Rush Limbaugh Continues In Error: McCain Did NOT Get More Votes Than Romney

Rush Limbaugh can be so wrong sometimes it's infuriating, and once he gets some misinformation into his head, it's almost impossible to get it out of there. He can complain about the low information voters all he wants, but it's the lazy misinformation he spews which we all need to worry about, as when Rush won't allow Donald Trump into the conservative movement because The Donald wants to raise tariffs to beat the hell out of China. That's not conservative, Rush says, nevermind a tariff regime funded this country clear through the War Between The States and many decades thereafter. The fact is that Rush Limbaugh's version of conservatism doesn't win because it can't imagine America before 1913, isn't intelligent and doesn't compel assent for that reason. America still has an institutional memory, and the people still can tell when someone makes sense and when they don't.

Rush opened the second hour of the program today, here, claiming for the umpteenth time that Romney got fewer votes than McCain, which he didn't: "Obama got millions fewer votes in 2012 than he did in '08, but so did Romney get many million fewer votes than did McCain." This phone-it-in comment is in service of Rush's new vote suppression meme, i.e. Democrat suppression of Republicans, courtesy of the new IRS nonprofits targeting scandal. But the theory is completely unsupported by the facts of the last election. How different is this misinformation than the idea swallowed hook line and sinker by Republicans that they lost in 2012 because they lost the Hispanic vote? Maybe they lost the white vote. 

Romney polled 60.93 million in 2012 and McCain 59.95 million in 2008, okay? And Romney lost the election by half as many votes in the swing states as McCain lost it by in those same states. Romney was a better candidate than McCain, but he was still a bad candidate.

With what's happened with the IRS scandal I don't think Rush will ever be convinced he's wrong about the 2012 election numbers, even though he is.

That would require some effort on his part, and as we all know, the older we get, the harder that gets.

Rush Limbaugh: Turd In The Conservative Punchbowl

On Rush Limbaugh's role in the decline of American conservatism, as recounted by Andrew Ferguson for The Weekly Standard, here:

The idea that conservatives should have a special interest in high culture​—​the best that has been thought and said, sung and played, carved and drawn​—​has been selectively applied. In speeches and in the [Mars Hill Audio] Journal [Ken] Myers has often raised the question of why political conservatives, who defended the literary canon, the Great Books, with such energy in the eighties and nineties, went limp when it came to defending other traditional forms of cultural expression.

A watershed may have been reached when Rush Limbaugh, who would replace William Buckley as conservatism’s chief publicist in the early ’90s, chose as his show’s theme music a Top 40 track by the Pretenders​—​a self-conscious contrast, Limbaugh has said, to the baroque trumpet concerto that opened Buckley’s TV show Firing Line. Buckley’s fanfare had signaled that he aspired to something lively but elevated, slightly at an angle to the surrounding popular culture. The Pretenders’ guitar riff was meant to signal that Limbaugh’s conservatism would have none of that stuffy stuff: He was fully at home with what had become of American culture and wasn’t terribly curious about what had come before.

Which is why Rush Limbaugh isn't much interested, either, for example, in the original principle of direct taxation in the constitution. American history doesn't exist for Rush before 1913, which is why Donald Trump, who believes in tariffs on China, doesn't qualify as a conservative. Rush only learned the bad stuff from Buckley . . . like how to excommunicate people from the movement. "Stripped-down" isn't just for punkers.