Michael Kinsley (who, in case you missed it, is back with The New Republic for about the ninth time in his career) is up this morning with a hilarious, sarcastic sendup of the various righty voices who have been whining that President Obama is trying to not just win elections for his side, not just pass legislation that liberals and Democrats favor, but destroy the Republican Party and all the good things for which it stands.
Headlined "Annihilate: Obama's very secret plot to end the Republican Party," Kinsley starts with Rush Limbaugh,who, Kinsley reports, "recently spent two days of his radio show wallowing in political self-pity." He quotes Limbaugh thus:
I have alerted you and anybody who will listen that what the objective is at the White House is the annihilation of the Republican Party, the elimination of all viable opposition—and on a personal level. You know, not just to annihilate Republican Party/conservative ideas, but also people, the people who carry them, the people who believe in them.
After which, Kinsley does Limbaugh the great disservice of acting as if we are supposed to take this threat to the two-party system seriously, and rhetorically asks such reasonable follow-up questions as:
What on Earth does he mean by "annihilation'" And not just of ideas, but of people? Should we expect pogroms against Republicans in Obama’s second term? Even Rush can’t mean that. So does '"nnihilation" mean anything more than just trying to defeat the other party’s candidate on Election Day, a tradition that Republicans ordinarily acquiesce to and often thrive at? If neither of these, "annihilation" must mean that Obama and the Democrats are cheating in some way. In what way is not clear. It sometimes seems as if Republicans think that their ideas are so superior that any Democratic victory is cheating by definition.
It's not just Limbaugh, Kinsley produces a few other examples of paranoid-sounding righty rhetoric about Obama's dark, Republicidal purposes.
If you missed the link at the top, the whole piece is here.