Video: Beck interviews Limbaugh on the threat to free speech

Another day, another harrowing clip of one of our new “czars” extolling the virtues of radical leftism. And yet, Limbaugh’s right: If bringing back Fairness was ever seriously part of The One’s agenda, the moment to do it has safely passed. To pull off something like that would require a complacent right and a broad independent middle energized with Hopenchange fever. Thanks to ObamaCare, we now have the opposite. Lefty Dan Gerstein surveys the landscape:

Step back for a second, listen to what the non-screaming skeptics are saying, and it’s clear the party severely overestimated its mandate and underestimated the public’s growing unease with the government’s massive growth over the last year. What would have been a hard sell in any environment has turned into an epic challenge. Yet the Democrats have been charging ahead as if it’s still November 2008, oblivious to the dramatic change in the electorate’s mood…

The president chose not to lead with his own [health-care] plan, and Congress filled the vacuum with a multitude of partisan bills. This only heightened the public’s confusion and wariness. The Democrats went back and forth for weeks on how to pay for their bills and then settled on Medicare cuts as the prime cost-saver, fueling doubts about whether it would be deficit neutral as the president promised. Worst of all, the House bills, which have been the locus of public attention, were found by CBO to actually raise costs instead of lowering them. That undermined the president’s credibility and the public’s confidence in Congress’ competence…

If Democrats are going get out of this hole and pass a meaningful health care bill, Kohut argues, they are going to have to address this broad distrust of government, which is becoming more acute among independents and even some Democrats.

Obama’s polling (now down to 51/44 at Gallup) will bounce back and he’ll almost certainly get something passed on health care but that “broad distrust of government” ain’t going away, especially with things like cap-and-trade on the horizon. So long as distrust is high, the odds of Democrats instituting stealth Fairness are even lower than the odds of them holding onto Congress long-term. The One will have to content himself with creepy idiocy like this, which I expect will be about as effective as the alleged plan to replace memories of 9/11 with a commitment to flower power or whatever.

Exit question: Is Beck serious here when he talks about the White House using some sort of disaster as a pretext to impose emergency rule? We’re only seven months into The One’s term and already he’s right at the brink of Reichstag Fire scenarios? I don’t think the left dropped those on Bush until his second year in office, at least. How’s GB going to hold it together for another three years if he’s already this close to the edge?

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