http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=2C18039A-80CE-4EB0-B776-12EBF3D70FED Rush Limbaugh: GOP ‘so irrelevant’
By: Mackenzie Weinger
October 16, 2013 02:25 PM EDT
Rush Limbaugh on Wednesday blasted the Republican Party as “irrelevant” and responsible for “creating one of the greatest political disasters” he’s ever seen.
“I was trying to think earlier today, if ever in my life I could remember any major political party being so irrelevant,” the conservative radio host said on his show, according to a transcript. “I have never seen it. I have never seen a major political party simply occupy placeholders, as the Republican Party is doing.”
Limbaugh slammed the Republican Party for consistently failing to offer any “serious opposition” to the Democratic Party or President Barack Obama. And now the party has made an “inexplicable political cave-in” with the agreement to reopen the government and lift the debt ceiling, he said.
“There hasn’t been any opposition, not any serious opposition,” Limbaugh said. “There may have been votes against this or that, votes against Obamacare. There may have been votes against the stimulus, but in terms of a package of policies, a package of principled beliefs, of opposition expressed daily by party leaders against what’s happening in this country, there hasn’t been.”
The only real pushback, Limbaugh said, has come from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah). “This is not the time to abandon Ted Cruz or Mike Lee, folks,” he told his listeners.
“You know that what they attempted to do here was, I think, valiant,” he said. “It’s been an illustration of just how terribly wrong things are. There are plenty of opportunities for lessons to be learned here. Now, look, I’m not living in a false reality here. I was thinking about this last night, too, while I was pondering if I can ever remember a greater political disaster in my lifetime, if I could ever remember a time when a political party just made a decision not to exist for all intents and purposes.”
And by buying into the “political trick” of Democrats and the media to convince Republicans that attacking a Democratic president would “anger the independents” and “criticizing the first black president, that makes you racist,” the party has tried to “make everybody like them.” And that’s exactly what has led to the Republican Party embracing irrelevance, Limbaugh said.
“And what they’ve ended up doing is creating one of the greatest political disasters I’ve ever seen in my lifetime, simply because they failed to show up,” Limbaugh said. “Then when they finally did make a play of showing up, they didn’t have the guts to stick with it.”
