An Ode To The Intellectual Giant Rush Limbaugh

Rush has a well-thought-out political philosophy, with deep roots in European and American history. He constantly collects real evidence, and is better at explaining it to millions of listeners than anybody else today. Limbaugh has a twenty year track record of sifting truths from lies; that is not an accident, any more than Tiger Woods is an accident. It comes from great talent and lifelong practice.

In the upshot, Rush is a voice for rationality and sanity in a world awash in madness and propaganda. If that's not the proper role of an intellectual, what is?

The words "intellect" and "intellectual" deserve to be rescued from the myth-makers of the Left, which has decided in its amazing arrogance that it really owns those words.  But that is just another sign of its narrow-minded cultism. The Left shuts out competing voices, like any other cult, and then becomes outraged when independent thinkers don't agree with its "smelly little orthodoxies" --- as George Orwell famously called them. (Orwell started as a Leftist and then figured out the scam.)

An intellectual is just a thinker, somebody who uses the intellect and does it well. An athlete is somebody who uses physical talent and does it well. Those words stand for excellence.

Rush Limbaugh listens to hundreds of competing voices and finds ways to make sense of them. That is what good intellectuals do -- a lot of listening, a lot of dialogue, a lot of clarification. Talk show hosts have the perfect job for it.

By far the majority of the great intellectuals in history have been conservatives, going back to the two main wellsprings of Western thought, the Greeks and the Bible. It is also true in ancient India and China. Confucius was one of the world's great conservative thinkers, emphasizing personal and governmental morality, correct social relationships, justice and sincerity. 

(Which is why that Leftist hero Mao Zedong murdered tens of millions of people trying to uproot Confucian traditions in China. In the end, Confucius won.) 

Plato was a great conservative.  Cicero was a great conservative. The American Founders were conservatives, with rare exceptions. The wisdom books of the Bible are full of conservative sayings. That's what the Ten Commandments are about. "Honor your father and mother" is a profoundly conservative idea.

All high civilizations have been built by conservatives. You can't accumulate the cultural capital needed to build any high civilization if you try to destroy the past, as the Left constantly tries to do. You can't build a chariot if you have to reinvent the wheel every generation. The batty idea that kids have the real answers in life is just a modern delusion. It is just ignorant.

Conservatism builds. Leftism overthrows. That is the meaning of that pop word "revolution." The all-destroying revolution is an adolescent fantasy, and the Left hangs on to those fantasies a lot longer than conservatives do.

Source: The American Thinker (read the whole thing, print it out and hand it out to people) 

Commentary

I credit Rush Limbaugh for keeping me from throwing away my vote in 1992, and for pointing me to other conservative thinkers...and for grounding me in conservative thought.

Do you want any easy way to tell if someone is NOT a conservative? Just tell them that you love Rush Limbaugh. [Their reaction will tell you everything there is to know about them. -TP]

You should steer well clear of those who hate Rush Limbaugh, for they can be no friend to a conservative. 

It really is that easy.