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You entitled the thread 'Rush was right.' I took my lead from that. You shouldn't be whining that my response is unfair nor should you try to read things into it (aka - weaving a straw man). Rush is right-wing practically to the point of lunacy. Rush is right (correct) mainly in his own mind and the fan-minds he has wrapped around his personality. Even a fair number of Republicans have come to that conclusion. And when someone is indeed that far right (be it Rush or a fanboy of his ... or even some of those rare fangirls) then their overall perspective, regarding moderate politics, is not only questionable but pretty much a given loss. The author of the article you present is a perfect example.

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You need to watch something other than FOX. Maybe than you will see that what you wrote is basicly the digested food waste of a bull.

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Rush Limbaugh openly admitted that his number one priority as a broadcaster is not to influence policy or sway peoples’ opinions. Rather, his foremost priority every day is to attract as large an audience as possible, hold that audience as long as possible, and then deliver that audience to advertisers in exchange for large sums of money.

Limbaugh can afford to live the way he wants. When we met he was on the verge of signing a new eight-year contract with his syndicator, Premiere Radio Networks. He estimated that it would bring in about $38 million a year. To sweeten the deal, he said he was also getting a nine-figure signing bonus. (A representative from Premiere would not confirm the deal.) “Do you know what bought me all this?” he asked, waving his hand in the general direction of his prosperity. “Not my political ideas. Conservatism didn’t buy this house. First and foremost I’m a businessman. My first goal is to attract the largest possible audience so I can charge confiscatory ad rates. I happen to have great entertainment skills, but that enables me to sell airtime.” http://rush-matters.com/current-events/rush-limbaugh-admits-im-just-a-
businessman

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I was and am aware of Rush Limbaugh’s entertaining techniques and “insincere patter” for several years now. I am not a person who listens to his program because I love to hate him, nor do I listen because I believe what he says. I just think of him as a financial wizard and as a failure of a human being. There are many things about Rush Limbaugh’s popularity that appalls me. It is amazing that, literally, millions of people believe that he is speaking the truth; and THEY think just the way HE (Limbaugh) thinks! How did we end up with so many ignorant people in the United States? Even more appalling, he doesn’t really mean what he says, but, obviously, enjoys the exploitation of the ignorance of a specific percentage of our population.

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Niki, what else would YOU call it when non responses to the issue are posted, and all that's offered is mindless, baseless ad hominems, w/ out a iota of support ?

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And point of fact, the GOP, despite openly opposing Obama and his policies, HAVE indeed offered up sensible, good faith gestures in compromise. Obama? For all his glowing words, has offered up vitriol, arrogance and defiance, as well as to cast a wide net of demagoguery. Obama is all talk, where as the GOP at least tries to meet in the middle.

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The mandate made its political début in a 1989 Heritage Foundation brief titled “Assuring Affordable Health Care for All Americans.”

Under the Heritage plan, there would be such a requirement.” The mandate made its first legislative appearance in 1993, in the Health Equity and Access Reform Today Act, which was sponsored by John Chafee, of Rhode Island, and co-sponsored by eighteen Republicans, including Bob Dole, who was then the Senate Minority Leader.

Ten years later, Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, began picking his way back through the history—he read “The System” four times—and he, too, came to focus on the Chafee bill. He began building a proposal around the individual mandate, and tested it out on both Democrats and Republicans. “Between 2004 and 2008, I saw over eighty members of the Senate, and there were very few who objected,” Wyden says. In December, 2006, he unveiled the Healthy Americans Act. In May, 2007, Bob Bennett, a Utah Republican, who had been a sponsor of the Chafee bill, joined him. Wyden-Bennett was eventually co-sponsored by eleven Republicans and nine Democrats, receiving more bipartisan support than any universal health-care proposal in the history of the Senate. It even caught the eye of the Republican Presidential aspirants. In a June, 2009, interview on “Meet the Press,” Mitt Romney, who, as governor of Massachusetts, had signed a universal health-care bill with an individual mandate, said that Wyden-Bennett was a plan “that a number of Republicans think is a very good health-care plan—one that we support.”

This process led, eventually, to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—better known as Obamacare—which also included an individual mandate. But, as that bill came closer to passing, Republicans began coalescing around the mandate, which polling showed to be one of the legislation’s least popular elements. In December, 2009, in a vote on the bill, every Senate Republican voted to call the individual mandate “unconstitutional.”

This shift—Democrats lining up behind the Republican-crafted mandate, and Republicans declaring it not just inappropriate policy but contrary to the wishes of the Founders—shocked Wyden. “I would characterize the Washington, D.C., relationship with the individual mandate as truly schizophrenic,” he said. Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/06/25/120625fa_fact_klein#ixzz
2JOM8j8Fa]
We all know of course that Rap will side step, attack, or somehow deny the facts, but there they are, for all to see.

And no, Obama is no the leftie he's being argued as being here. He IS a moderate, a centrist Republican if you will. The British easily saw it as it was (ironically, with mention of the very health-care issue as well), and make the argument far better than I could:

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Vote Obama – if you want a centrist Republican for US president

Even the policy Democratic loyalists point to as proof of the president's progressive bona fides – his healthcare plan, which mandates the purchase of policies from the private health insurance industry – was designed by the Heritage Foundation, one of the nation's most rightwing thinktanks, and was advocated by conservative ideologues for many years (it also happens to be the same plan Romney implemented when he was governor of Massachusetts and which Newt Gingrich once promoted, underscoring the difficulty for the GOP in drawing real contrasts with Obama).

How do you scorn a president as a far-left socialist when he has stuffed his administration with Wall Street executives, had his last campaign funded by them, governed as a "centrist Republican", and presided over booming corporate profits even while the rest of the nation suffered economically?

A staple of GOP politics has long been to accuse Democratic presidents of coddling America's enemies (both real and imagined), being afraid to use violence, and subordinating US security to international bodies and leftwing conceptions of civil liberties.

But how can a GOP candidate invoke this time-tested caricature when Obama has embraced the vast bulk of George Bush's terrorism policies; waged a war against government whistleblowers as part of a campaign of obsessive secrecy; led efforts to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs; extinguished the lives not only of accused terrorists but of huge numbers of innocent civilians with cluster bombs and drones in Muslim countries; engineered a covert war against Iran; tried to extend the Iraq war; ignored Congress and the constitution to prosecute an unauthorised war in Libya; adopted the defining Bush/Cheney policy of indefinite detention without trial for accused terrorists; and even claimed and exercised the power to assassinate US citizens far from any battlefield and without due process?

In sum, how do you demonise Obama as a terrorist-loving secret Muslim intent on empowering US enemies when he has adopted, and in some cases extended, what was rightwing orthodoxy for the last decade? The core problem for GOP challengers is that they cannot be respectable Republicans because, as Krugman pointed out, Obama has that position occupied. They are forced to move so far to the right that they render themselves inherently absurd. Excerpts from http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/27/vote-obama-centris
t-republican

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Tit for tat got us where we are today. If we want to be grownups, we need to resist the ugliness. If we each did, this would be a better reflection on Firefly and a more welcome place. I will try.

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Living overseas, and following American politics and politics in other Countries, Obama definitely is a centrist. Put aside your own political beliefs, anger or love for President Obama. No matter what side you stand on.. look at all the Policies, and where he has stood, where the Democrats have stood, and where the Republicans have stood... it's all out there in the public domain. FYI - Obama has been a centrist before he even ran for office, people claim he is Liberal, he is not. People have moved so far to the right in the GOP field, that people claim him to be Liberal or moving far to the left. He is not. Those instances where many on the left were hammering Obama for 'caving' to Republicans in 2009/2010, are not policies agreed to by someone who is Liberal, he has been trying to meet Republicans in the middle by going against many of the policies pushed hard by the far left. [ihttp:// www.economist.com/economist-asks/barack-obama-centrist]]
How about something from "Republicans for Obama"?

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The Republican party isn't what it used to be. Our leaders and our most vocal activists have written moderates out of the party and have refused to work with the other side, to the detriment of the nation. Center-right presidents such as Reagan, Bush Sr., Ford, Nixon and Eisenhower would have no chance being nominated today.

President Obama has shown himself to be a common-sense centrist. He has cut taxes when necessary, has taken steps to protect the environment, and has aggressively pursued Islamic extremists who threaten America. Most notably, he has reformed our healthcare system by signing a Republican-inspired healthcare plan into law. In most other points in our party's history, Obama would fit in well as a Republican. More at http://www.republicansforobama.org/]
Or, you could hear what The American Conservative (they don't come more "right" than THAT!) has to say:

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Is Barack Obama a Republican Realist?

His foreign policy recalls George H.W. Bush—and his domestic policy could be Ike's or Nixon's.

I never considered Obama to be a non-interventionist or a member of the peace movement. In fact, both in terms of his public statements and policies, Obama reminded me of President George H.W. Bush and his top “realist” foreign-policy advisors James Baker and Brent Scrowcroft: favoring pragmatism and a muddling-through approach over the pursuit of grand designs and ideological crusades; selective and preferring short military engagements over full-blown wars; Teddy Roosevelt over Woodrow Wilson.

Indeed, much of Obama’s cautious response to the so-called “Arab Spring” recalled Bush I’s efforts to deal with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism. And the decision to kick Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait but not to invade Iraq provided a clear contrast between Bush I’s Realpolitik and the messianic foreign policy of Bush II. From that perspective, Obama’s leading-from-behind in Libya, Syria, and the rest of the Middle East, coupled with the acceleration of the military withdrawal from Iraq (and apparently from Afghanistan), are pure Bush I, which explains why many neocons hated Papa Bush with the same intensity with which they now despise Obama.

With the selection of Republican Hagel, an intellectual heir to the Baker-Scrowcroft Realpolitik tradition, Obama has taken a major step toward transforming his presidency into a replica of the administration of George H.W. Bush, at least when it comes to foreign policy.

In a way, much of what Obama has been advocating on domestic policy is not very different from what a Bush I administration (or Nixon, Ford or Eisenhower) would be doing, ranging from raising taxes, reforming immigration policy, or protecting the environment. Obama, in short, is not a socialist or a even a social-democrat, just a good old centrist Republican. More at http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/is-barack-obama-a-repu
blican-realist/

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In essence, the THINKING Republicans in this country recognize Obama for what he is; it's only the irrational screaming heads like Rushbo who make money from riling up their audience by pretending he's a drooling, hard-core leftie--for their OWN purposes, not because it is in any way true!

Tit for tat got us where we are today. If we want to be grownups, we need to resist the ugliness. If we each did, this would be a better reflection on Firefly and a more welcome place. I will try.