Wingnut News for Friday.

Fox News Runs With GOP Talking Point That White House Is Focusing On Limbaugh To Distract From The Economy
Wednesday, Politico reported on an alleged “strategy” to paint hate radio talker Rush Limbaugh as the face of the GOP, and claimed that it was “hatched” by Democratic strategists and is “being guided in part from inside the White House.” From there, Greg Sargent detected a “new media meme” that the White House “is entirely to blame for the Rush Limbaugh story getting so much media attention and turning into a media circus.”

Yesterday, Limbaugh charged that the White House is “playing manipulative games with washed up talking heads, targeting me on the taxpayer dime. This country doesn’t need another administration playing dirty tricks and making enemy lists.”

Doing their part to defend Rush, House Republicans have ascribed sinister motives to the White House’s alleged strategy. They claim it is an intentional effort to distract the nation from more pressing issues. “Political operatives in the White House are trying to divert attention away from the challenges facing our economy,” House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) complained yesterday. Fox News is amplifying the talking points:

BRET BAIER: Is the White House using Rush Limbaugh as a diversion? We’ll look at the controversy that just won’t go away.

SEAN HANNITY: Now it took quite a bit of coordination between the White House and the liberal media, but they have succeeded in distracting the attention of the American people away from President Obama’s free wheeling spending spree and towards Rush Limbaugh and the leadership of the Republican Party.

KARL ROVE: This is misdirection. They’re trying to draw attention away from the things that the country wants to talk about and that they know they’ve got a vulnerability on in order to have a conversation about Rush Limbaugh.

Bachmann: GOP Must ‘Do Everything We Can To Thwart’ Obama From Securing ‘A Power Base…For All Time’
Conservative talker Bill Bennett interviewed Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) on his radio show this morning. During the interview, Bennett asked, “Why [is Obama siding] with the liberal House Democrats rather than the more moderate [members]?” Answering his own question, Bennett continued, “The answer is because that may be where he is…the most liberal member of the Senate.”

Bachmann concurred, but added that she believes Republicans should “thwart” as much of Obama’s agenda as possible, specifically citing what she called “socialized medicine” and “the new tax on energy”:

BACHMANN: If you want to look at economic history over the last 100 years. I call it punctuated equilibrium. If you look at FDR, LBJ, and Barack Obama, this is really the final leap to socialism. … But we all know that we could turn this around and we can turn this around fairly quickly. We’re still a free country.

And as the Democrats are about to institutionalize cartels — that’s what they’re very good at — they’re trying to consolidate power, so we need to do everything we can to thwart them at every turn to make sure that they aren’t able to, for all time, secure a power base that for all time can never be defeated.

Glenn "McCarthy" Beck tries to link Communists to Obama, but they don't cooperate
Glenn Beck's getting increasingly strident and desperate in his attempt to portray the Obama White House as a den of Communism. Yesterday he opened up with yet another "Comrade Update" that actually depicted visiting British Prime Minister Gordon Brown as a totalitarian simply for having extolled "cooperation."

By that standard, I guess, Sesame Street is a Commie Indoctrination Program. And at this point, I honestly wouldn't be surprised to find out the Beck indeed believes that to be the case.

In any event, he followed this smear by immediately having on Sam Webb of the Communist Party USA, claiming that Webb had declared Barack Obama a Communist ally:

Beck: You said that he was not only a friend, but an ally.

Webb: I don't think I said that. I only said that he is a people's advocate.

Beck: No, you said an ally.

Webb: No, I don't think I did. I made the speech, you didn't.

Karl Rove whines about 'old style politics' of targeting Limbaugh
Karl Rove was on Greta Van Susteren's Fox News show and complained about the Obama White House's decision to target Rush Limbaugh, which he decried as an evil "plot" cooked up by Carville and Co.:

ROVE: Well, first of all, yes, they are making a target. Think about this. They have assigned a senior aide to President Obama is heading this up inside the White House, an unnamed aide. This has clearly got Carville, Begala and Rahm Emanuel, who talk literally every day -- they have an early morning phone call.

This is clearly something that they've concocted.

And the question that we -- there are two questions we ought to ask. First of all, is this appropriate? The idea that the White House is devoting all this time and energy and effort when we've got all this myriad problems facing the country, that they've got senior aides in the White House gaming out how they can make Rush Limbaugh the headline in the evening news seems to me to be a little petty, small, and really inappropriate.

Bigger question is why are they doing this. And I think the answer is, is that they decided they don't want to have a debate about the budget. They don't want to have a debate about the stimulus bill. They don't want to have a debate about the omnibus spending bill, the $410 billion bill with 8,500 earmarks and it. They don't want to have those kind of conversations with the country or with the Republicans in the Congress, so they want to go out and phony up a fight with somebody and devote the time and energy and effort to that.

This is misdirection. They're trying to draw attention away from the things that the country wants to talk about and that they know they've got a vulnerability on in order to have a conversation about Rush Limbaugh, and hopefully, delay or postpone or maybe even kick off some of the discussion that they would otherwise have on these three big issues.

VAN SUSTEREN: But you know, it's possible that this could backfire big-time against them because the American people are focused on the economy. I mean, you know, it's, like, every poll that people are looking at the economy, the Dow is going down -- went up, of course, today. But everybody's worried about that and -- and you know, at some point, they -- I would think tactically, they'd worry that everyone would sort of turn on them and say, you know, Forget Rush Limbaugh, whether you're a fan or not a fan. How about -- how about the economy?

ROVE: Yes. It's petty and it's small on the part of the White House. I mean, didn't President Obama come to Washington saying, I'm going to change the tone? And here he has unleashed his attack dog in Rahm Emanuel, and he's got Carville and Begala out there beating up on Rush Limbaugh, and for what purpose? I mean, you know, what's to be served by that?

And it's clear that this is -- that this is the same old style politics that we grew to really dislike in the 1990s, when the White House thought everything through from a political perspective, road-tested it by running polls and focus groups and did everything with a very keen eye towards the politics of the matter, not what was in the best interests of the country.