumbo numbers stuck in our head because we know that tax season – tax season, and that’s another problem right there by the way. Baseball should have a season, tax shouldn’t have a season. Tax should be a day.”
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Steyn lobbied congressional Republicans to understand that message.
“This is supposed to be a Republic of free citizens,” he ranted. “November was not about people saying, ‘Oh, I want parties to work together to get things done.’ No, they want the parties to sit on opposite sides of the aisle and do less and undo a lot of what they’ve done in the last two years and the decades before that. That was the message in November and Republicans should understand that.”